5/5: no. 7

Posted on June 10, 2014 by thisbendablelife

I am accumulating houseplants and pets. This makes me suspicious. This is a transformation, a direct contradiction of the bylaws of the committee of Me.

Across the windowsill above the sink, they’ve started to line up — the coleus she planted in preschool, barely kept alive for two years. A strawberry plant gifted from family. Lemon balm spontaneously added to the cart at Trader Joe’s two days ago, in a fit of nostalgia. A hen-and-chick pulled by the kid from a crumbling curb-side planting in San Francisco, toted home in her suitcase. Basil. Philodendron.

What is happening? My best guess: the experiment is working. When we yanked the pull string on the dervish of our Big Move, the objective was simplification. Slow down, trim away the crushing demands we’d built into our lives. Require less.

Make Space.

Space to breathe. Space to see. Space to pause. Space to find the horizon, to think, to stretch out our arms and welcome the new. Welcome the mess of life. Welcome each other in again.

When I’m very quiet, I can see that our life has loosened at the edges, widened its corners. There are tentative signs that we’ve got sustenance to spare. It’s possible that our cups are now more full than empty and we’re ready to share.

Maybe I can take care of a houseplant. And some chickens. Maybe I’ve found the space.

5/5 Creative Challenge: no. 6

Posted on June 9, 2014 by thisbendablelife

(I guess I like photos of ice cream.)

Somehow, today came out even. She sang “Three Little Birds” while we made our beds, after a long undercover snuggle-up. I made a list of dinners for the week. I drank my coffee warm and the egg yolks came out medium-soft and she ate everything on her plate. I did not take personally her thrashing protestations over going with me to the grocery store.

I did forget to make the sushi rice and nearly forgot ballet lessons and that blue laundry basket is still sitting by back door, full. Which brings to mind yesterday’s photo of the fox caught in his cottage under a laundry landslide … there is a lot of laundry. Laundry and ice cream.

I spent my earning hours wisely, clickety clicking my way through an assignment, efficient. Every now and then, I get a project that gladdens me. That surprises me in its organized and clear direction, its ease.

Just now, I can hear the pained tones of a Mary Poppins audiobook drifting from the treehouse windows. Across the counter, soft shine of Pyrex bowls, upside down and drying. A tiny pot of lemon balm in the window. (It used to grow like a weed in my childhood backyard, that and mint. I would pick them both in bunches and tie the stems with twine, hang them upside-down in my dusty playhouse to dry. Pretending to be an herbalist witch, mason jars filled with water from the hose, making murky teas.)

A stack of receipts and paper scraps tallies everything we owe to friends, a nasty little snowball of small, incidental, but personal IOUs. I am forgetful when it comes to three things: listening to voicemail, paying people back, thank you notes. Anything that involves phone calls or stamps. A lifelong wicked splinter in my personal integrity.

Turns out, she can blow a party noisemaker with her nose.

5/5 Creative Challenge: no. 5

Posted on June 8, 2014 by thisbendablelife

It’s very quiet. The house hums softly–refrigerator, cat purr, the spouse pacing through the house to check the chickens in the box in the laundry room, lock the front door, look for his phone. It’s dark and time for bed. I tucked her in with sticky, unbrushed hair but managed to wash the mud from her feet. Now she’s loose-limbed and warm to the touch, deep asleep.

All day the light shifted between sickly orange to clear and bright. Uneasiness, everywhere. It’s hotter than it should be and the fitful breezes smell like smoke. The city shut off the surface water supply, everyone is on well water for now. Six thousand acres burned. We’ll sleep with the windows closed.

5/5 Creative Challenge: no. 4

Posted on June 7, 2014 by thisbendablelife

It started out a perfectly clear day. Mama, this is like a summer day out of storybook. Everyone is smiling … She correctly used the word “dappled” to describe the light through the oak trees.

The man dug a trench and laid cinderblocks, chicken coop finally happening. It’s a good thing, since The Girls are really too big for their box and yesterday I heard a bona fide cluck.

Meantime, a spark flew. An ember got loose. Over 300 acres are burning just a few miles outside of town, and neighborhoods are evacuated. A plume rose in the distance, a dark purple column billowing above our junipers. The sun was a red circle, everything bathed in pinkish orange light. Sunset light at two o’clock in the afternoon.

The children ran free in the backyard, hooking elbows to spin in circles and sing. I drank four or five glasses of really great wine with my sister-in-law. We watched Chris Hadfield singing in a tin can and the dog lazed, chewing on clumps of grass.

And all the while, shadows were too high in contrast, everything tinged in sepia. I thought about The Road. The city turned off the surface water supply. Just a precaution.

5/5 Creative Challenge: no. 3

Posted on June 6, 2014 by thisbendablelife

And that was it. Closing ceremonies, tears, picnic surrounded by wildflower meadows, fish pond, a surprise gelato cart, picnic blankets pulled together under a shade tree, funny muddy kids, and our good, good people. Our new people. We love our people, and what a comfort to know we’ll return to them in September. Already, we’re plotting sleepovers and cocktail nights, meetups at the river, and more. God, I love summer.

The main thing is, I don’t have to pack a lunchbox for 79 days.
The main thing is, we can sleep as long as want, wake up to cat attacks, full sun, lawnmowers growling, the sprinklers already off for the day, grass still misted, warm breeze pushing in the curtains.
The main thing is, we did it–another year down, this one especially fretful, at first, until we found our place and our thriving and our new friends.
The main thing is, nothing but salad for dinner.
The main thing is, we have a sweet, gold Westfalia that needs to be washed, vacuumed out, started up, and stocked. (I remember once my brother inherited an ancient shell of a car that’d been stored in our grandparents’ pole barn, and when he started the engine, dozens of acorns blasted out of the tailpipe in a cloud of blue smoke — precious squirrel cache annihilated just like that.)
The main thing is, despite a niggling list of freelance assignments piling ever higher (thank you, thank you, friends and universe), she’s old enough to disappear inside chapter books while I earn.
The main thing is, hammock time.
The main thing is, school is out, summer is in, we have chickens in our laundry room, and the family is coming over to swing hammers and sling lemonade, Coop or Bust.

5/5 Creative Challenge: no. 2

Posted on June 5, 2014 by thisbendablelife

Mama, can you stay right in this aisle? she asks worriedly, knobby knees and legs dangling over the edge of the library chair. Of course, I reassure. She tucks her chin down and is swept away by Ellen Tebbits’ difficulties with woolen underwear. I scan the shelves and once again slide out The Mysteries of Edward Tulane, skim, nod yes.This will be our next out-loud book.

My favorite day is library day. We know the shelves so well, make a beeline for our favorite sections, and in minutes our cloth grocery bag is stuffed with pounds of books. At home, we heave the bag onto the dining table and feel rich. We snuggle under a blanket feet-to-feet, or wiggle into the hammock.

She’ll cry out with delight or surprise at a plot twist and recount it for me. I admire this. Unlike her, I turn into a growling beast at the slightest hint of libris interruptus and I will not break the sanctity of the storyspace by “telling you what it’s about.” She, on the other hand, wants to share like a gossip. I encourage this with murmurs and exclamations. Oh? … Mmmm … I think I remember that bit …

I hope fervently that she’ll always want to share remarkable events, surprises, slights, questions. So far, she does the same with playground news. Sometimes she comes home troubled. I don’t think I should tell you, mama … but I need to tell you …

So we talk about honesty, and being a good friend, and how sometimes someone will ask you to keep a secret in your heart like keeping a yucky, spoiled apple in your pocket. If a secret makes you feel bad, or worried, or scared, your trusted grownups will help you. We talk about Ralph S. Mouse’s confession of the wrecked motorcycle, and being forgiven. Patrick’s betrayal of the secret Indian and cupboard, and Omri’s wrath. What it must feel like to hide behind a curtain as the powerful Oz, when you’re only a humbug.

We cleared out her cubby today, fuzzy slippers and spare mittens hauled home, the back corners swept clean of small treasure debris — stones, leaf skeletons, bits of colored beeswax, bottlecaps. She takes me to her desk, tells me she’ll miss it. In twenty-four hours this magical, trying, testing, thriving year will arrive at summer intermission. Strawberry lemonade, cooing doves, the sulphur of early fireworks, flipping our pillows to the cool side.

We walk underneath the maples. Oh, I love the way this kind of tree makes the light glow … We stop for $1 ice cream cones and she makes me eat most of hers. Too sweet. She likes the cone part best.

5/5 Creative Challenge: no. 1

Posted on June 4, 2014 by thisbendablelife

I’m participating in a creative challenge by the new-to-me and very lovely writer/artist Christina Rosalie. There’s only one thing to do, to soothe the itch in my fingers that begs me back to the writing board every day — write. This will be a fun kickstart. And maybe it will finally force me to store my 3,233 photos somewhere other then my phone, for the love of god.

The 5/5 Creative Challenge has two pieces: five snapshots that represent your day, five minutes of writing words that represent your day. You can find more detail and read about Christina’s recently PDX-transplanted family on her blog. Meantime, here’s my first go …

She always asks me back for one more hug. Mama, mama, huggie. She still says that word, even now at seven-almost-eight. (She still loves her own freckles, still eats noodles with her fingers.) I escape her bedtime room, leaving daddy on the floor in the dark to talk her into dozing. Out here, the dishwasher is shushing and through the patio door I can see a stray fork on the picnic table, forgotten when we cleared dinner. It’s warm enough to eat outside, most nights, now.The juniper are stamped out of the dusk sky. I keep thinking, in two days it will be summer vacation and we will wake up at 9:00 and sometimes eat popsicles for breakfast. In front of me are packets of wildflower seeds, waiting. For mulch, for me.

Our first CSA bounty arrived from the valley, smelling of mud and honesty: small potatoes, carrots, lettuce, kale, garlic, a massive onion, a little treasure box filled with dark red strawberry gems that we sliced, sluiced with cream, and ate immediately.

By the kitchen door is the blue laundry basket piled carelessly with towels and the crumpled picnic blanket from our weekend day at the river, with friends from out town. I miss them. I miss their girls and the full, right feeling of a flock of children wandering through my house, someone needs to pee, someone is hungry, someone won’t eat that, someone is bored. I love all of that delightful mess, like a mother hen. The oldest made us meringues from scratch and they tasted like toasted marshmallows. Which reminds me, somewhere we have weird vanilla taffy candies from Chinatown. It’s 9:49, see. This is when I scrounge the back corners of the pantry for hidden sweets and wonder if he’s fallen asleep in there, on her floor, again. The cat (the fat one) scratches on the glass to be let in for the night.

This is how I deal.

Posted on July 9, 2013 by thisbendablelife

News today. Hard news from a dear friend, and what can I do except … love. I’m sitting in one of my favorite spots in town, with a complementary bowl of gazpacho at my right hand, and a mason jar full of cold-extract coffee to the left. There’s sad-hopeful music streaming, and outside it’s all sun and blue. There’s a river sliding by, 90 degrees in the forecast, and white slashes of snow still on the distant peaks. Everything is lovely. And hard. The world is not nice or beautiful or fair. It isn’t.

But it is. It’s just … glorious and sad. Shake your fists at it, and it smiles gently. Carry on. Order a Slip n’ Slide, make quinoa salad, read a book that makes you believe that good things can happen.

We can teach children to be kind and respectful. We can be generous. We can ask for forgiveness, and (best and most magical of all) we can grant it. We can ask someone how they are, and mean it. No — how are you, really?

We can be moved by David Foster Wallace’s assertion that This is Water — and we can think about why, if he knew this, he hung himself in his backyard, leaving a note and his unfinished novel for his wife to find, after she’d cut him down. And then we can thank him for the wisdom he left despite the pain he couldn’t overcome.

This morning I had a disagreement with my child about naked mole rats. Yeah, I did. She declared them “cute.” I declared them the exact opposite of cute, they’re not cute, how could she say they’re cute? “They are the cutest things in the world, mama. I feel sorry for them and I think they are CUTE.” Agree to disagree. Exchange eyerolls and smiles with the spouse, the dry wit born of parenting.

There’s something in here about perfect imperfection. Ugliness inside beauty marked with flaws. I could dig out an analogy around the ideal design of a veiny, fleshy, naked rodent with huge, yellow teeth and squinty eyes crawling along on the same planet as whiskery teddy bear hamsters and rosy-cheeked human babies, and truly good people with truly hard circumstances.

I’ve faced a lot of ugly in my life so far, in varying degrees. I’ve had my tongue slashed with bitter disappointment. Shockwaves have rattled my chest. I’ve been tossed into the darkest slot canyons of the heart. I’ve skinned my fingertips, crawling out.

There is a deep, clear sweetness in the aftermath. We can soften. We are so fortunate — our arms are built just so, right and left coming together, forearm over forearm, palms up. A cradle beneath a sky of loving eyes.

My first word was “gentle.” Let us be so.

Finding summer.

Posted on July 3, 2013 by thisbendablelife

I’d entirely forgotten these things.

Hammocks. Popsicle-sticky wrists. Sun hats and the red, sweaty band across your forehead, later.

Watermelon. Lemonade with crushed ice. Nothing but cheese and crackers for dinner.

Grasshopper chirring and the hiss of a breeze in high branches, teasing. Somnolent wind chimes in the neighbor’s yard.

The smell of wet pavement in the sun. The rippled edge of book pages turned by soggy fingertips.

Struggling and twisting into damp swimsuit straps. Cherry pits in the grass.

Singing into the electric fan – every word vibrato (Mister Roboto).

Flipping the pillow to the cool side. Again. Citronella candles. Night noises through window screens.

It’s been a long time since I stepped both feet into summer. So glad to be here.

A month. Then two.

Posted on June 27, 2013 by thisbendablelife

Hi, you. It’s been awhile.

In a month, seventeen boxes of books get unpacked.

A room filled to the ceiling with boxes and furniture is transformed into a home office/guest space.

A yard pushes up surprises: columbine, lily of the valley, forget-me-not, day lilies, painted daisies, hosta, daphne. Wild roses and strawberries.

The eight-months-missed touchstones of home emerge from boxes and find new nooks. Our artifacts. Our us, in objects. The small stone jaguar from the Yucatan. The sonogram. The flower pot decorated with buttons and crayon scrawls. Grammy’s desk.

The typewriter collection comes out of storage for the very first time. (Platen count: nine.)

Paid work gets tackled every day. Kindergarten races toward the finish line. We meet the sweet neighbors who live with their 90-year-old mother named Violet. The first water bill arrives (xeriscaping and water barrels are in our future). I cut an inch off of my own hair. Mainly to avoid auditioning curly-hair stylists. Two bummers about moving: new dentists and new stylists.

The kid writes a song about fleas on a dog’s knees that get blown away by a breeze onto the trees–and sings it to me whilst strumming our out-of-tune ukulele on Mother’s Day.
~~
In two months, a fence gets half built. There are 260 linear feet to cover, in total. Half is good.

I realize it’s my first summer without a daily office job since the kid was born. Longer than that. I buy a wading pool and a stack of bubble wands and make a huge list of fun-but-educational games and at-home science experiments for an enriched summer experience and … yeah. I know. It will be popsicles and mayhem.

I help launch a family dream.

Our coffee ritual transitions from warm to iced–we unpack the espresso machine and the cold brew kit. The fence continues; the neighbor offers beer and sends her kid out to help.

We take our picnicking skills for a test run, sandwiches and potato salad and gritty sand in the wrong places. Crawdads. Lifejackets. Sunscreen protests. Aloe vera. Inexplicably, my head is too big for my old sunhat. Can an adult outgrow a sunhat? The lake’s water is rimmed in a wide band of bright yellow, rocking in the small, lapping waves. It’s pollen from the pines, blown across the water and pooling at the edges. I don’t realize how vibrant and beautiful and strange it is until I look at the photos, later.

We glance at the boxes still stacked against the dining room wall. We studiously ignore the Chaos Pit otherwise known as our garage. The (now gutted) second bathroom fades to a vague future dream and we forget what it’s like to have a bathtub. Almost.

The kid’s kindergarten graduation ceremony happens. I don’t cry.

The next morning, I drop her off for the last day. Through the classroom window, I see her toeing off her velcro sneakers and sliding on her indoor slippers–a preschool routine for four whole years. Goodbye, soft-footed mornings. I cry in the parking lot.

We think about adopting a kitten. We discuss our chicken coop dreams, sketch plans for a treehouse, talk greenhouse strategies. We stare at the mistletoe infection in our junipers and mumble hopeful predictions and go inside.

I finally have lunch with a new friend.

We welcome a hamster into the mix.

A 34-year friendship is shored up with a visit. I make her look at mountains every single day. I make her break her cleanse with beer and a cheese plate. (I once force-fed her an olive. We were eight. A story for another time.)

Dance recital rehearsals are incessant. They are a flock of little girls, skinny and pudgy, knock-kneed and swaybacked, awkward and graceful. They match only by merit of their identical pink leotards and ballet slippers, gauzy skirts above playground-bruised shins. They are certain of their own beauty.

We count nine months since we hightailed it to our new life. It is vibrant and beautiful and strange. Knock-kneed and soft-footed. Awkward and certain. Stories unpacked. Pushing up surprises. Wide open.

This Bendable Life

Category Archives: Writing practice