TEST POST
Posted on | May 12, 2010 | No Comments
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Cras sed leo id orci fermentum pretium sollicitudin eu felis. Integer pharetra iaculis nunc, non placerat orci sagittis et. Donec adipiscing elementum ligula id iaculis. Morbi a tellus ut lectus porttitor hendrerit. Duis non nunc et nisi egestas dictum vestibulum ullamcorper lacus. Vestibulum eu dui non erat adipiscing luctus a vitae lacus. Quisque varius placerat est, in euismod nisi dapibus ac. Phasellus fringilla, lorem ac consectetur fermentum, nisl nibh varius nisi, vitae adipiscing nulla ligula id sapien. Donec tristique felis ac neque hendrerit ut malesuada leo vehicula. Morbi ante eros, blandit ac posuere eget, suscipit sit amet dolor. Etiam pharetra, nisi eget dictum fermentum, elit eros consequat augue, nec laoreet sapien orci a metus. Nam magna velit, ultrices a auctor ac, lobortis a velit. Nullam a lectus ut mauris ornare lacinia.
Live Blogging Thursday
Posted on | July 30, 2009 | 15 Comments
Hi Thursday. I’ve been off in my own world lately, doing things. One of the things I have been doing is trying to sort out some issues with my blog and the funky charset issues that occurred with an upgrade to a newer version of Wordpress. As a result I’ve been going through my archives, and holy moly I’ve been blogging a while. This is the 901 post on this blog. Crazy, right?
Anyway, what I realized is that I love reading my older posts that just capture whatever we were doing that day, right in the moment. Maybe they are banal moments, but they are ours and I like the record. I like seeing where we were, and where we are now, and lately I haven’t been doing nearly enough of that here.
So. Today. LIVE BLOGGING. I’m going to update this post a bunch throughout the day as Bean and Sprout and I gallivant and get ourselves into situations. I would LOVE for you to join in and live blog your day too. Leave a comment with a link to your post if you do.
9:32 A.M.:
This is what our morning looks like often. The boys hanging out together doing things. Sprout has just started rolling over back to tummy (he’s been doing tummy to back for a while) and with this whole new range of mobility he is tearing things up! Bean likes the company.
Breakfast. This is a classic for me: toss two pieces of bread with ample butter into a pan. Crack two eggs on top, any old place. Cook the whole mess. Eat. The toast is dreamy. Buttery and crisp. The eggs are hard, which I like. Also a latte.
Now we are off to carve sticks and build fairy houses in the back yard while Sprout naps.
1:20 P.M. Harder than I thought to keep up with our active family & actually post pictures!
From the morning fairy house making: Bean was very serious about using the pocket knife. He sharpened the ends of sticks to poke into the moss to build the structure. We gathered small stones and shells and field flowers. When you stop to look, even the most humble clover astounds.
When we came indoors we had slice after slice of cantaloupe and then went for an impromptu raspberry picking adventure with DH. Bean raced up and down the rows, eating more berries certainly than he picked. Sprout sampled some too, and didn’t seem to have any complaints. I am picturing some type of raspberry cobbler for dessert tonight.
Now Bean is napping and Sprout and I are hanging out in the back yard. The end of summer crickets have begun their ruckus, even though it has only felt like summer for the past week. We’ve had so much rain, these days of warm and gold have been balm to our damp spirits.
Next up: exercise, a swim at the pond, and making dessert.
How has your Thursday been treating you?
3:25 P.M. We just had the best swim. I am slowly but surely teaching Bean to swim in the neighbor’s pond. I didn’t bring the camera–one too many things to haul! But he was great and giggly and super cute. He put his head under and kicked gorgeously and tried many times to push off from the side and paddle to me. He’ll be swimming by the end of the summer, I think.
Where is everyone today?
10:39 P.M. It was a perfect day. Not every day turns out like this, but I am happy that this was the day I picked to keep my camera close at hand and record moments.
After our swim at the pond DH and I worked out, Sprout watched and Bean painted.
Then Bean and Sprout did some chilling out with books.
Then dinner. Pasta with fresh basil, oregano, chives, tomatoes, olives, and sausage.
And the best raspberry cobbler ever. EVER. (so easy to make: 1 c. flour + 1c. whipped cream folded together with 4 tsp. sugar for the crust–apply in lumps over 2 pints raspberries w/ 1/4-1/2c. sugar and 4tbs butter cut into small pieces. Bake at 375 for 45 minutes.) DIVINE.
I loved reading the comments today. There is something so fascinating to me about the minutia of life. I am really looking forward to some of you doing some live blogging too. A peak into your world as it unfolds.
Evidence
Posted on | July 26, 2009 | 11 Comments
I am running hard. It’s my first run alone without boys, and I feel like I am flying. Then almost as a reflex, my muscles contract, gravity pulling at my shinbones.
I’ve seen it, just, out of the corner of my eye. I stop, loop back.
On the side of the road, a hermit thrush among the pebbles, the tall roadside grass bending down around it, shade dappling its feathers. Its eyes are closed, two dark curved marks among the white down of it head, its life a parenthesis between them.
I squat. My hips are flexible and loose from running hard in the heat. My knees are by my cheeks. My muscles tingling with sudden stillness.
I reach out with a single finger to touch bird’s flecked chest. I can feel my pulse beating in my fingertip as I press it against the bird’s soft down. It is already stiff, its claws drawn up, wings folded close. Only its neck, slightly askew, reveals how it might have died: a sudden thud of softly feathered bones and flesh against a windshield glass. A pickup truck maybe, the farmer’s son driving fast, gravel spitting up behind his tires.
I am breathing hard and the backs of my knees are slippery with sweat, but for a hundred minutes, or maybe it is only one, I cannot take my eyes of the bird.
I’ve heard the hermit thrushes calling in the woods. Theirs is a song that makes my heart tremble, though I can’t say why. Now here on the road its slender throat rests among the bits of gravel that are also beautiful when I look: sharp shards of quartz and other stones I do not know the names of.
I swallow hard and taste salt. All the way home I notice how things die.
Clover cut by the a mower’s blade, each tiny cluster of three leaves wilted now in the heat, bunched, scraggly, drying to a paler green.
The sleek shimmery S of a snake, pressed flat into the drying mud, its scales like scalloped plates, the road stained darkly with its sticky blood.
A cluster of dead leaves on the sassafras tree where a twig has ripped partway off from the branch The leaves are brittle and brown. They curl inward like a frail fist.
They hold secrets, these dying things.
Still panting hard I walk the steep incline of our drive and duck into the coop where the air is alive with the frantic fluttering of a small housefinch caught between the window and the wire mesh screen. I thought I’d seen something dart in before me, a small figment of air and shadow. I know they come all day for the cracked corn we feed the hens, swooping in through the door, then out, but my arrival sent it fluttering panicked to the window.
I wait a moment. Wait for its fluttering to become still. The air is pungent and intense with scent of ammonia and feces. Dust motes fall in golden angles towards the floor. The bird stops thrashing and crouches in the corner between the glass and the wire mesh.
I reach for it with a quivery hand. It tries to fly. Its wings spread, its feathers brown and utterly perfect, each one layered upon the next to make a thing of flight. Its wings become tangled in the mesh, the wire holes almost big enough for it to slip through. For a few brief seconds we struggle. Then I clutch it in my palm, carry it to the door and let it go.
(My father died seven years ago today.)
UPDATED to add: It wasn’t until after I’d written this post that I realized it was the day my father died. It’s not about loss, so much as it about wonder. In this culture we always think of death as sad, but that strikes me as so one dimensional. It’s so much bigger, and sometimes sad doesn’t describe it at all. Sometimes it’s about shape shifting. About things beginning, changing. After exhaling we inhale after all. There is more to us than this, I think. More to the thrush’s song, suddenly silent. Along the road I also found the empty blue shells of robin eggs, long empty. Those birds have already begun to fly.
What do you think about death? What does it mean to you?
16
Posted on | July 22, 2009 | 16 Comments
I was 16, obsessed with Kate Moss, had a novice eating disorder, was fixated on boys, and still a kid in a small secret pocket compartment of my heart. I read Dostoyevsky and Dante for pleasure, climbed trees, and was very concerned with the fate of the world.
I listened to Nirvana, tried not to eat, wore baggy jeans and black bodysuits, and I hated my mother because she deferred to my father on everything that ever had anything to do with me. I wanted secretly to be a runway model. I kept a sketch book. I thought the 1992 Calvin Klein ad campaign was the epitome of romance.
My father was the smartest man I had ever known and I adored discussing philosophy and religion with him, which often occurred after I’d get back from a date. I’d perch on the couch in a circle of yellow lamplight, and we’d talk, sometimes for hours, about reincarnation and karma and the fate of the gods.
He was also one of the most socially clueless men I have ever known, and had no idea how to parent a teenage girl. Aside from the good conversations, he responded to almost every one of my requests to do normal social teenage things with a “no.” I had a 10:30 curfew, and had to spend hours doing yard work in order to earn social time with my friends. He was the first person I ever said “fuck you” too.
I paid for nearly all of my clothes and anything deemed frivolous myself. I learned how to lie. I rode with boys who drove too fast and when I said I was one place, I was often somewhere else entirely.
My best friend (who took those pictures of my boyfriend and me with the rose) and I spent a lot of time together and it is because of her, and because of her mom I survived my life then. We plastered our walls with pictures from Vogue, isten to Metalica, Depeche Mode, Pearl Jam, and strangely, Enya. We drove around fast with the windows down, went to the beach, and talked every night on the phone.
I loved being the center of attention, but was too awkward and earnest to really pull it off. I was fascinated with the attention that I got from boys, but I often toyed with them. I liked boys who were dangerous or daring, or at the very least, interesting. I broke up with the ones who stayed the same for too long.
I was a lifeguard, and a swim instructor. I had a red bathing suit and a dark tan. I played chess for hours in smoky coffeehouses, and went skinny-dipping in one of my boyfriend’s parents hot tub. I wore black ripped fishnets under cutoff shorts when my parents weren’t watching, tried cloves, tried tequila.
I imagined running away. I imagined being famous. I imagined I was important enough to change the world. I made a sculpture of my head out of clay. I loved to draw. I learned to grill steak for my most serious boyfriend that year (he always wore a baseball hat and loved watching sports on TV.) I went to the Renaissance fair. I briefly flirted with the very Goth boyfriend of one of my good friends, a flirtation that lasted until he bit me, hard, on the neck at a party. I had a 4.0. I was as much a contradiction as possible. I was 16.
I changed a lot from 16 to 18. When I was 18 I fell in love, in Germany at a youth conference. It was really love, as wild and heart stopping and carefree as only young love can be. I was sure we would be together forever. We are still friends. He just got married last month.
I absolutely adored reading about you as teenagers. And now I’m curious: what was it like for you when you fell in love for the very first time? I’ll post more on this too.
Monday’s inspiration + a question
Posted on | July 20, 2009 | 22 Comments
Hi Monday. It’s briefly sunny and everything seems to be yelling about it: finches and woodpeckers and chickens. In the honeysuckle at the front of the house, hummingbirds.
Today: a run, reading a story or two, taking Sprout for his 5 month check up*, transplanting a peony bush, and quite possibly some baking. Also writing. Always, always that.
Here are a few links I found this weekend that I am crushing on:
These photos of the Holland Flower Auction that almost make me want to weep. I’d give a lot for an armful of roses right now, or tulips.
This Joy + Ride. A gorgeous little journal with interviews featuring artists and writers and all kinds of delight.
And this delightfully terse blog with beautiful photos.
(* An update to come on my beautiful, sweet Sprout.)
***
Now an question for you (that will help me enormously on a story I’m writing): What were you like as a teenager? If you share, I will. And maybe I’ll even post a pic or two.
And still to persist stubbornly
Posted on | July 18, 2009 | 10 Comments
These are days of thunder, of quivering rain-soaked leaves, of things starting out one way and ending another. Expectations are for fools: the bright shiny bits of tinfoil that trick the crows with their dark feathers and bright eyes to plummet towards the ground.
We see ten crows, a murder, when we go for a run. They keep swooping back and forth across the road; wings wide and black like sudden shadows lifting free from the foliage, everything so green it almost aches.
The damp air is sweet with the fragrance of bloom and fruit. Raspberries are ripe now, and blackcaps along the fences. When we’re through with running we stop to eat them, the juice making our fingers purple and stained.
The air is so humid it feels like we are drinking water as we breathe, our skin slick and salty, feet skimming the gravel. Since we started running at the beginning of the summer we’ve made progress, minutes off from our first time, and every day, nearly, we’re there together running the uneven terrain of hills and dirt road, breathing hard, sometimes quiet, sometimes telling each other little things.
Running has been the one thing that has held this summer. Even when everything else is at a loss: words, money, time, we’ve had running. Even when things have been endless: rain, worry, self doubt, there has been blood thrumming through the capillaries in our lungs, our rib bones rising and falling hard like the hulls of little boats pitching on a storm tossed sea.
It is something to run everyday without expectation. To just go, run, and gradually mark a difference. I am trying to learn this: to expect nothing and persist.
To wipe sticky cheeks, to weep, to tell stories, kiss scraped knees, make plum tarts, shuck peas, gather words, gather four leaf clovers, gather hope, drink lemonade, drink coffee, put words on the page, hit the delete key, hit the wall, dig in the dirt, remember, recycle, rinse the plates, stay up late, write, write, write.
Some days it takes everything just to show up for the day. To get out of bed after a night that turned into a wind-whipped laundry line of hours.
I’ll be honest. Some mornings I wake up wanting to put my fist through a wall. There are mornings when I hate the sound of my children and the crows in the trees. Mornings where my thoughts are black and jagged and coffee seems like a weak substitute for all the hours unslept and torn into fragments by the urgent primal demands of my baby and my boy.
And its on those days that running matters most. That time on the road has become the footing that makes it possible to go forwards in my life. And look! I can run faster than I ever have.
Some days it is only the only thing saves me: if I can run, I can write. If I can write, I can live. If I can live, I can mother.
It is the hardest thing, this: to turn towards a new day with empty palms, ready to let it be whatever it is, and still to persist stubbornly.
Thunder cupcakes
Posted on | July 16, 2009 | 9 Comments
Make these. They are the perfect accompaniment for thunderstorms, especially when made and eaten with little boys.
* 1 8-ounce package cream cheese
* 1 large egg
* 2 tablespoons sugar
* 1/2 teaspoon salt
* 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
* 1/4 cup mini semisweet chocolate chips
* 1 cup all purpose flour
* 3 tablespoons sifted unsweetened cocoa powder
* 3/4 teaspoon baking powder
* 1/2 teaspoon coarse kosher salt
* 1/8 teaspoon baking soda
* 3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar
* 1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature
* 2 large eggs
* 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
* 3 oz bittersweet chocolate, chopped, melted, warm
* 1/2 cup whole milk
Beat cream cheese in medium bowl. Add egg, sugar, salt, and vanilla and beat until almost smooth. Fold in chocolate chips (I was generous with these!)
Preheat oven to 350°F. Line standard muffin pan with 12 paper liners. Mix wet ingredients together then add dry. Fill cups 1/3 full. Then plunk a heaping spoonful of the cream cheese + chocolate chip mixture into the middle of each cup.
Bake cupcakes until toothpick inserted into center comes out clean, about 20 minutes. Cool in the pan, then in the fridge~ I think these cupcakes actually taste better cold than warm…though some might beg to differ.
* Recipe originally from here.
Also, I am just loving these beautiful photographs.
Inspired by:
Posted on | July 15, 2009 | 12 Comments
Hi. Wednesday. There was sun today for the first time, literally, in weeks. Tell me this, Internets, is it sunny where you are? And if so, is it often? I’m starting to get itchy feet. Hankering to be somewhere else maybe. Some place with more sun, more… I don’t know. If I were foot loose and fancy free I’d be tempted to do this. I’ve always wanted to write a story about big rig drivers. Cool, right?
Really though: do you love where you live? Tell me about it!
Also today: lots of revising and forward progress. Writing is a crazy making profession for sure. So much terror and doubt is there, every day, waiting in the margins, in the click of the space bar. During breaks today I was inspired by her beautiful aesthetic. And also this breathtaking art.
This super cool journal also caught my eye today. I love when image and story and news and ideas collide. It’s how it’s like inside my head.
Speaking of things that get inside my head–I loved reading this story in particular because it reminded me somehow very much of The Year of Silence by Kevin Brockmeier in the Best American, which was originally published here. I wish I could find a link for you to read it online–because then you’d see what I mean about these two pieces connecting. This picture in particular, of Sao Paolo stripped of visual pollution is just what I pictured when I imagined a city stripped of sound. It’s serene and calming and yet…I like a mess, which is why I liked how Brockmeier’s little piece ends immensely.
And finally, because I adore lists and am a total sucker for good food, Travelers Lunchbox delighted me so much today. Particularly this list of all foodie lists.
My short list of to die for food off the top of my head: cherry pie, pasta from Mezzaluna, lime gelato in the Piazza della Signoria, affogato, oysters with white wine and garlic butter.
Runners up: root beer floats, hot chocolate from Quebec served in a bowl, majool dates, fresh raspberries, steak frites, unagi sushi, raspberry sorbet, licorice, dark dark chocolate, caramel apples, dry packed scallops, Oh lord, I have started something I cannot stop. What are your top five and your runners up?
Instinct
Posted on | July 14, 2009 | 8 Comments
The chick is a frail collection of feathers and fluff. Its feet are the size of a sparrow’s. Its wings flap uselessly, and among the grasses, it is no higher than the smallest clovers. It frantically follows the goose everywhere. She doesn’t get it. She is harried, and runs. Leaves it cheeping pitifully in the middle of the green lawn and lifts into the air with her huge wings, flapping towards the galvanized tub of water that we fill for her. She plunges in, water falling off her feathers like glass beads.
The chick cries for her, its down growing damp in the dewy grass, but when we take it indoors, offer it the warmth of our hands, food, fresh water, it refuses and cries mournfully and loudly for the goose.
I want desperately to get involved, rescue it, and fix whatever is wrong. I also want desperately to do away with the entire thing. The chick. The goose. The whole business was a disaster from the start. Something I didn’t think through or consider when I let the broody goose sit on stolen eggs, and now here we are.
The chick is unbearably loud with its cheeping. You can hear it through the closed windows. The goose is louder. All morning it’s a back and forth as the tiny little thing tries to follow its mama about. She knows it is her baby, maybe. She makes soft throaty noises when its near. She lets it sleep on her back after she’s through with preening. But she steps on it just the same, with her huge orange feet.
Somehow, improbably, it has survived four days. The days seem inconceivably long. It seems impossibly small. I brought it indoors and kept it in a box where it was warm for a while, when I saw that it could no longer follow her about in the rain drenched grass, but it drove me crazy with its pining.
Finally I lured the goose back to the nest with another egg—we had confiscated the others that she stole. And though she doesn’t get how to care for the chick, really, she is a sucker for eggs, going immediately to the nest and plopping chest first onto the soft circle of hay I’ve made. Her instincts only half intact. I get it.
I watch her with empathy and contempt. You stepped on your baby, you stupid thing. I want to scream at her, as for the tenth time I waver, decide to intervene, scoop the chick up, offer it water from a jelly jar lid. But just the same, I reach for her, and stroke her long shaking neck. I know what it feels like to want to just fly away.
A weekend roundup
Posted on | July 12, 2009 | 6 Comments
First off, I very much loved reading about your media habits the past couple of days. I have continued keep a record of what I’ve been consuming media wise, and I think that it’s made me much more conscious and thoughtful about my choices… I’ve decided to keep the record going over at twitter. It seems like the perfect, if not slightly ironic venue for such things.
But before I do, I want to share with you some of my favorite links from the past couple of days:
Firstly, Elizabeth Strout’s essay “English Lesson” in the Washington Post this week is fantastic. She is such an amazing writer to me. Her characters are so real, nuanced, subtle. She deserves every ounce of praise for Olive Kitteridge, which was my favorite book I read last year.
Also, I am giddy with the discovery of the Washington Post’s Summer Reading Issues from years past. I am sure everyone else on the face of the earth has already devoured these stories, but until now they have somehow escaped me. Delight. I cannot wait to read all of them (I have not yet.)
Also, speaking of the Washington Post, if you don’t read Gene Weingarten you should. This piece made me sob when I first read it. This one made me nearly die laughing. Also, because things seem to work this way in my life, his piece this week explores the various glories and follies of tweeting. Ah-hem.
Now, without further ado, some family updates (a.k.a, my camera is fixed people. Prepare yourselves for some seriously photo-heavy posts to come!)
First off, have you met Bob, our rooster? Bob, Internets. Internets, Bob. He is named after this book.
Here is the new batch of girls who have finally figured out how to do the free-range thing, thus saving us more fruitless attempts to catch them whilst thrashing our legs on sharp pine boughs.
And here is newest member of the poultry bunch: the chick that the goose hatched. It’s name name is Twitter. Bean named it. I swear he knows nothing of my current media obsessions.
And because I cannot stop staring at my beautiful boys:
Also yesterday, because it was raining and we were bummed because we were supposed to go to this amazing parade to celebrate the umpteen hundred years of our city’s existence and instead had to stay home to avoid being drenched and bedraggled, we had a dumpling party instead. The four of us. Fancy frozen drinks for everyone and homemade dumplings using this recipe.
While we were frying up the dumplings we had pandora on, set to a Madonna quick mix (which turned out to be the best movin, groovin, bootie shaking tunes ever!) The storm was right overhead with lots of serious thunderclaps. For dessert we made chocolate pudding with fresh strawberries and watched the Tour together on the couch.
What have you been reading, doing, and eating this weekend?