Jul 26 2010

the heart in the moon

This was the moon two nights ago. I was just about to go to bed, had just gone out to the kitchen to get myself some water, when I saw this outside my window:

So I put my shoes on, my pajamas were okay (no neighbors), and I went out to see if I could capture what I saw. This is close, although technically, it’s not a great picture. I didn’t use a tripod, it’s blurry, the moon is blown out. But this shot captured the mood pretty well, and I kind of like it.

I love that the moon is not the same every night, it changes as moods vary, auras shift, different spots are illuminated.

I thought about how love is not the same every night, either.

And about 26 really slow-exposure shots later, I had drawn myself a moonheart. The picture below is exactly the same as the picture above, same placement, same exposure.

Except that I moved my hand in the shape of a heart.

And yes, it is upside down, but here’s the thing: I drew it right side up, and I know that it is a camera-mirror thing, and I could have flipped it in Photoshop. But, the trees were still facing up??? and I couldn’t quite figure that out, which didn’t matter because actually

I loved that even though I had drawn it right side up,
my heart ended up upside down.

Plus I drew a heart using the moon as my pencil.

How cool is that?

Jul 24 2010

the taste of limits

Today it rains. It is hot and it is sunny, and then it is hot and it rains.  A cycle of weather I must live with.

It is has been so hot, for weeks now, that I stay inside. I want to be outside, I want to sweat and dig in my garden and pull the ten million weeds that call my name each time I open my back door. They mock me, these weeds. Point and nod as I walk by, I hear them: bad gardener, lazy girl, indifferent caretaker.

I give them the finger and go back inside.

The best time to weed is just after it rains, roots are easier to pull from soft, wet soil. I should go out there and do that right now.
But I won’t, it is late already, I need to make pizza for dinner, and tomorrow, I have an art show.

But if I could, I would go out there, right now, and start pulling. And when I finally finished, sometime next Tuesday, there would be a mountain of weeds, a foothill of dill, a backache, and a giant sense of accomplishment. Funny how something so simple can make you feel so good.

Next weekend, I am going to my friend’s house so she can teach me how to make pickles. She is 84 and has lived a life filled with extraordinary amounts of pain, both physical and emotional. And yet, she giggles. A lot. One of these days, on a different day, I will tell you her story. But she called me this week and she said, “The cucumbers are early this year, we have to get going on these pickles.” These pickles that I asked her to teach me how to make.

She is housebound, and most likely bored, and if I could, I would go and spend every day with her, so she could teach me all about 84 years worth of living, and how to make pickles and also how to crochet those amazing doilies. But for now, I had to tell her the pickles would have to wait, I have a show this weekend, I cannot go there until next week, when it is August.

I am going to learn to make pickles.

Sugar and spice,

salt and vinegar,

time and life.


Jul 16 2010

the sun and the moon
and the stars

Now is the Moon’s Eyebrow.
When my son was little, we had that book by Cooper Edens.
I have always loved that line.

Another book, The Vanishing Pumpkin by Tony Johnston.
“Please do,” growled the ghoul.
I have always loved that line as well, I used to say it out loud
all the time. People looked at me funny.

And this one, from the same book: In fact, she fairly flew.
This happens when I run, every once in a while.

The Sky Jumps Into Your Shoes When You Take Them Off at Night.
Another book, also by Cooper Edens.

The Caretakers of Wonder. Another one, same author.

Why don’t they write books like that for adults?

Books you can barely find these days, treasures that lie forgotten.

Words change your life, sometimes.
You read them and they imprint themselves on your mind.

Her pupils were two black thorns turned inward.
The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike.

The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham.
A book I have never forgotten.

Lines that speak to the soul in you, written from the soul of
the writer. This connection that keeps humans, human.
Speech.

My cats talk to me, they express their needs, their desires.
But that nuance of words and language, that is for the artists.

Almost, I would rather read Vincent Van Gogh’s letters
than look at his paintings. Almost.

How many combinations are possible, with words?
At some point the human race will start to repeat itself.
It has to, or else invent more words.

But fire speaks the language of us all.

This is not open to interpretation, it is fire.

It has kept us all alive.

Besides, now is the moon’s eyebrow.

::

What’s your favorite line?


Jul 12 2010

four hours

in a car is all it takes to clear my mind. four hours of nothing to do but drive and drive down this endless asphalt ribbon. my hardest decision will be which music to listen to next. four hours of singing, loud, uninhibited singing, along with joni mitchell, bob dylan, cowboy junkies, counting crows, alison krauss. four hours of not caring what people passing me think as i belt out all my favorites, feet tapping, head bobbing, mouth wide.

four hours of trucks and cars and vans and jeeps and buses
and motorcycles, and one helicopter being pulled by a camper.
never saw that before. of watching for hawks and spotting two herons and counting crows as i sing a counting crows song and
then smiling to myself about that. of eating m&m’s and drinking
a coke, which I only ever do on long drives.

four hours not distracted by internet or television or telephones or anyone else’s voice. four hours of looking ahead, not behind, not up, not down, not at everything that needs to be done. four straight hours of straight hard thinking.

four hours of sky and horizon, trees and wire, whizzing by so fast you don’t see it. but it sits there, in your mind’s eye.

four hours of enjoying the ride.

four hours twice within 28.

eight hours in a car, with my thoughts and my music.

and none of those thoughts were of time.


Jul 8 2010

inertia

My garden is singing the thirsty blues. My pruners have been sitting out on the picnic table for a week. It hasn’t rained, so that’s okay, but really I should go out there and put them away. And the hummingbird feeder is broken. I meant to look for the old one and put it out for them, but I haven’t, yet. Poor thirsty hummingbirds. Perhaps today.

I started one book that did not grab me. I am five pages into another. Each time I start to read I fall asleep. I will have to try another, I want one that I can’t stop reading, so I can stay up late and pretend I’m fifteen. Man, it’s hot. Not hot in here with the air conditioning running and running and running, but man, it’s hot.

I don’t even feel like eating. Well, maybe just ice cream. A dip top. But you could never eat a dip top in this heat, you’d have to run back to your air-conditioned car, and even then it would probably be too late, chocolate would be dripping all the way to your elbow.
I might go get one anyway, eat it right at the counter while I wait for my change, so fast an ice headache rips through my forehead.

And I really should do all this laundry that is piling up on me.
But it’s too hot to fold clothes from the dryer. All my cats do is sleep, and I had crazy wild dreams last night. I hate sleeping in air conditioning, I feel like I can’t breathe, even with a small fan blowing air directly onto my face. And I can breathe, but still,
I wake up in the night feeling like I can’t, sweating even though
the room is cool. Like my body knows how hot it is out there.

I would love to get up and go outside and listen to the crickets, sit in one chair with my feet up on another, and blanket myself with cool night air. But I don’t, the mosquitoes would carry me away, and no one would be able to find me in the morning. Which could be kind of funny, I wonder where they would drop me off? Maybe the neighbor’s around the corner, when I got too heavy.

In the mornings I drink hot tea. I don’t care if it is too hot to drink hot tea, I drink it anyway. Today it will be 93º and I think I am going to go running. I love to run in the heat, there is nothing in the world as good as that kind of sweating, feeling my body release the things it has been holding onto, stress, impatience, tension.

All of that will be gone when I am done, and I will stand there,
glistening, while life drips off of me onto the ground.

And then I’m going to go and get that dip top.

Some things a girl just can’t do without.


Jul 6 2010

South 83

Millions of miles have been traveled along this route.

The path I run on is an old rail trail that has been converted into a footpath. The markers have been left in place and I love that, both as a way to mark my own mileage, and because they make me think of the history of this place, all those trains, people, cargo, that have been here before me, all their stories, the lives and loves and loss and possibilities.

My mother’s father, my maternal grandfather, was at times, a hobo. This same track continued on into the town my mom grew up in and passed through an area near their backyard. She has told me stories about him, and the other men he sometimes brought home from the train. Bapa, as we called him, was also a drunk, in the very old-fashioned sense of the word, before they were called alcoholics. He was the Wild Irish Rose in a paper bag kind of drunk, and we didn’t see him much when we were growing up. He wasn’t a nice drunk, he was a mean drunk, and for that reason my mom kept him away from us most of the time.

He died when I was quite young, but the strongest memory I have of him is a day when he came over and sat at our kitchen table with his booze and he did get drunk, but not mean, and then my mom and the four of us kids had to help him upstairs to the bathroom. There are fourteen steps, and we went up two, down one. It took us about an hour to get him all the way to the top and by that time we were all crying tears of laughter at the things he was saying, and because we didn’t think we would ever make it to the top.

My other memory of him is that he always said, “Capiche?” after he told me something. And while I had no idea what it meant at the time, I somehow loved that he said it.

So I think of him when I am on this trail, wonder if he passed by this way, what stories he could have told about the people he met, the places he went, how he became the person I knew. I wonder how many times he passed this marker that says South 83 and thought that soon, he would be home.

My father’s father, my paternal grandfather, was among many other things, a well witcher. If you don’t know what that is, it means that he could take a divining rod, most often a Y-shaped tree branch, and find a well, deep underground. I never saw him do it, but my dad has, and he says that Gramps really could find water this way. This is one of those things that some people believe in and some people don’t, but I choose to believe that he could do it, that there was something special about him, this part of his legacy.

He was a tiny man, barely five feet, and always hunched over because he had polio when he was young. He probably didn’t weigh much more than a hundred pounds. But he was a tough old man, he worked his whole life on a farm, hard labor. He was always working, always fixing something, always in his work clothes.

I don’t have too many memories of him either, he also died when I was fairly young. But I remember that when he and my grandmother visited, he always brought a paper bag of candy. He was kind, and gentle, and quiet. He was an old-fashioned man, a country man, a man who made do with what he had, who never got rid of anything in case he might need it one day. He was a man who could find water with a stick.

And I think of him too, now, when I am on this trail, and I keep seeing all these Y-shaped branches.

The trees along this path, that fold their arms above me and around me as I move through them, are trees that might have been saplings back then, when my grandfathers were alive.

These trees hold many secrets, and sometimes they whisper,

telling stories of those who’ve been here before me.

And I listen. I always listen.


Jul 2 2010

what lies before me

When I run, I break everything into thirds. If I am planning to go six miles, I focus only on the first two. Once I have made it that far, I focus on the next two. I know that once I cover those, I will be two-thirds of the way to my destination, I will have already gone twice as far as I have left to go, and then the last two seem easy.

On days when I struggle, I split just the segment of path directly before me into thirds. If I make it to that first tree, then I can make it to the next one, and then the distance to the last tree will feel like nothing. I have covered more miles than I ever thought possible by breaking them into thirds.

And if my life ends up covering a fairly standard number of years,
I am now in my middle third.

The first third was a bit of a struggle, there was so much to learn, to figure out, so many mistakes to make that caused sore muscles, injuries, time waiting to repair. Sometimes I just wanted to stop. Sit down. Give up. I hadn’t learned discipline. Or tenacity. Or patience. I hadn’t settled in for the long haul.

I am past that phase now, and glad of it. I am warmed up, I have my stride, there is a rhythm to my days and I move along at an even pace most of the time. I am on the straightaway and can take time to gaze around me. I am no longer worried about whether I can make it. I’m moving close to the halfway point.

And as I move on, further down this path, this path we call life
that we live and breathe and burn through so quickly, I wonder if the last third will be the easiest one, not downhill because that hurts my knees worse than anything, but leisurely, graceful, steady. The one where I feel that I could go on forever.

Well, okay, maybe not quite forever.

But at least just to that next tree.


Jun 26 2010

training wheels

Forty-seven is a strange age, not exactly old, but not really young, either. And of course, that is why it’s called middle age.

But with this age, this middleness, come revelations, realizations, determination.

Life speeds up as you get older, but your body slows down.

I want to run more and more and more, but am able to do so less and less and less. I want to stay up very late to finish a book, but my eyes start to droop around midnight. I want to spring clean my house all in one day and have energy left over for dinner. I want to stay outside playing until it grows dark and someone calls me in.
I want more. More time.

I don’t want to reinvent the wheel, I just want a newer bicycle. One without any rust or scars or missing spokes. One that lets you pedal backwards when you want to, in case you missed something. I want to understand life before it’s too late, while I still have time to enjoy it. I want to appreciate, while I still have the strength to pedal.

I have wobbled and wiggled for 47 years, trying to maintain my balance. Now I think I am ready to pare things down, remove that extra set of wheels, pick up speed. I want to fly down a hill with the wind in my hair, or coast past my house with my hands waving high in the sky.

I want to let go. Of things, emotions, barriers, clutter. All that clumsy baggage that keeps me from gliding along, bumps and potholes that make for a very rough ride. I want the life that I have and the life that I want to become the very same thing. I want to ride into the sunset, keep going all night, and circle the sun at dawn. I want to race time with one eye on the prize.

I have no illusions, I know I will fall. Plenty of times.

But that’s okay, I plan to get right back up.

Unless, of course, I break a hip.

And then I’m going to cry like a baby.


Jun 24 2010

sibilance

You can’t write about silence because it doesn’t exist. It pretends to exist, we talk about it, we yearn for it, we aspire to it, but life is never truly silent. There is always something making sound, your heart beating, your lungs breathing, there is always a whisper of life, somewhere.

My mind is never quiet. I have never been able to meditate, to completely clear my thoughts, there is always some phrase or idea that raises its hand and waves for my attention. I don’t think that is necessarily a bad thing, although sometimes I do wish that they would all just sit down and read for a while. Or take a little nap.

But mostly I like that my mind moves in circles, thoughts flowing in and out and around, and then back again, sometimes when I least expect them. I like that a line for a poem can just appear, on a page that my brain has already printed. I like that words are perpetual, always there, my constant companions.

Yes, peace and quiet sound really nice, I wish for both fairly often, but in truth I would probably get bored.

I like to stay up, alone, when everyone else is sleeping, I like the way the house sounds when my husband and son are here and asleep, it is a different sound than when I am home by myself. Even though I can’t really hear anything, I can sense their presence within the quiet. Perhaps it is the peace of their sleep that I feel, palpable evidence of their dreams.

Sound travels further at night, and our dreams entwine themselves around what we hear and tell us the story of that noise, this whisper. They (the proverbial they) say that dreams don’t really play out as stories, that they are just flashes in our brains, synapses, individual thoughts or images that our mind strings together later, and then adds meaning. I’m not sure I believe that.

I think dreams are stories that need to be told.

Poems are emotions that struggle to exist.

Words and images are the conduits.

Silence can exist, in a vacuum. But I am not there.


Jun 20 2010

go fish

My sister took this picture of my dad last year, and we both love it because, as we say, “It’s classic Deetz.” Somehow, in this picture, I can see him as a little boy, sitting there just like that.

We all call my father Deetz these days, when my son was little he started calling him D.T., no one is really quite sure why, but it stuck, and over the years it evolved into Deetz. Now everyone that is any part of the family calls him that.

I have a lot of memories of fishing with my dad. When I was a kid he would load all four of us into the station wagon and off we would go, probably giving my mom a much-needed break. My brothers and sister and I caught a lot of sunfish in those days. Once, just once, I caught a bass. And I was so excited, but then so disappointed when I had to throw it back, because it wasn’t bass season. Of course, someone else always had to put the worm on the hook for me, my dad did it, mostly, or sometimes my brother, but I didn’t ask him very often because he also liked to torture me about my fear of worms and would usually dangle one in my face first.

Once, we went fishing after a long rainy spell, and the big old station wagon got stuck in the mud. I mean really stuck. It took hours to get out of there, all four of us pushing and laughing hysterically and then getting mad and then laughing some more as the wheels just kept spinning and we would move an inch or two, and by the time we got home we were all covered in mud, and that was not a good day for my mother.

Another time, we went ice fishing. I don’t remember catching any fish that day, but I remember that for some reason my brother decided to fill his hole back in with chunks of ice right before we left. And me, being the klutz that I always was, immediately forgot that hole was there, and as we were walking back to the car, my leg slipped right down into it. My dad instinctively grabbed for me, catching me by the hood of my coat, and pulling me back out almost instantaneously, so I was saved from a complete dunking, or worse. But, oh my, was I cold. We had to go to my grandmother’s house, which was closer than ours, so I could get out of my wet clothes. Nobody was very happy with my brother that day.

Sometimes just a few of us went, sometimes it was just me and my dad. And as I got older, a lot of times I didn’t even fish, I took my book and sat near him and read while he fished. For some reason, I love those memories as much if not more than the ones I have of actually catching fish. We didn’t talk much, you have to be quiet when you are fishing, but we sat there, together, each doing the thing we loved best.

My dad is the most patient man I have ever met. He is quiet and sweet and selfless. For my entire life he has given himself to his family. He has always, always been there for me. Putting worms on my hook, driving me to the mall when I was a teenager, and then sitting there on a bench while my friends and I shopped, helping me fix anything in my house that has ever been broken, giving me advice when I have asked for it, and just being there, silently, when all I needed was that.

My dad has always been there to grab my hood and pull me up.

My dad is my hero.

Happy Father’s Day, Deetz.