Vesuvius At Home

I Will Trade My Bears For Gold

2013-05-21T21:11:00.000-04:00

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

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

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

In Which My Husband Is Sweet Unto Me

2013-05-13T12:02:00.001-04:00

(with clarification*)

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

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

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

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

I am pretty excited about this.

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

Happy Monday.

School Dress Codes and Dirty Feminine Flesh

2013-05-09T20:59:00.001-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lust is bad.

Your bodies make men be bad.

Your bodies are bad.

Mile 140,021

2013-05-06T15:37:00.001-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At Home in the South

2013-04-17T08:55:00.001-04:00

a summary

While my family back in Colorado has been hit with one major snowstorm after another, the south has blossomed like a sweet magnolia, or what I imagine a magnolia would look like in bloom, having never actually seen one. (We've got dogwood and forsythia and wisteria all blossoming, but no maggies yet). We had white flowering trees back in Colorado, but the ones here are more dramatic somehow, fluffy like clouds of whipped cream lining the streets, alternating with fat-blossomed scoops of strawberry. Brevard looks and smells like a frivolous dessert after a long, dark fast and I'm stunned to realize I haven't taken any pictures. I've felt a bit stunned lately.

With the kinder weather, I have remembered everything I loved about this place when we first arrived. The social scene is so vibrant and happening. It's like nobody told these people they live in a sleepy southern town so they party like it's Chelsea in the 60's. Well almost. Chelsea in the 60's with a lot of children running in around in noisy packs. Recently there was a potluck--the best parties here are often potlucks--and after mojito madness and heavy plates of delicious Cuban food, we stood around the fire, the kids determindely snapping off branches of the Christmas tree that was decaying in the back yard and tossing them to the fire with destructive joy. The hostess was one of the first friends I made here last summer, the Baptist from South Carolina who brings sweet tea vodka everywhere and talks as if she's writing a script as she goes along. "Care to step out for some celebrations and libations?" she asked me once. Or, "This snake swam up to lick a sniff." And how can you not love someone who already has herbs growing up in her garden yet still has the Christmas tree in the yard? (I don't think she reads this blog, but just in case, P--you are a treasure).

So already there have been several nights of patios and beers, afternoons of sunshine and iced coffee, dewy warm mornings with gentle humidity and a loud surplus of birds. The cardinals flash crimson against the blue sky, the woodpecker swoops by all black and white in his funny red fez. Bluebirds and something canary yellow and hummingbirds if I'm lucky. They sound all day but are riotous at dawn. If I only had sound to go off, I'd guess I was waking every morning in the Amazon, some thick jungle from an Allende novel where I stand barefoot atop the rich and squelching soil.

Ayla snapped that first picture of me last night. In it I'm cooking the apple-chardonnay sausages that Indy would begin to choke on a few minutes later, sending me flying out of my chair to give her the Heimlich. One moment I noticed she was struggling to breathe and the next I had her in my arms over the toilet, nothing in the whole wide world but the knowledge that I was going to force that meat from my daughter's air pipe, and I did. Something flew out and I said, "Can you breathe?", but she couldn't answer--from coughing, I think, but to be safe I did the thrust again and she puked. She drooled a bit. "You made me throw up," she said in wonder and I stood there, bent over, her back to my heart, cells from her body still swimming around in mine. I held her, quivering all over, steadying the rhythms of our simultaneous breath.

Everything was all right. Thanks to the great generosity of Margi, who writes at May I Have A Word?, I was able to enjoy a massage yesterday. It was much needed; I've been off the computer for a week due to pain shooting down my mouse arm and entire right side. The morning started out cloudy and misty, very Transylvanian indeed as I drove through rolling hills, past tired old horses and beautiful houses all given up, letting twisting vines and grasses claim them back. But by the time the massage was over, the sky broke blue and I sat at a coffee shop drinking my latte on ice and watching the school children in matching P.E. uniforms playing across the street. They were on a wide stretch of private school-green, an unbelievable hue. People were reading in the park, the children were shouting and chasing some puffy, floaty thing around in the sky. Every car that passed had a window down, the same summer-coming breeze in everyone's hair as we planned our meals, picked up coffee, sang out of tune. Everything was all right as you know it is in so much of the world, so much of the time.

*I just found out that those fat scoops of strawberry ice cream trees are, in fact, Magnolias. Well butter my butt and call me a biscuit!*

Post-It To My Soul

2013-04-05T11:10:00.000-04:00

(a record of happiness)

Don't worry, sooner or later I'll be home

red-cheeked from the roused wind.

I'll stand in the doorway

stamping my boots and slapping my hands

my shoulders

covered with stars.

-Mary Oliver, Walking Home from Oakhead

*I would have liked to have written a record of happiness but my kids are home on spring break and I

Easyer

2013-04-01T14:01:00.000-04:00

For Easter I took a lot of pictures and ate fajitas.

All the girls wanted to do for Easter was play chubby bunny, and we did.

So I'm sharing it.

Because, I don't know why.

Then we had a photo shoot. I wasn't really feeling Easter this year, but I did demand a photo shoot. We didn't buy Easter dresses so I told the girls to put on something fancy of their own choosing. The photos all have this hazy film because it had been raining and the lens kept fogging up. Noah didn't want to be in any pictures but he called out poses and the girls started laughing really hard and we all fell down on top of each other. Later, the girls went to bed and we staged our own sexy little shoot, Noah and I.

It was a good Easyer.

What Women Do

2013-03-26T22:54:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I texted my sweet sister-in-law to casually ask her if she knew where I could get some meth. I thought it would be funny but she believed me and now I just feel bad for both of us.

On Sunday I had the good fortune to join three of my lady-friends for a retreat in the woods. We did a long yoga session that left me spectacularly sore and then spent the rest of the day sipping on tea and making collages. It suited my soul just fine. Late that night Noah and I took a painfully hot bath and I told him that I want to believe in every new age hippie thing, I truly do, but standing in a circle with a group of women singing about earth our bodies, water our blood just makes me feel hokey. I am willing to take any old stone and roll it around in my mouth, testing it for goodness and sometimes spitting it out. Monday was book club day. I learned it is required to drink four glasses of wine on Passover (yesterday was also the start of Passover) so we did that and sat around for hours talking about the book and then moving on to everything, everything in our lives, and it was good. It seems like a lot of lives and relationships are in sway. Are in transition. I have this blog sitting here and every day, every day I wonder if I should write it but I am in transition. I am feeling private. I don't know why.

The other day Ayla had a meltdown. She served herself the last of the ice cream and when it was her sister's turn to have some, Ayla was forced to surrender some of what was in her bowl. She fell to the ground choking on her sobs and the only thing I know is I never know what to do so I just sat there with her. I sank to the floor beneath her door frame, the transition space. She was wrapped in her white blanket and we breathed. We breathed together for some time until eventually Indy joined us and the three of us camped out right there on the floor, and they showed me some baking tutorials on youtube. Ever since then I have been filled with nothing but compassion and aching love for these little souls, living out their lives tethered to mine. I am getting good at working out these splinters in my heart. I'm not saying it doesn't hurt but then one day your daughter slams into your waist in the dark hours of the morning crying with joy "mom-o, mom-o!", and you realize you are free. Something you once were, you are not anymore. Like Melusine, you have shifted form. So if you ask me to, I will hold your hand and sing but what I'm learning now is that pain can be undone and nothing is more sacred to me than sitting with other women, declaring in our own ways, one by one, that we are letting go of everything that doesn't serve us. Sometimes stones find their way in but we will spit them out. We will sit with our daughters until the crying subsides. In all the dark houses in the town, this cycle is playing out forever. In all the bedrooms the mother is holding the child. In all the bathrooms, the women slip their robes like lies to the floor, and step with feet like moons into clearer water.

Roman de Melusine by Jean d'Arras.15th century.

Runs in the Family

2013-03-20T10:11:00.001-04:00

My Grandma Hartke with my dad's older brother, Eric.

"Our family moves around a lot," I told the girls when they got in the car after school, both of them thirsty and with low blood sugar as they always are at 3 o'clock.

Because I too had read the New York Times article,and because Elizabeth had mentioned something similar on her blog, I told them a story to stave off their bad moods, these tiny monsters I fight every day at three.

I told them about their grandmother, my mom, who moved with only her mother from Pennsylvania to Colorado at just three-years-old. They rolled the windows down. Outside the day was a riot of color, but they were listening. I told them about my dad's mother, raised on farm in Kansas, one of six girls, who moved to Colorado as a young woman.

They began to chirp in the pieces they knew.

Daddy moved from California, they said. And grammy. And grandpa moved from England?

I think Grandpa was born in Massachusetts, I told them. And Dede was born in Chicago but he moved to California. His parents moved here from Czechoslovakia. (That's what it was called when they left it).

Then I told them about my father's great-grandmother, who stowed away on a ship from Sweden as a teenager and found herself married to a deputy of Wild Bill Hickock on the prairie frontier, where she gave birth to thirteen children and buried eleven of them. The many-greats grandfather who came from Sweden to fight in the Civil War but found the war was over when he got here, possibly ensuring my daughter's own births all these years later.

"And then we moved," Ayla said. "From Colorado to North Carolina."

"That's right," I said. I don't know if it means anything. I just know that in this context, we, all of us, began to make more sense.

We aren't outliers. We are people of our own particular blood.

Comforted, we went about our afternoon.

Let The Record Show

2013-03-16T15:53:00.000-04:00

When we decided to move here, I had visions of us sitting on a back porch, surrounded by these green rolling hills (dare I say, they're rather Irish), sipping drinks and listening to bluegrass music. The good kind of bluegrass, with more Celtic in it than country. It's not really bluegrass or folk but I don't know what else to call it. But I imagined it playing in the sultry heat as we lived our slower lives in older mountains.

Well. Let the record show that today we are doing exactly that. It's over 70 degrees here. The bees are buzzing and I can smell lilac or honeysuckle. The drink is sangrita spiked with good tequila and tabasco. The band is Chatham County Line. Did you know that we heard Chatham County Line live the first night we came to Brevard? When we were starry-eyed and young? When all the roads seemed possible, the air was warm, the hopes were high? Well we did. There were fairy lights and pennywhistle. We stood beneath a southern sky as it turned from blue to periwinkle to black, he held my hand and we moved in time to the music, to the turning of the planets, to the rhymns of our hearts.

Accidental selfie taken during Chatham County Line show, Brevard, NC May 2012

Southern Living

2013-03-12T09:52:00.000-04:00

A few weekends ago I was holed up in a hotel room in Durham with my daughters, who were jumping a wild ruckus between the two hotel beds, one recovering from a stomach bug and one doomed to get it that very night in the small hours. But they didn't have it yet and while they jumped, I read "Southern Living", to which I now subscribe. The first time it arrived in the mail, I wondered what the hell had happened to me. Everything went still for a moment and I swayed numbly in a "is this real life?" tilting of the universe. But the magazine is actually a great window into Southern culture, which I am sometimes baffled by, and events around the south, like low-country oyster roasts and music fests that I'll probably never attend, but sound lovely. Also it gave advice onto how to get into a hammock "like a lady" (ankles crossed, julep down) and how to make insults sound like compliments. I am pretty sure this advice was tongue-in-cheek. I am 89% sure. Ok, 72%. Look, I'm pretty sure.

In this issue was an article by a woman who's husband had moved with her from Manhattan to Tennessee and experienced the Three Stages of South exactly as I have. Stage One being a state of giddy wonder--everything is so charming! So quaint! Watermelon Rind Jelly, what is that, I don't know, but I love that it exists! This was me back in July, in a whirl of lake swimming and mountain music jams on back porches and old time street dances on Main Street. But eight months in, her husband was basically examining his own palms in wonder, asking how the hell he got here and telling his wife, "I'm starting to feel like I don't understand anything that is going on, ever". He was also homesick for what I believe the writer referred to as the "straightforward" interactions of places other. This is Stage Two. I'm not sure what Stage Three is because neither I nor the writer's husband have hit it yet, but I'm hoping it involves Los Angeles, or the set of my favorite tv show, or maybe the green people emerge from the forest and dance me into perpetual health and bliss, I don't know. To be continued.

Anyway, it helped me to know that this poor New Yorker and I have hit the same stages, at about the same times. There have been times when I've looked around at this life in awe and wondered how the hell I got here. I'm pretty sure this is a universal feeling. I was talking to my oldest friend A in Sacramento the other day. A took a new job, absolutely knowing it was the right thing to do and now nothing has turned out as she'd hoped and she is frustrated and drained and confused. Sometimes I think back to May, when Noah and I decided to move here. I felt absolutely certain it was the right thing to do. And now, of course, I wonder. I always imagined that as I grew older, I'd grow better and better at trusting my instincts, but in fact the opposite seems to be true. I'm starting to wonder if an instinct is something to be trusted at all, because none of mine seem to come out right. Maybe an instinct is just an impetus, urges meant to keep propelling us forward in life. If that is so, I'll look forward to the next one for that reason alone. I always was a thing that craved change.

Ledges, Tides, Sea-Change

2013-03-10T22:30:00.001-04:00

On Friday I felt good for the first time in a long, cold winter. A rainy winter. A winter I spent missing my family and the wide prairie skies with an equally ice-pierced ache.

But on Friday I felt good even though I had no time to write, the barometer my mood generally revolves around. In the morning Noah and I went to an interminable school assembly to watch Indy get an award for "improvement in reading". I am against these nonsense flattery awards, (one girl was given a "princess award" for "liking princesses") but that's another blog. After the assembly I spent the afternoon cleaning, singing to Mamma Mia! (now you know too much about me by far) and listening to This American Life with the windows thrown wide. The sun was out and it was warm, that best kind of spring day, one of the first warm days after a long winter where you feel almost grateful for cold and snow--almost--because it makes these early spring reprieves so damn beautiful, so breath-taking and teary-making. Without the winter would the spring make me feel like my being, my chest and heart, are finding rich soil and blooming wide and fluttering, my center a trembling velvety butterfly wing? Would I feel that I personally am blooming? I don't know but here's some foreshadowing: I'm ready to find out. I am distinctly interested in what life without winter would feel like in my soul.

(But that is another blog, a story in wish stage, not yet written)

I feel so good today, I told Noah in breezy kitchen, looking at the blue sky. Indeed, I felt like the movie scene where the sick patient leaves the hospital, always in the sun, shaky at first but throwing away the cane after a few wobbly steps. I got out of bed, I got things done, my mind spun out stories to write and cracked jokes. Ayla's friend came over and went home and I made cobb salad pizza in the kitchen, flirting and teasing my husband. The weather was set to be good through the weekend and I went to bed feeling light, spirit and body light and beautiful when I stood and enjoyed it in front of the mirror.

And then Saturday.

Saturday came and I knew right away, shuffling about in the kitchen, measuring coffee into the machine, that it was back. Winter's grip on me wasn't over. Beneath it I slump. Depression settles into me physically as well as spiritually and I dragged about the house, heavy-hearted, heavy of foot and chest and brain. Every task seems insurmountable. Even little things like getting dressed, never mind bigger things like cleaning the kitchen, playing with children, pursuing a dream, living with purpose. My brain misfires about everything, asking why bother over and over again. I can't blog, can't edit my book. I can trick myself into writing, which is a salvation but short-lived. Noah took the girls to the park and I slouched in front of the computer, reasoning anything, even mindless web-surfing, was better than climbing back into bed. My shoulders curved around me, my body expressing my sense of total defeat. Eventually I gave in. I crawled back into bed. Why bother why bother why bother. Noah came home and the girls clambered over me like puppies, but I was unresponsive and Noah coaxed them from the room, took them outside to a gorgeous summer-like evening.

While he put steaks on the grill and threw the frisbee to the girls and dog, I got in the shower and couldn't coax myself out of it. I sat on the floor with the water rushing over me. I made feeble attempts at talking myself out of this one like I've done with depressive episodes in the past. But something in me was protesting too strongly. I was tired of trying to choose happiness. I was tired of trying to fix myself, by myself. For years I have been managing the depression, being without health insurance and unable to afford help, and I've done a decent job. I have sought out spiritual teachings and educated myself about the disease. I have practiced yoga and meditation and what I am told therapists call "thought stopping", teaching myself to cut off the lies depression fires constantly in a brain, to replace them with other thoughts. I have taken my fish oil and walks in the sun, I eat my nuts and salmon and green smoothies. I have done this for more than ten years and sitting on the floor of the shower, I thought about how it feels like plugging holes in a breaking damn. It feels like fighting an unstoppable, ten-year tide. And I realized that depression is not something I have to manage on my own. I have tried, I try so hard, I do a really good job but I deserve to have more than one good day out of every six or ten or twenty. In that momennt of clarity, the clouds of depression cleared in my brain and I thought: On Monday I will make an appointment at the sliding-scale clinic and I will tell them that I need help. That I want medication because I can't do this on my own anymore. And I don't have to.

The decision alone brought some relief. I managed to get out of the shower. I went to the kitchen and told Noah my plan. He agreed, gently, that it was a good idea. I couldn't wait to get to the doctor's office, to get real help, but just making the decision caused a shift in my brain. For all these years I have treated depression like it is a part of me that I am responsible for managing, something that I need to change. I do believe I am responsible for my moods and actions, to some extent my thoughts and emotions but I'd been treating depression like it was my fault and something I was responsible for fixing. It's not. It's an unwanted visitor. It's a monster on the shoulder and it's not my job to talk the monster down off ledges, to self-help it into a prettier, presentable state. No. I want the damn thing hacked the fuck off.

And if I can't do that, I want to medicate it into a stupor so that I can go about my life, unbothered as possible.

So it's Sunday night. I had a decent day. First thing tomorrow I am calling the doctor. I am a little afraid of being denied help and brushed off, I don't know why, I just am. My contingency plan: if that happens, I will get another opinion. I am making this promise to myself, here, at the turning of the seasons. I'm going to get help. I'm going to feel better. I'm not going to go it alone, anymore.

The tide must change.

February 27, 2013

2013-02-27T13:41:00.000-05:00

I was brutally ill Monday night with a stomach bug that I'd already nursed my two daughters through. Being so very sick made me think about the job I did taking care of them, and made me wish I had shown perhaps more compassion than I did, when, say, Indy asked for a bath at 4 am after we'd both been up since midnight and I told her to wait til dawn, or when Ayla was sick in the car on a four hour drive I made alone and afterwards I made her step out into the cold so I could rinse her hair with bottled water. I don't know. I could have done better. But last night when they got home from school and found me sick in bed, they brought me cups of cranberry juice and ginger ale and petted my forehead and I thought well, they must have learned this somewhere. Maybe from me.

I do hope.

I'm not one-hundred percent myself today, but I wanted something fresh up on the blog so I decided to post these pictures from our trip to Colorado that I've been meaning to share.

Indy and Ayla with their cousins, Eisley and Violet. One more baby cousin due in July.

My girls treated to a shopping spree by Grammy and Auntie Lulu.

A family picture, Tuttle style. Noah and his five siblings, and my sister-in-law Susie there with the finger in her nose. Then her husband Zach (Noah's older brother), Brett (boyfriend of Sophie), Sophie, Indy, Ayla, Lucy (the youngest), Carlton, me, Noah, Mercy.

Noah's second sister Sophie, who reminds us all so much of Jennifer Lawrence, both in looks and personality.

Whoopie pies during coffee break.

Susie, Noah's first sister Mercy, yours truly, Indy. God I love my sisters by marriage.

Mercy and I on coffee break, getting photobomed by Indy.

Indy and Noah's youngest brother, Carlton.

Had to throw in this one of Susie so you can get a glimpse of how beautiful she actually is.

Me and my sister, Heather, who will have her third in July.

My girls in this beautiful sister moment.

Now I'm going to go make dental appointments and round up Girl Scout cookie money, pick up the girls from school, feed them something, and nurse my still weak tummy on Mother's Little Savior--Grapefruit Perrier.

Speak

2013-02-21T22:15:00.001-05:00

We turn a corner and a flock of red-wing black birds abandons a field and heads for the sky, all at once as if by divine decree. I can't see the poetry in anything, I tell my husband. All I write is clunky prose. My baby sits on my lap in the remembered sun and is cajoled into going to school, Ayla's hair thick as moss on her head as I kiss it, as they run. They have my freckles across their nose though not as many as I have, in the evenings they examine tinctures and oils along the sink and want to know why. For blemishes, I tell them, which you might get someday, though I hope you won't. Ten minutes are spent in a car with a book, gorgeous and lush. The earth is swearing it's going to do spring again this year, as it usually does, and for ten minutes I feel it coming, the gathering climax, the sun and the breeze and the book so warm and earth-rich they make me cry. Like the tiny blue birds, one-two-three, I discovered while gazing dreamily out my kitchen window, the one above the sink, where I spend so much time. In the afternoon Indy and I lay side by side on my bed, belly up like rainbowed fish my father once pulled from the water. She lets me tangle my fingers in her wild blonde hair, her wild child crown, her motherless untamed locks. She lets me gaze at her freckles and pin her across my chest, across my belly, the place where she was magicked into being. Life comes from life comes from life. I chop peppers and garlic. I toss curry powder with flour and shake raw chicken into it. I drop it sizzling into a pan. All night my house will smell like an Indian restaurant. Bathe the girls. Pour the wine. The brain won't stop, it spins as if it believes it's the universe, the whole swift planet. It feels raw and gauche. I have flubbed every social situation I've been involved in the past week, the brain misfires, I have actually blushed. Blushed red as I don't recall having done since college. The creative writing professor. Speak up, he said, Your voice is very quiet. You are speaking too softly. Speak up, he said, but I can't. Everything is locked away like an unloved wife who would rather burn than come out. It builds and builds, churning like thunderclouds while I wash a pan, drink a Perrier. I lie down to sleep and in my sheets is a pleasant, surprising smell. Is that the smell of me? Ayla stands next to me while I'm chopping in the kitchen and for a moment I have the sense I am standing next to myself. It seems I can see myself only in the peripheries, the half spaces, like I dwell in another dimension and can't quite reach me. I lie down to sleep but the mind won't rest, it churns out sensations, images that send me stumbling half-naked, fish-bellied, thighs hushing like powdery marshmallows, down the hall. In the hall, down the night. SPEAK UP, he said. In his hand, he teased a match.

Hooters Not Allowed

2013-02-19T10:29:00.002-05:00

Last night I was troubled with stress dreams about the political structure of the south. I'm not bragging, that's just a fact. There was a new sheriff in town, and because some city official was "with the sheriff", we all knew it meant we weren't going to be able to do some fun thing we really wanted to do. The memory of what we wanted escapes me, but that wasn't the point of the dream. The point was that my fears about having my personal freedoms restricted were surfacing. A fear of misuse of government power I have experienced only upon moving here, to the Republican south, to a state that went blue in 2012 but was red this election cycle, that has more laws and restrictions than lately-blue Colorado, for sure. On Sunday Noah and I stood in a brewery discussing the fact that, for all their talk about small government and personal freedoms, I have never felt less free than I do here in the land where Republicans rule. Their laws restrict the simpler things in life, like happy hour and vibrators. Also nipples.

(Never mind that it will probably soon be legal to bring your concealed carry into a bar.)

That was last night, and all this morning, in the dream hour between four and five am, I was harassed with one call after another from the school system letting me know that, because there was some snow and slushy roads, school was cancelled. There is set to be a make up day on Saturday. School on Saturday--if that is not abuse of government power, I don't know what is. As I said in a rant on facebook, I was born and raised in a state that just legalized recreational use of marijuana, and where, as I told my mom on the phone this Sunday, it feels like you are innocent until proven guilty. Here in the south I feel guilty until proven innocent. Part of me is afraid to even type these coming words, I'll just say I won't go into detail about the constant badgering ALE (Alcohol Law Enforcement) have given Noah and the others at the brewery--a business the community is happy to have, but that the city and county people clearly hate, based on their endless restrictions, taxes, and tyrannical control of things like when and where and in what clothing it is legal for one to drink a beer. I won't tell you about the ALE official who bragged to my husband about their laws being the most restrictive, about their power being the most complete, before going on to make racist remarks that I don't want to recount here on my space. I won't tell you that because my sense of personal freedom here is limited, it sets my pulse raising, it troubles me in my sleep. Is freedom of speech a thing, in Carolina? I roll over in clean sheets and tell myself that the "snow day" is all a ruse, that surely school was cancelled because a gypsy woman gave the school superintendent the evil eye, or because a pregnant woman walked a field west to east at dawn, and that to drink a beer freely all you must do is slay one goat and bury its right eye in a patch of yarrow under a winter moon. In the pale light of dawn, I find myself hilarious.

I'm hoping these are only growing pains. The honeymoon period has worn off. The bonfires have ceased for winter. It is February, after all, and February is difficult anywhere. I won't tell you that Noah says, at work, there is an unspoken rule that no one will talk about their regrets over moving here, because talking won't help. I won't tell you that I told Noah it was time to institute the two-year plan, that in two years all the new hires must be able to run the brewery so we Coloradans can exit en masse. I will just say we are in a rough spot. I want to make it clear that the people and community here are lovely, wonderful, liberally minded people who grow gardens and raise chickens and who have to be really, really careful about getting high, even in the privacy of their own homes, but that sadly the good old boys network has all the power and is running (ruining) everything. I will say that I know these things often look different from a distance, but I wrote this blog because I needed to express what they look like today. Today looks like this: I had plans to work, but the girls are home, the sun is shining, and I need to go look up what mountain loreal rite is required to accomplish anything, because from my point of view it seems like superstition and ritual is just the way things get done around here.

Clouds Like Wings

2013-02-07T09:09:00.000-05:00

*photo taken out the car window on the drive from Denver to Ft. Collins. Long's Peak in the middle, there.

I awake every morning to the sounds of the rain forest, to a great symphony of birds, a riot, calling their stubborn songs to the sky. Nearly every day this last week I have sat at this computer and reached for words to say--there is so much to say--and have come up empty handed, with nothing to show but distance and ache. I wanted to tell it all--how in Colorado the four cousins, reunited, jumped and jived in ponied grace in my sister's living room, where I played Rock Band, drums only, the sole activity I know that makes every problem fade away. How Lucy (called Lupus), the baby of the Tuttle siblings, the youngest of six, backed the massive Suburban into a ditch and how, laughing, her older brothers rescued their tumblers full of whisky before we all stood on the lip on the side of the car and tilted it so that the front wheel would touch dirt and we could drive it again. (Fear not, there was no drinking and driving going on). I wanted to explain about the origins of a picture and the drama that followed it. But I can't tell stories, I can't type or think or write--

I am editing my book for self-publication, and every time I come even close to typing that sentence the walls of my being slam down, the birds go silent, the coffee goes cold. Somewhere in the distance a raven caw-caw-caws, like it knows all my little fears and laughs. Every morning and every evening I lie in bed and tell myself stories, as I've done since I was a little girl, the reason I can never sleep. This morning instead of spinning out a fantasy land I told myself I would wake, make coffee, sit down and edit the hulking monster my once beloved book has turned into, but a voice came to my head and I sat down and wrote other stories instead. Then I came across this poem, and I thought, hell with it: In the spirit of Elizabeth Aquino I will post the poem here (because it made me cry) and you will know what you need to know: that we were all together again in Colorado and had a laughing, sprawling, jolly good time. That I flew home to a place that is not home. That every day instead of posting here I am wrestling with angels (quite literally, the book is called ANGEL FOOD), trying to force them into submission, trying to force myself out of a fearful corner and just get the damn thing done, because I have to, because the unruly child cares nothing about its dirty face and wants to run free.

Great Plains

by Bruce Willard

I could drive for days without fear
of outrunning these patchwork clouds,

bridge lines of cumulus
this way or that towards the horizon,

midway between one place
and another, standing up
to the administrations of wind.

I like a destination which pulls
true, deliberate,
but at great distance. Like

I like the slow, imperceptible
progress of knowing
but not knowing
how far I'll travel today,
where I'll find gas
for the next leg
or when.

*Poem found today at The Writer's Almanac.

A Formal Feeling

2013-01-30T10:36:00.001-05:00

We got home yesterday from a trip to Colorado, where we spent nearly every moment surrounded by family, wonderful and exhausting. Noah's siblings (he has five of them) flew in from Huntington Beach and Portland, the first time in years we were all in one place. Energy was high and a bit wild, even though we were there to mourn a death. Maybe because we were there to mourn a death. Noah and his older brother, Zach, cooked wonderful spicy Mexican food, carnitas and pickled onions, beans with chile sauce and tomatillo sauce, the younger sisters and Zach's wife Susie helped clean up, and Ayla and Indy, the only grandchildren, ran among us nearly feral yet looked after by all. We spent a lot of time sitting at restaurants and breweries, gathered around tables with Noah's grandfather who goes by the Czech word Dédé (short vowels, not long), and Sonja's brothers and sister-in-law. We ate a lot, drank a lot, and laughed a lot, which seemed fine at the time but in retrospect, I worry if it was jarring to Sonja. I don't know. It's hard to know how to be.

In the few quiet moments, I wondered about what I would write here when I got back. The chaos and cajoling love of this family left me filled up and wrung out, both at once. A sort of primal state that saved little room for thought or reflection. It seems there is more that I should say, but I can't tell Scott and Sonja's story. I can only tell mine.

The day after the memorial service, I woke up in Sonja's guest bedroom and saw the morning light on the western mountains. The light was pink like a newborn and I felt very alive, and very happy to be here. I got my coffee and went back up to the window, where I sat on the floor and said a prayer for all the many people this death has left behind. Light a candle, bake a dish, there is so little we can do for the mourning. It was good to see those mountains again, even from Fort Collins where you can't see Mt. Evans or Pikes Peak or the eagle face of Long's. The words of Emily Dickinson dropped into my brain--after great pain, a formal feeling comes--. The sky was the same pink I'd see a few days later, from the airplane, traveling west to east, which, to quote Pam Houston poorly, any old star will tell you is the wrong way to go. A gorgeous color, even though it was only a faded scarlet, which I'd watch dim to white flying over the curve of the earth with my head back, crying and missing everything, missing home.

January 21st, 2013

2013-01-21T10:40:00.000-05:00

Dear friends, my mother-in-law's husband, Scott, passed on Saturday night. He had been fighting cancer in his colon, liver, and spine for the last eleven months. We are very sad, especially for Scott's family and Noah's mother, Sonja, who had been married to Scott only about a year and a half and who was nothing less than head-over-heels in love.

We are flying out to Colorado tomorrow and will be gone for about a week.

Love,

Brittany

Ayla and Indy at Scott and Sonja's wedding, July 2011

Bless My Heart

2013-01-17T10:38:00.000-05:00

It has rained for six days, or five, or a hundred, and the earth is shipwrecked. I don't understand why the whole town doesn't just wash away, mudslide down the hill into South Carolina. The backyard is softer than the bottom of the sea. I am from Colorado, where if it rains for more than six minutes we call the police. Everyone is battening down their hatches for two inches of snow, and though it is predicted to clear overnight and be sunny tomorrow, there are rumors that school will be cancelled. What the hell tom-foolery is this? Truly I am a stranger in a strange land.

Bless my heart.

It doesn't happen often, but on more than one occasion since moving here to a state which seems happy to refer to itself as "North Cackalacky" (?), I have had moments where the universe goes quiet, all of it just backdrop, and, like a character in a movie, my own voice-over drops into my head and wonders: What the hell am I doing here? The thought arrives not in anger or despair, but pure wonder. I make choices every day that shape my life into what it is, and then I sit back and stare at it in awe. As if my life was not, in fact, created by my own hand. And perhaps it isn't.

Bless my heart.

Yesterday the rain cleared for a moment, and I put on my pink rainboots and went to tromp the great bayou that was once my backyard. Or the neighbor's property that abuts (ABUTS!) my backyard. We've rescued this dog who is part beagle and part racehorse. She rocketed around me, doing laps along the edges of the field. She used her doggy-snout to toss water into the air. Watching her play eased some of the low grade stress that wears constantly when living in a land so far from your own. It was something I didn't know to expect, the frustrations of all the little things: the inferior and thus infuriating grocery store, site of all my breakdowns, one mass symbol for every little strain about being a western woman in the south. There is a thing people do here that confounds me. They are polite to my face, helping me find the canola oil or refunding me the dollar-fifty that was supposed to come off my ice cream at the register, but didn't. But beneath that pleasant exterior, I get the distinct sense that no one has ever hated anyone as much as this smiling grocery store clerk hates me. They seethe quietly while speaking in pleasant tones. I was not prepared for this. In the west, people are usually either genuinely friendly or genuinely hateful. There are few pretenses at either. This is what I will call the "bless your heart" mentality. Upon moving here, our friends asked those native to Dixie about the rumors we had heard--that people might say one thing but not actually mean it. That the famous phrase is a insult, sort of. Every southerner I heard being asked about it swore up and down it wasn't true. They shook their heads and widened their eyes, promised it was sincere, and I believed them.

Bless my heart.

During that brief break from the rain, I watched Georgia (we're changing her name to Georgia) and thought: six months. That is how long I can live in a place before wishing to move on to someplace else. Even though I love it here, I know here now. I'm sorry to say it, really. I exhaust even myself. Then Georgia (née Ginger) leaped into the bushes and smoked out an entire flock of eastern blue birds, who flew like scattered precious stones up toward the low gray sky. I've never seen so many rainbow-hued things in one single place. For a moment I believed maybe it wasn't going to rain forever. You don't know this because I haven't told you, but blue birds are my own personal emblem of hope.

New

2013-01-01T16:07:00.000-05:00

photo courtesy of Oskar Blues Brevard on instagram

Last night was the culmination of the labor of more than half a year.

I dropped the girls off with some of our heroic friends, put on a black dress, and joined my husband at the brewery just as he was getting off work and the place was beginning to fill with the first of over 1,200 revelers who had scored tickets to the sold-out event. The first time we saw the building, it was a truss manufacturing plant. Since July we'd seen it empty down to a lifeless shell, and then, within the last six weeks or so, begin to fill with shiny tanks and a canning system and kegging lines. A dusty, concrete mezzanine had been transformed to a packed and hopping tap room, with a beautiful curved bar, booths, and a racecar hood with the Oskar Blues Thunderbird on it. It was decorated and lively with Christmas lights and silver ball ornaments hanging from the lights. Noah took my hand and led me up to the bar and introduced me to the women working the taproom in vintage red dresses. I got my first taste of Brevard-brewed, husband-brewed beer and we stood along the railing, looking down on a stage where a local bluegrass band played and what seemed like all of Brevard, including many of our new, dear friends, drank and cheered and danced below us. The whole OB crew was there--the three other families who moved out from Colorado with us and many people from the Longmont location. We posed for pictures and hugged our new friends and shared relieved beers with our old ones, looking around at the throbbing, growing crowd with wonder.

It was so much work to get there. Noah and his coworkers have worked exhaustive hours for weeks upon weeks, hitting and overcoming nearly every bump imaginable. These weeks have been trying for me too, home alone with the tireless daughters day after day, away from my family and my home, missing my husband so very much. We cut a Christmas tree while Noah worked, and hung it with lights. While he worked, we baked cookies and made ornaments. While he worked, I shopped for gifts and went to the post office and bought wrapping paper, often not seeing him for days at a time. A time I would not have survived without the help and friendship of the many people we have met in Brevard. Months, and then suddenly this: the end of the deepest challenges in sight, the firepits and food trucks and everybody in glitter and suspenders reveling in a finished, running, working brewery.

After a count down and kiss, we got home around 1:30 am and the doggie we are fostering was chirping in her crate. I put the leash on her and, in my boots, walked like a prowler across our neighbor's backyard, down the hill on the soft earth, to the place where there are trees and a wide dormant cornfield and a nearby creek, and we could hear the creek telling secrets in the darkness. There was a veil of spotted clouds stretched in the sky, and they raced with velocity across the moon, or maybe the moon flew swiftly through the sky without getting anywhere at all. Then the clouds broke and I turned up my face and felt the moonlight on my pale skin, a wild thing. My breath was in the air. All around us was darkness and corn husks and tall trees, but in the distance I could see my neighbor's porch lit up in the night like an old campfire meant to stay the shadows, and rising and falling over the creek were their voices, near and far away. To the east a long silent path stretched before us, blue and chill, but the dog didn't like it. So we walked on the places where our feet made stones shudder like shells. Everyone was sleeping. There was none but us in the world of frost and darkness, but we turned our noses up toward the moon and never felt afraid. The night aware it was new and everything around us, breathing softly with the untroubled huffs of the earth.

Sing Your Story

2012-12-31T13:39:00.001-05:00

For some time now, I have been controlling the Universe with my mind. Sorry about everything. Not that Everything is my fault, I'm only controlling a tiny portion of it. For instance, weeks ago I mused to Noah, in one of my "moments", that why don't they hire Tina Fey or Amy Poehler to host an awards show. Low and behold, a few days later came the announcement that they were doing that very thing. Shortly followed another occasion on which I said that some show (or perhaps a football team?) ought to do something, and shortly after--they did. "I made that happen with my brain," I said to Noah. "I know you did," he said, and we clinked our glasses lackadaisically. Of course, there are other things to consider: twice now I have been alone in my house when the television has turned on by itself. After it happened the second time I said aloud, "If you are here, turn it back on." I immediately realized how terrifying that would be and said "No don't don't don't don't don't," and it didn't. I puzzled over this for some time until, lying in bed last night, I realized that both times this happened I had been deeply absorbed in my writing, "in the zone" if you will, and of course the only conclusion is that I had turned the tv on with my mad creative energy.

So you see.

I'm not sure what I'm going to make happen in 2013. When I started 2012 in Longmont, Colorado, I had no idea I would end it in Brevard, North Carolina. I am hoping for renewal. I am hoping my husband will stop working 36 hour shifts (ok, it happened once) and I'll stop feeling like a single mother. What is on my mind lately is that, blog or not, life gives us chance after chance to rewrite our stories. If we don't like it, we can tell it again. If the story refuses to be rewritten, god bless we walk right out and find a new one.

I love you.

2012: I edited my book, and edited it some more. Then I lost it in a computer crash. Then I got it back in a miracle. Starting in January, I will be editing it again.

I got some bees, who came to me from California, who I would later haul for three days in a van to North Carolina.

I scared the crap out of my kids.

Indy was Indy.

Ayla was Ayla.

Their dad bought a canoe and used it once.

The rainbow ended here.

We went to visit North Carolina to see if we would move there.

We decided we would move there.

We said goodbye.

This happened to Noah:

The girls and I built a new life in Brevard. We swam in lakes and went on hikes and missed Noah through a long July, August, and September until he finally joined us again in October.

My mom and dad came to visit and we explored Asheville and Noah had to order new contacts and meanwhile wore his glasses, which he hates.

We explored Pisgah forest and saw the waterfalls.

My kids were rad:

I flew back to Denver to visit, and saw my sister's-in-law Lucy, Mercy, and Sophie. I also saw my own sister, but I don't look great in my pictures with her, so.

Christmas break happened (and is breaking me), and we went to Hendersonville and ate ice cream on a cold December day.

Onward.

The Proper Pagan Part II

2012-12-23T11:13:00.000-05:00

One thing I love about the South is the deep stillness of a Sunday morning. The town has the silent resonance of the far woods on Sundays before nine a.m. because everybody--everybody--is in church. On the five minute drive to the grocery store, Indy and I pass no less than four churches. First Methodist, Brevard Wesleyan, Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd, The Church of the Nazarene. All have full parking lots except, suspiciously, the Nazarene. I have planned to visit the grocery store like a proper pagan when all God's people are in church. I do not miss church except for, occasionally, with a pang of sentimentality for the rituals of my childhood. I have memories of brown paper bags on Christmas Eve, stuffed with oranges and apples and chewy peppermint nougat. I have memories of the dry must of coat closets back when certain ladies still wore fur. I still sing "O Come Emmanuel" and "O Little Town of Bethlehem" and "O Holy Night" while honoring the solstice. I can do both. I asked Ayla if she wanted to go to church on Christmas Eve, with the Unitarian church in mind. I have no blueprints for how to raise children who are spiritually informed and aware but not indoctrinated. Ayla said no, and then said, "well, if you want to, we can," in a way that meant she didn't want to hurt my feelings.

I only asked because the pressure to make Christmas special is high this year. I'm not sure which I miss more, Christmas in Colorado or Christmas in California, but I miss both. One was all the traditions of my childhood, the other was mimosas on the beach while dolphins rise in the distance. I don't know how to do Christmas in Carolina, in the rain, without the cousins and the snow, or the sand and sunshine. I asked Noah if he wanted cinnamon rolls and Swedish pancakes on Christmas morning. (He'll do the dinners). "Not both. Don't do too much or you'll freak out. I'M DOING THIS FOR YOU," he mock roared in an imitation of me I found hilarious. "I JUST WANT YOU TO BE HAPPY! ALL THIS YELLING IS FOR YOU. ARE YOU HAPPY NOW??"

He summed up almost exactly how I feel.

After getting our mint, rosemary and thyme, Indy and I push the cart through the chill quiet to the car. "Don't you just love December?" Indy sighs rapturously, her breath puffing the air. Tucked in the van, she shifts to giddy, like any six-year-old two days before Christmas. She pushes herself up on the arms of the passenger seat and kicks her pink-glittered legs at the dashboard. "I'm just. So! Excited! For CHRISTMAS!" When I tease her and say that I thought she wanted lots of socks and underwear for Christmas, her cheer proves indomitable. "Well, it would be nice to have some pink socks," she says sincerely. Earlier I asked her what she wanted to do to make Christmas special. She said she wanted to send more gifts to her cousins. Last night we snuggled on the couch together watching the Grinch, and at the climactic scene when the Who's down in Whoville awake to find all their presents vanished, but gather in the town square to sing anyway, Indy turned to me and said, "That's because he took all their things but he couldn't take their spirits. Their spirits is where their happy lives and he couldn't take that, anyway." I told her maybe they were robots who were happy only because they were programmed to be, thus rendering their bright spirits meaningless. She was bordering a bit Pollyanna, even for her mother. Indy just smiled and said no, that wasn't true, and didn't I think the Grinch had a weird face? I don't worry much about where they'll land, spiritually. I have no illusions about the amount of influence I have on the matter. Last night I lay awake in bed and remembered them both as infants. From the moment they were born, Ayla, intensely alert and sensitive, cried and railed about all the ways and wrongs of the world. Indy only ever had one cry, the one that simply wanted to be held.

The Proper Pagan

2012-12-21T10:52:00.002-05:00

Backyard, North Carolina, Winter Solstice. Long after dawn.

Today I wake to Solstice light and the sad truth that I was raised too Christian to make a proper pagan. I would have liked to rise at 3:11 as the Finger of God touched Jupiter (or something), lit a fire, smudged sage, and welcomed in the new era that all the spiritually-inclined people I follow on twitter are talking about. I would have liked to plan a ceremony, done sun salutations, written all my sorrows down on paper, burned them in the light of the first rays of sun, scattered the ashes of every disappointment into the green soft earth of Carolina, where the trees and flowers would have chewed them into food to spark new life. I would have liked to have done all that, but instead I slept too late when I knew I should wake early to beat the rush to the grocery store. Then I pinned a lot of pictures of beautiful things to Pinterest while drinking coffee out of a white mug I bought because Oprah suggested it might be classy. To spark up some fun, I burst in on Ayla, happily playing with her horses in her newly cleaned room, crouching like a linebacker with my fingers clenched like a super villian's and roaring "CHRISTMAS! CHRISTMAS! CHRISTMAAAAAAS!" I scared the dickens out of her, which was frankly good for us both. Last night I tried to meditate in bed, which is never a good idea for me because I just end up sleeping. But I wanted to find some peace in the holiday clamor, the most important package that may not be delivered, the bonus that didn't come. I closed my eyes and exhaled completely, hoping for insight to troubling situations: how to heal this earth, how to twice-bake potatoes, how to make both meaning and rib roast at Christmas. At this point I was still thinking I might wake at 3:11 am to the Finger of God. I can never remember the full mantra, so I repeated it silently the way I hear it: May the long time sun shine upon you, all love surround you, and may the odds be ever in your favor. Not kosher, I know, but I'm a spiritual gypsy and can therefore do as I please. My mantra and deep-breathing gave no insight to my conundrums, but they did bring me a lengthy dream of Jensen Ackles in a Magic Mike-type situation, which really was better for me than anything I knew to ask for.

2012-12-16T16:03:00.000-05:00

Today I want to say that I am overwhelmingly glad to be home with my daughters. We are listening to carols, even though. We are baking cookies, even though. My mind went crazy this morning, bouncing around every direction, rustling up its own fear and anger until some wise part of me said, enough. Enough, and I signed out of all social media. I stopped clicking over to NPR and HuffPo. Enough, enough. The worst has happened, I have shed my tears, that is enough. To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil, writes Jack Gilbert, and to me this is truth. When I write about not succumbing to the madness, I mean not making war in my own soul. Not giving myself over to fear or anger or hate. Not allowing myself to sink into dismay. I believe this is how to heal the world, and so I will do what I can. I will turn myself away, again and again, from anger and despair. I slipped up, of course I did. I have opinions on what should be done, in weak moments I broadcast them but in my heart I knew this was wrong for me. Not wrong for everyone--social change needs its mouthpiece--but wrong for me. If I contributed to your agitation, I am sorry. I do not want to agitate. I want to find the stillness in my soul and stay there. Dwell there, because I can't help anybody by dwelling in sorrow and despair. If I succumb to fear, to anger, to madness, I will only go on to plant that pain in others and who knows what sparks that might ignite? Today I stayed home with my daughters. Ayla is sick and sleeping on the couch, Indy is bright-eyed in the kitchen, in my apron strings, hugging me close. The trees are lit, the fire burns, the sorrow is deep but so too is this pleasure. Today we love each other and take joy in our lives. Tomorrow I will do my Christmas shopping and be grateful for my life and allow whatever joy might come.

Even though.

*Thanks again to Elizabeth Aquino for posting the Jack Gilbert poem.

Strange December

2012-12-14T09:45:00.000-05:00

At dawn I drove the girls to school through a landscape covered in thick white frost. Everything still and glistening. The grass here remains green, and the kudzu, and there are green leaves on two trees in my backyard. It is a strange December. I don't know this place where I am. The bare winter woods, the mild afternoons, the humidity gathered every morning on my windows. I feel dull about Christmas and don't know what to blame--my total lack of shopping, our new home here in the semi-south, an artistic holdout between the deeper dixies of Georgia below and Virginia above. I haven't seen my husband since approximately December 5th and I miss him, and I'm so proud of him, and I'm just floating along. Brevard suffers a depressing lack of Christmas lights, almost nobody has bothered. Myself included. It had occurred to me the night before, as I sat ensconced in a knit blanket before my two lit trees and the Christmas special of Downton Abbey, that it's up to me to create Christmas this year, for the first time in my life. I can't arrive at my mother's or sister's house and find Christmas achieved (and it is an achievement, women know this) as I always have in the past. I have to achieve it myself. I dropped the girls at school and drove home as the sun hit the frosted hills around me, a dazzling winter white glittering in the near distance. It felt good to breath in the cold air. Inside, I sat by the living room window and watched the sun illumine spider webs still spinning in the trees and I thought about rib roasts and wine cakes and wondered what the hell I was going to do.

Then, distraction: a youtube video of Jimmy Fallon brings back a memory of summer. It was July, we were moving across the country. I was in the van with my children, alone with them as I would be for the next two months. We had stopped for gas in Overland Park, Kansas. Carly Rae Jeppsen was playing on the radio, it was our first day of driving. Evening was coming on, we were already road weary, we were shooting through the Midwest in search of St. Louis, in search of a new home. I was happy as I always am in a car headed somewhere new. Before I knew all the wonderful things Brevard held waiting for us, before I started saying "girl" and "y'all" and "for a hot minute" like a loathsome poseur, the maps app on my phone took us on a detour through a neighborhood and we rolled all the windows down and danced in our seats. It was free slurpee day at the 7-11 we gassed up at and we sucked down our circus-colored drinks and smiled as the snowy sugar soothed our aching bones. We rounded a corner and a hideous bug, a flying spider with a lobster shell, shot through the open window and Ayla began to scream. iPhone, Slurpee, steering wheel--which to release? "Kill it, Indy! Kill it! Take off your shoe and kill it!" I yelled. Screaming, Indy did. This girl who tells me she isn't brave beat the monster to death with the back of her sparkly jelly. The colossal skies of the west were still above me. It is amazing how much your life can change and still be exactly the same. In minutes we were back on the highway, speeding east across a curved and welcoming land. Before you came into my life I missed you so bad, I missed you so, so bad.