Waking up

As part of getting our house ready to go on the market and be shown, we took down the curtains in the bathroom. These are curtains that the previous owners had made, roman shade style things, and it had been a long time since they'd last been washed. So...they tore in the dryer. We needed new curtains. Quick. Cheap. I was going to have to make replacements.

The week before I had, reluctantly, packed up my sewing machine. It was in a big box somewhere in the garage.

But I had kept out a couple needles and pins.

So, we went to the quilt store - not the cheapest fabric, but my best chance of finding a fabric I liked - bought a print for the bathroom side and a solid for the window side. I love the print. It just so happens I bought enough to be able to make Cora a little dress sometime. I don't know how that happened. And that night I sat and sewed the new shade by hand.

That was about two weeks ago. Now, I have itchy fingers. I want to make something. I'm wishing I had some scraps of fabric - I am thinking about making a little old-school doll quilt. Something handsewn. From templates. Something scrappy and sweet.

I've also been reading, finally. During the year I kept up with what my classes were reading, and I would read an article online now and then, some other blogs, but not what I would call real reading. I mean, for the last several years I've averaged between 65-70 books a year, and last year it was far fewer than that. And it has taken a while for me to feel ready to take a book back up in a serious way - a novel, not just a "candy bar" (don't get me wrong, I love the candy bars). But in the last week...I've read three good novels (thank you, public library!). Atwood's The Year of the Flood, Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply, and Walter Mosley's The Man in My Basement.

And, now it feels like my brain is settling back into place. I'm thinking about writing again. I'm thinking about what else I want to read. I'm thinking about who I am, who I want to be. I feel like the last ten months have been about being who I needed to be - similar to the time right after Cora was born, actually, though that felt more biologically-driven, and this more recent experience felt more driven by logic, by what I knew rather than felt had to be done. I'm still thinking through all this, still feeling out the shape of it, but it's good to have a start at the distance to see it more clearly.

A new look

Yeah, I changed things around a little bit. You know, everything else is changing, why not the blog look? (BlogLook? Blook? Yikes.)

Just checking to see if you are paying attention. Or, you know, maybe you are watching a princess movie. Or a dinosaur movie. Or something like that.

One Art

I am sitting in a motel room in WI, Cora asleep in the bed, Chris at a concert, the room filling up with darkness as the world beyond the open window fills with evening birdsong and highway thrum, and I am thinking about that Elizabeth Bishop poem "One Art" and in particular, these lines:

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I think I am thinking about these lines because earlier this evening we were all down
in the motel pool and at the end I was sitting and waiting for Chris to coax Cora out of the
water and my mind wandered to memories of our backyard pool when I was in high school,
 and I was thinking that having that pool was one of the very best things about high school,
as I see it now. I loved being in that pool, lying on hot cement next to it after being in the
water for a long time, the feeling of the heat soaking into a wet suit. I would read stretched
out on the diving board. My brothers and I played games there - made up games of baseball
while sitting perched on boogie boards.

And I was thinking about places, bodies of water, I've left behind - that pool, the ocean,
a beloved lake, and soon a river, and those lines popped into my head. I am finding there is
something about a motel room, a cool evening, birdsong, a highway, and a sleeping child that
all conspire to make it very easy to think about loss. That is the art in Bishop's poem, after all,
the art of losing.

Holy Moley It's a New Post!

Or that is what I imagine my mother saying. (And my other six readers, bless your hearts.)

I'm not going to to fill in from my missing time incident, but jump right to the important stuff, which is what I made for dinner tonight. The mixed greens stir fry from p264 of Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, with Napa cabbage, spinach, and hon tsai tai, the latter two coming from our beloved CSA (yes, we signed up again!). With brown basmati rice and a few variations (more garlic, more ginger, a little teriyaki sauce, and so on). Yum! Cora tried a bite of the greens, and while she didn't want more, she didn't spit it out. Round these parts, we call that a success. She did eat her bowl of rice, plus some cheese, ham, and crackers.

Today I collected the final papers from my students, and graded them. I was really pleased with the papers this time around, though frankly I had designed the assignment so that it would take a real act of homework disregard to screw it up. And then I was really happy to be COOKING and enjoying it again. I even have plans to make a cake tonight, still. I think it is partly that Chris is home again, that the semester is over, and also that we have made our decisions.

I can't say that our decision completely fulfills all my hopes for the next few years, but this year apart has also helped to clear up my priorities to the point where I am mostly content with the fact that we are moving to Grand Forks.

There. I said it.

Turn here for Memory Lane

Today I watched Natalie Merchant's Feb 2010 performance on TED; she sang songs from her new album, settings of old poems. It was terrific, especially her setting of Hopkins' "Spring and Fall", a poem I love dearly. Then at the end, for an encore, an old 10,000 Maniacs song.

And then I spent some time in the storage closet looking for my old tapes, remembering how many times I listened to those songs in Santa Barbara, in my old apartment, humming them on the walk to the beach, singing along with a friend at her place in Ojai. You know, throwing myself a big nostalgia party.

These are some of the songs I listened to while I packed up my apartment, getting ready to move to the Twin Cities.

These songs cover a lot of emotional territory for me. I found the tapes. I'm not sure I'm really ready to play them again.

A good morning

Despite the fact that Cora woke up at 6am, this morning is nice. She laid in bed pretty quietly for another half hour (a bad dream last night sent to my bed at about 10pm, and she seems to finally be grasping the concept of "don't push Mommy off the bed"). Then she played in her room for another half hour. Given that I finally weaned myself off the baby monitor, this was actually restful for me.

Once I got up, we had a tea party. Then she wanted to get dressed. She colored while I made French Toast. She ate four pieces of French toast, a banana, a cheese stick, and drank a cup of juice. Right now she's watching Dinosaur Train ("Our favorite show, Mom!!!") and wearing her Palm Sunday outfit: pink polka dot dress, pink striped pants, rainbow shoes. I'll try to get a photo.

It's the kind of weekend morning that was so rare to have this past fall, and is becoming something more dependable. It's nice. After a couple months of feeling like I am struggling uphill with this girl, now it feels more like we can meet each other on more even ground. Yesterday we were at a birthday party...at a toy store (I know). We had talked in the car about how we weren't going to buy anything, but that fell apart when Cora spotted a ballet bunny play set. And, frankly, if it had been a $5 thing I might have just bought it. But this was $20.95. After about 30 minutes of off and on tears and negotiations, she made the choice to put it back and wait for another time. It was a relief and a surprise. This girl, she is growing up.

I am liking the way age 4 looks from this vantage point: five weeks to go!

Four new reasons why spring has to be on the way

This morning was a good morning. I dropped Cora off at school and we went through our new ritual where she walks me to the lunchroom door, gives me something out of her "pocket", holds the door for me, gets one more kiss, and then runs back to her cereal. Then I went to my favorite neighborhood cafe for a coffee and a muffin (plus a bag of coffee beans and a baguette) and waited for the Co-op to open. There is something about going to the co-op that makes me happy about cooking. I've struggled with that this year, with finding the happy in the cooking, as exhaustion and cooking for a preschooler has taken a toll. But I've got it today, and I am happy about that.

(I have to point out: preschooler. Not toddler. I'm trying to break the habit of calling her a toddler, because she is so not a toddler. A mother of one of the 2nd graders who is at Cora's daycare for before and after schoolcare stopped me in the hall the other day to say she had had quite a conversation with my daughter, and can't believe how many words she knows. I know! It's crazy! I love it! She also winks!)



Today at the co-op they had something guarenteed to stop me in my tracks. Seeds. A big display of seeds.



It is only March. Early March. I exercised restraint and only bought four packets. Brought them home. Took their picture. Decided I wanted to be able to see them all the time until I get their little seed-butts in the ground. (The best joke in our house right now? "Guess what!" "What?" "Chicken butt!" Oh yeah. Incredibly funny EVERY TIME.) SO, of course, I taped them up on the cupboards in the kitchen.



Where I tape all the things I want to see everyday. Don't you?

(One day, probably in an alternate universe,
I will have two English bulldogs
and their names will be Muscles and Roosevelt. )