Signs of Spring

60 degrees today, and bits and pieces of the snow men sculpted five days ago during our winter wallop list toward the muddy lawn like much-licked popsicles:  winter's last gasp, already on  its death-rattle exhale.* 

Me, I'm ready.  

I know I've waxed rhapsodic about the southern spring before, but then again, constancy, thou art a jewel!  I love spring in its leave-taking, when it is perched upon the high-dive that launches it on its spectacular swan-dive into summer; I love it in its full April effulgence,  when the trees are spun-sugar confections and roots extend through moist earth with a minute snare-brush whisper —  we are alive —  but maybe I love it most right now, when everything trembles on the cusp.

Everything?

The transitory moment before the heavens part and rain starts sluicing down, when the clouds are oiled and heaped high and greenish and the wind begins to rise; the blink-and-it's-gone pause between  day and twilight, when the air you walk the dog through is so pink-tinged you long to linger in its embrace; the bit of day before the sun peeks over the housetops, chill and formal, full of birdsong — there is much to be said for the bits of time that lie in the spaces in between. 

Spring is here, but not really, not yet.  The trees are still just angular constructions, festooned with last-year's nests, in disrepair; there's still snow in the birdbath.

But at the same time, a pale rosy haze hovers above the bare branched dogwoods:  next month's buds.  The peonies that never bothered to bloom last year have already let red ropy foliage emerge from the ground.  And once more, as we always do, we begin again; we hope.

Yesterday, two bluebirds lit on the scrub in the park a good portion of the neighborhood avoids.  Today, a hawk, perched on the phone pole.      

*Possibly hurried there by Elder Girleen's single swift well-placed kick on the way to the car before school — oh to be young enough to enjoy the beauty in destruction!

Weather Report: March 2, 2009

Southerner that I am, I don’t have the proper words for snow. Sugar snow, corn snow, powder: here in Atlanta we don’t know nothin’ about those: we just have little snow, otherwise known as dirty snow. People who actually have more than a passing acquaintance with the cold white stuff would scoff; wouldn’t even call what we get around here snow at all. But yesterday’s "storm," which began about 11 in the morning and lasted, off-and-on, until supper time, was such a lovely one —feathery, snow-globe-upended flakes, a cold swirl-and-dance to land on the tip of the tongue, the eyelashes, superlative for packing into snow balls. It left six inches behind in places (not south of I-20, as much as we hoped it might), contained thunder; muffled the city for a bit.

Somewhere there are children who make snowmen that aren’t muddy brown and studded with bits of pine straw collected on the initial roll of ball through snow, but I’m not sure the experience they have is half as magical  as it is for a southern child, who longs for snowfall all year long, experiences it once, if at all, and never ever has to attend school once it commences, since around here flurries constitute a “winter wallop” that leaves the streets empty of people to do what they have to but full of those engaging in what they want instead (get coffee, have a late breakfast).

Yesterday we had our annual snow, and embraced it with glee, because if it’s only going to snow for six hours, it doesn’t matter too terribly much that you lack gloves (me, because I lost one a year ago and figured I could hedge my bets and go without for an entire year), have never owned a suitable scarf (both girleens) or don’t possess a waterproof winter coat (ditto). Not for us the burn-out that comes with having to scrape ice from windshields every morning for months! Not for us, the ritual of getting suited up in padded snowsuits only to have to strip them off for a last-minute bathroom trip before even getting out the door!

Today, of course, all of yesterday’s cold austere beauty has become a few scabrous patches of dirty ice left below the trees, but all the same school’s been cancelled.

 Because it’s not actually snowing anymore and there’s nothing left to play in, the Girleens are mostly just bemused, though game to stay home. But I — although looked at objectively a snow day for me now is by no means a day off — embraced the news with the same joy I did back in those old bad days when snow day meant no classes for me at the University of Georgia and  lollygagging in a bed covered with raggedy quilts in a rundown apartment until mid-afternoon when all that was required of me was leisurely afternoon stroll downtown to see who was out which coffee shops and bars were open.

In the southern locales I've so far lived out my life, snow is not... extraordinary, but at the same time it is so out-of-the-ordinary that it becomes so.   When it snows, the matter-of-fact dailiness of my life is dusted with magic, transformed. I see a little better; I step a little more carefully, my eyes for once on exactly where I'm going.  

I  tend toward the ambitious in terms of resolutions, can come up with a baker's dozen, as I did a month ago, here.  

But it would be enough; to treat each day like a snow day, an unexpected party, and rejoice.

The First of Three Valentines

Man o man, I wish I'd written this — Judith Warner's column for today from the NYTimes.

I might, in fact, have a bit of a crush on the woman who can write like this.

Spring Fever

It shouldn't have arrived yet, but it has, though maybe it'll abandon us again before the month's done:  Spring.  It comes, bearing gifts, and crocus (croci?) to nestle in the still-wintery beds. The mockingbirds are, this morning, rejoicing:  the sap is running in the maple that graces the lefthand corner of our yard.  

It seems absurd to sit here in front of this screen in the face of this shy excess.  

I cut my teeth on spring, varietal Georgian.  In fact, if spring in this neck of the woods were, truly, a varietal (not that I know jack about wine), it would have to be a prosecco or that Portuguese sort known as Vinho Verde.  

Spring in the bit of earth I call home is a green wine, effervescent, astringent. It goes down easy. There are always things to be done, but me, I'm off to take a heady early-morning sip.     

Weather Report: January 28, 2009

The new year, and most of the first month of it has already been swallowed up. By what exactly? And just how did we get here so fast? Younger Girleen has a brand-new Louise Brooks-style haircut, Elder Girleen commemorated her 7th birthday with waffles for dinner last night and, last weekend, a "movie party" with the girls in her first grade class (for the first time I rejoiced that there are 14 boys in her class, leaving only six girls to feed pizza to).  The Husband is still sans job, though taking a page from the laconic cowboy model of manhood, has by sheer force of will, strongarmed lots of irons into the fire.* 

And me, I’m just a week or so back from another winter’s worth of contract work reading lots and lots and lots and lots of short stories, during which I deduced that the current literary short story template includes:

twins as protagonists**; 

cell phones set on nightstands the way cigarettes were once set in ashtrays, that vibrate sleeping couples — one of whom’s a cheater — awake; 

elderly parents who must be cared for; 

cold, hard sex between people who care for each other not a whit.

Oh, and Graphic Novels.

And here in Atanta? It’s cold, cold, too cold, and a pale wintery sky. A new president; a new year; and I have from the library conjured up for myself a book — Your Best Year Yet!

Because it would be nice, wouldn’t it, for 2009 to be that? But there is so little time, and is what there is of it worth expending on worksheets and assessments, on contemplating what I might’ve accomplished this past year, and how I limited myself as I worked toward it?

Nah, no time for any of that.  Sorry I've been gone so long.

*The assumption being that the saying refers to a cowboy who has his hands full at branding time, not a Victorian housemaid ironing lots of petticoats.

**If you are 23 now you were born in 1986, and given all the older mothers running around by then, chances are quite high that you know a lot of twins

News From the Front

At five-thirty this morning, the Husband fumbled for the silent alarm clock beside our bed and whispered urgently to me:  We've overslept!

The reality being that we hadn't, at all, that the alarm he was certain he'd heard was imaginary, but we're all a little on edge right now, and it stands to reason that he might feel anxious that he'd slept through the starting bell of yet another round.  

Fact Number 1.  The Husband walked into work a week ago to discover his job no longer existed.  Handed over his corporate cell phone; was handed the proverbial cardboard box to put his personal effects in, and that was that.  A small drama being played out all over the country this month; a chorus swelling in the background of the day-to-day that sings out this:  laid off.  

Fact Number 2.  He is not the first parent from Elder Girleen's class of fifteen kids to fall under the wheels of the corporate bus.

What do I know of recessions?  The first one that occurred in my lifetime meant nothing to me but lines at the gas pumps I walked past on my way to school and the president's cardigan-clad plea that we turn down our thermostats a few degrees.  

And the second?  Well, when you're hardly wet behind the ears and make minimum wage and survive off coffee and cigarettes and filched sugar packets from Wendy's, where the salad bar means all you can eat, how does a recession touch you?  It was nothing but a word, and besides, I was too busy applying to grad school to notice much, although now that I think about it, my longing to escape the real world for the ivory tower might have been considered pretty telling.  

But this time, I'm a card-carrying grown-up and find it hard to consider recession  just a word (which was how I got through last go-round, when I was just a few semesters past having failed economics and my only dependent was a siamese cat — hey!  light another cigarette!  strike up the band!).  

Last Wednesday, it was still just a word.  One we were worried about, yes, but in a fairly hypothetical sense.  Today it's tangible and real-to-the-touch.  Who knows what's going on with the guy who lays on the horn in traffic for what seems like no reason?  Who knows what's behind the fact that some mom drags her kids into school late?  It's hard times out there.  We've got to be gentle with each other.  

 

Weather Report: November 9, 2008

I admit it, I had grand plans.  In the final weeks before the election, when I'd developed a twitch in one eye due to obsessive  Huffington Post reading (and from the anxiety those daily emails from the Obama campaign were causing), I was going to get out with a camera and document what I think we all already knew, even then, no matter what the outcome was going to be, was history in the making... 

• ...the car pool line at Elder Girleen's elementary school, the row of mini vans and station wagons and compacts, most with Obama stickers pasted to their bumpers....
  
• 
  
• ...a jack o lantern carved with the already-so-recognizable Obama campaign logo, placed on a front porch next to a house with a McCain/Palin yard sign ...
  
• 
  
• ...the GO VOTE exhortation chalked in pastel on the sidewalk  half a block away ...
  
• 
  
• ... the early morning line our neighborhood's polling place had never witnessed before...
  
• 
  

So much has been written.   Judith Warner's New York Times column from last week, here, says much,  and so very eloquently.  

On Wednesday, November 5, I walked out my front door and was astounded to see that while I had my mind on other things, the leaves on the trees had miraculously, gloriously, shed the dull-green cast late summer gave them and turned gold.  I know we need rain like nobody's business, but the blue sky that's arched behind those trees this week, so cloudless, so saturated with color — it made me ache.  I don't think I've ever seen anything so hopeful.  

Yesterday, I drove interstate 20 in the early morning ... turned off it onto Highway 138 and began the drive to Athens, past Quick Trips that a month ago had no gas in their pumps, past blocky contemporary cemeteries where graves were brave with bouquets of plastic flowers.  Past a Baptist church where cut-apart and welded-back-together metal drum smokers had already been fired up and barbeque was in a couple of hours going to be sold.  Past a salvage yard that stretched out over acres, where the cars had been positioned nose to tail, starred of windshield, sporting crumpled bumpers. 

The first time I was able to vote, Ronald Reagan was elected president.  

The trees are at this moment such a brave lick of flame and color, and what if it really were morning in America, right now?

  

 

The Lilies of the Field, They Toil Not, Neither Do They Spin

Hambidge Center for the Arts and Sciences Rabun Gap, GA 

Last day here. It seems like I’ve been here forever; it seems like I’ve been here no time at all. I seem to be so unable. Unable to hold both in my hands at the same time: my real world and the stillness, the expectancy, a place like this forces upon one. Here, one has to take things as they come. At home, I am mistress of my domain. I make things happen. I am the fulcrum that pries children into school, the net that flung out, snares them into sleep at the end of the day.

Of course I’m not any of that, really. But the message of modern motherhood is always that you can be, you must be, so sometimes… more than half the time… sometimes, I think I'm that important.

I arrived resistant. Maybe going away to write would be like looking into the abyss, I joked before I came and that was not much of a lie. Head full of things: the upcoming election, maternal guilt (a good mother wouldn’t leave her children for so long!), the price and availability of gas (the gas stations I saw on the way up into the mountains that were hung with plastic bags and caution tape seeming a bit Mad Maxish), daughterly guilt (a good daughter wouldn’t expect her 73-year-old mother to be able to get a three-year-old to school!), how much food there was left behind in the house, spousal guilt (a good wife, having found childcare for 10 days, would have spent that time second-honeymooning with her long-suffering husband!).

This is what I was given: a cabin, knotty pine walls, the smell of green Palmolive soap. The trees outside the window, straight, like a crowd gathered waiting to see what I’d do. The sound of a crow, and mist over the hills, cast out like a magician’s scarf.

There is a painter here: raised somewhere in Texas, she makes her home now in the desert. Her specialty is painting mist. Captured on residencies like this in black and white by old-fashioned 35 mm camera, color digital images, video cam. Surely she knows what metaphorical hay could be made from it all: an artist so singlemindedly preoccupied, with painting air?

She is very very good at what she does. And I've decided to view the way she drives down the gravel road here every morning on her quest to find clouds, as valiant, quixotic.

We do what we do, and that might be all there is to it. How much examination can any of this bear?

There are bees that hover in the fall sun above the purple flowers massed on the front lawn here, and hives in the field across the road, white and boxy, in rows like tombstones. The sound of one bee, what is it but the noise a body makes, doing what it must, going about its business? But the many! Their hum rises from the flowers like a orison cast toward heaven, and walking past makes me want to lie down on the grass until I understand everything bees have to say.

The leaves have begun changing in the time that I’ve been here.

Last night there was a screech owl in the trees that flanked the road between dining room and studios, but when I tipped my flashlight up toward boughs, it thought better of shrieking.

There is a creek across the road, and in an elbow of land, a fallen-into-nothing rounded stone springhouse.

Spill and rivulet, such a Georgia creek, poured like cream from a pitcher into flat, shallow expanse, the surface puckered with half-moons.

The bright vine that snakes up a particular tree I can see from my window is the one thing that, mornings, catches the sun first: is probably poison ivy.

There is gold beyond the green here when the sun comes up, a bird I’ve not seen before on the power wire that sags between studio and road. It is my last day here.

Consider the Fig

It's not news to anyone:  spring's long long gone, not even a whisper of memory anymore.  The rabbit's-foot curves that were the leaves of the fig tree at the side of the house in April are now completely unclenched; as early as June they'd become hands with broad, spatulate fingers.  

I stand on tiptoe, push the leaves back with both hands, searching for fruit, greedy.

A cicada insists:  hot, hot, hot.   A mockingbird patrols the sag of the phone line.  Who would think it's September?  Not I,  trills the bird mockingly, over my head.  The figs I find weep milk and crystalline sugar.  They're purplish, ripe, completely unlovely.  Borne of plants put into the ground a generation ago, when this neighborhood was bars-on-the-windows and frugality handed down.  

Now we live in such plenty:  nobody eats them.  

Me, though, I might be a scavenger born and bred, the offspring of hippies who scoured their neighbors' Madison, Wisconsin lawns for dandelion greens, a copy of Stalking the Wild Asparagus open to the leafy greens chapter.  I've been known to ... well, let's put it this way: one summer, when Elder Girleen was still young enough to sit in a stroller, I filched handfuls from the back yard of a vacant house and carried them home in an emptied sippy cup.  And the boughs draped over our backyard privacy fence from the neighbor's yard:  if I can reach the drooping figs, I can consider them fair game.  

They're wonderful with goat cheese and arugula.  One summer I made them into ice cream.  I don't know when I started to like them.  When I was little, I equated them with the gardens of elderly women:  on a par with swept dirt yards , cracked tire planters, whitewashed trunks of pecan trees.  Inside the sorts of houses that fig trees belonged to, there were sure to be dirty kitchen drawers lined with yellow, curling shelf-paper.  Sure to be window sills displaying mason jars with screw-top lids full of miscellaneous screws, and balls made from old rubber bands saved for decades.  

In Texas, my grandmother had a fig tree in her yard.  We visited every summer; every morning I watched her breakfast on figs ripe from her tree, sliced and swimming in bowls of half-and-half.  I turned up my nose.  

But I would sit cross-legged in the dappled, rustling shade underneath the tree, reading  books I found in the old glass-front bookcases; musty-smelling books I never would have dreamed of reading at home, where I had access to friends, television, the library:  Anne of Green Gables, Return of the Native.   Whose names were inscribed on the end-papers of those books?  Ancestors, I supposed.  I didn't know them. 

Now, here I am, forty-three:  when I reach for the figs on the trees outside my dining room window, maybe all that history is still within my grasp.  I part the leaves, I reach for summer with both hands.  The Girleens like them with Greek yogurt and honey.  

We get two or three at a time.  They're certainly not anything you could live on, but when I check for ripe ones while the Girleens are at school I feel like ... like what?  A good provider?  Inside the house are lists to be made, emails to answer. I am procrastinating.  I am outside in the yard, picking figs.  

Lists.  I make them, I change them.  In two weeks, I leave for  a two-week residency here.  I did this sort of thing before,  but all that was in another life, one before children.  Now I have two kids, and I find that I'm preparing for being away from them (and it's not even two weeks, it's ten days) the way a mother bear eats berries in preparation for winter.  My lists — what time people have to be at school, how many snacks have to be packed to go with them, when they have to be picked up, when and where piano lessons are, the telephone numbers of neighborhood mothers whose help has been pro-offered and gratefully accepted — have become so elaborate:  I may have to give the Husband and the Grandmother, who is coming to stay, a Powerpoint presentation before I get in the car loaded up with files and research books and computer and printer and drive off to the mountains!  

For ten days, I will be responsible for no one but myself, and this feels both seductive and frightening.

I imagine that driving-away, and it feels like it's for so long, and to such a far-away place.  I remind myself it's not rocket-science, this mothering I spend so much of the day-to-day engaged in.    Everybody will be fine!  Children learn good things from seeing their mothers engaged in work. They learn good things from going to school with hair uncombed every once in a while (this being one of my predictions)! So what if they eat too much pizza for dinner!  

I will learn good things.  I will have the chance to replenish, to write, to rub shoulders, to talk shop.  

But if people can get along without you, then they can get along without you.  And that is complicated stuff.  

So what do I do to combat my anxieties?

I pick figs, as if that would be enough to keep anyone from being hungry.  The house is better stocked with food than it usually is, no matter that I've done it so far in advance my stockpile while be long-gone by the time I drive off.  I do load after load of laundry, as if that will keep people from running out of clean clothes two weeks from now.  

    

State of the Union: September 2, 2008

I don't remember if I read this somewhere, or if it's something someone told me, but here's a stat plucked from the ether:  the average blogger (as opposed to the superstar blogger, who makes money from their avocation) keeps a blog going for about six months. 

Who knows what a blogger's ability to keep a blog going for six months means (or, equally,  if it means anything).  Maybe it takes six months to get bored with yourself.  Or maybe it takes six months to run out of anything to say.   Or maybe it takes six months to use up the goodwill of any friends out there in cyberspace who might be checking in on a regular basis.

No, I'm not pulling the plug — though these days I post so infrequently maybe I should.  But the past few weeks, between getting kids to school, keeping carpool schedules straight in my head, helping Elder Girleen weather the slings and arrows of first grade's early days (It's hard! she's wailed once or twice) and assisting Younger Girleen as she navigates the rocky shoals of her newly nap-less state, I've found myself wondering.  Wondering not why? not what's the point? but just wondering. 

OK, maybe why? and what's the point? do play a part in whatever it is that I'm wondering.  

So much of my life never ends up here.  (And maybe that's a good thing, the editoral voice that's never very far from hand chides me.)  Maybe it shouldn't.   The self-professed slant of this was "mixing the water and oil of motherhood and writing" after all. 

But at this particular second, those parameters feel like a bit of a box.  

Maybe it's that motherhood epiphanies are few and far between as you shepherd a child through first grade — it's not kindergarten when everything's new; instead, it's just life.  Or maybe it's that a summer of such active parenting has led me to a fallow fall.  Or maybe there are certain motherhood junctures when one feels the strongest need to give voice:  when the baby is born, when the first one starts school, and now just isn't one of those times.    

Soon enough, I predict, Media Studies scholars will take as their research topics like that, and we'll all be the wiser. 

But in the meantime, what we've got going on around here is just life.  

This morning, Younger Girleen and I took my car to the shop, driving eight lanes of interstate to get there.  Early morning sun palmed the guy-wires supporting the cell towers arrayed along the right-hand shoulder of the road.  A guy in an Expedition, the name Magnolia snaked across one forearm, asked in gestures if I'd let him merge in front of me.  I complied.

One of the things that needed fixing in the car was the radio, which has been on the blink for months.  The mechanic changed a fuse and .... voila!     As we drove back through town, Atlanta suddenly looked like the setting of a movie.  A movie along the lines of The Wire, but a movie all the same.  

Everything looks good when you've got the right soundtrack.  

 

Here One Day, Gone the Next

Elsewhere in the world, it may  still be the dog days of summer, but not 'round here.  

Nope, your calendar's not wrong:  it's still just early days of August, when lawns unravel into little more than crabgrass and heat leaves everything limp.  The leaves of the kudzu and the poison ivy are glossy and lustrous twining up the trunks of the trees.  The crepe myrtles have littered the ground with brassy fuschia blossoms, stridently attempting to add some color to things.  Last week, when we walked from the car to the pool,  wilted fluff from mimosas spangled the pavement.  

But even as August does what August does best, we have The First Day of School, and today the Girleens, newly-backpacked and outfitted, are off at their respective schools (first grade and preschool) experiencing life without maternal intervention.  

The house is very quiet. 

 The temperatures may be inching up into the nineties, but all you have to do is walk a first grader into their school building, opening those heavy metal doors into the smell of fresh paint and freshly-waxed linoleum floor that says first-day-of-school like nothing else can, to feel fall's onset.  It's there, like an underglaze under the panorama of summer.  

There's crisper weather ahead.  You can taste it on the tip of your tongue. 

Hot Town

I know, I know:  if I were a better person,  driving would probably come up less often in my writing, the way of the world currently being $4.19 gas and an environmental crisis and all.  

The reality is, we actually don't do that much driving.   We live south of Interstate 20, and out of loyalty to the 'hood, stubbornness and just plain perversity, I try to stay on the wrong side of those tracks as often as I can.   

When I set up the Girleens' swimming lessons for the summer, though, I was asleep at the switch, and now I'm spending a couple  a days a week for the month of July shuttling them back and forth to the swimming pool.

But I suspect that even if this were not the case, the act of driving would take up more space in my writing than it probably should, simply because driving becomes a meditative act when one spends much of their waking time with small children:  yes, the small children are also right there with you, strapped into their seats like tiny paratroopers, but they're just as lulled as the next person by tires on asphalt, the blur of view beyond the window, and the dreamy life-is-a-beautiful-art-movie  sensation caused by being in a car with the radio on.  

In the car, I seem to have time to think.  Apparently Elder Girleen does to, for the car is where, the other afternoon, she asked me the following:

Mommy, why is Prince Eric always unconscious in the Little Mermaid?

In the car, we pass the HAND CAR WASH, a cinderblock building  painted a shout of orange so brilliant, so orange, it practically breaks eardrums,   where an itinerant BBQ cook has set up a rickety, surely-not-condoned-by-the-health-department smoker; we wait out the light, we turn, the dangerous, alluring scent of well-cooked ribs pervades the car.  

I'm hungry, the girleens chorus.   

In the car, we listen to Let It Be as we inch through rush hour traffic, because music hath charms that soothes the savage beast, also six-year-olds and three-year-olds who've been swimming for hours on July afternoons who have just been chauffeured past the mouth-watering aroma of BBQ ribs a mother would never dream of letting them eat.  

Oh, the summer I was sixteen, when the ashy, head-spinning taste of my first filched cigarettes filled my mouth and time was immaterial, the summer I was sixteen, when we debated life's big questions, one of which was this:

Beatles?  

or

Stones?

I was a girl for Mick, through and through.  The Beatles?  Too hippy-dippy; they didn't have that necessary edge.  Sentimental, I thought, sappy ... and then I lit another cigarette and set the record player needle into the groove of my current fave Patti Smith album, Easter. 

And now here I am, forty-three, and the Rolling Stones mean naught to the girleens, though Wild Horses is a song that's gotten their approval. The Beatles are the band we listen to.  

And all those songs I thought so sentimental 25 years ago?  What a beautiful soundtrack they make as you travel through your life with kids in tow,  your youth waving goodbye in the rear-view mirror.  

Of Summer, and Of Reading

The end of the school year is in some ways such a celebratory conflagration: end-of-the-year picnics heaped upon final committee meetings heaped upon final school projects heaped upon recitals, all set alight by the frantic desire of a  mom who works at home during naps and spaces in the school day to get a few final things done.

This year, our May went up in a beautiful blaze, as quickly as dried wood and tinder, and then we hightailed it to the beach.  

It's glorious to have such a clean break between a family's "on" season and its "off," to plunge into summer and its laborious applications of sunscreen and bug spray as quickly as you dash from the skillet-hot sand at the beach into the first slap of opaque salty water. 

The only drawback I can think of  is that if you have your week away at the beginning of the summer you're longing for another by its end. 

But that is the most minor of complaints.  We're back in Atlanta now, the gardenia bush rooted six years ago from a twig cut from the one that perfumes the front yard of the house where I grew up is a riotous overly-fragrant excess of blossoms, the pom-poms of the hydrangeas droop in the heat as big and round and blue as dinner plates.  

One of the things summer sometimes, happily gives me is some time for reading, and the day before we left for the beach I grabbed a novel I'd heard about from the new releases shelf at the library.  Called The Ten-Year Nap, by Meg Wolitzer, it takes as its territory the New York stomping-grounds of the urban mom; the "nap" the title refers to is one the protagonist is — maybe — waking up from after having spent ten years as a stay-at-home parent.

It's a smooth read, perfect for summer.  Because it "has something to say" about the perennial stay-at-home/working parent  debate, its characters can at times feel like chess pieces moved around a board in service of the author's larger game, but the observations about parenthood are so spot on it's hard to mind that the author might be working toward a particular conclusion.  

A snippet, when a character realizes her husband has to work hard at listening as she recounts her day:  

He couldn't help it that he was only partly compelled by the world she had fashioned over the past ten years since she had left work and Mason had been born.  That world could be absorbing yet was also pulled along by a current of tedium, and everybody knew it.  

Children had a lot to do with it; they were the most fascinating part of it all, but mostly only to their parents or, depending on the particular aspect, sometimes only to their mothers or only to their fathers.  You stayed around your children as long as you could, inhaling the ambient gold shavings of their childhood, and at the last minute you tried to see them off into life and hoped that the little piece of time you'd given them was enough to prevent them from one day feeling lonely and afraid and hopeless.  You wouldn't know the outcome for a long time.

Weather Reports: Spring and Siblings

Mid-May.  How did we get here so fast?  The trees to be seen from the curve of the window arabesque-and-reverse in the cold front, or what passes for one this time of year, blown in last night. Newly-leaved; as graceful as girls in spring dresses.  

Mid-May. The blackberries fingering the ditches are laden with knot-like white blossoms.

Mid-May.  A couple of weeks ago I retrieved from the attic and unpacked the box labelled Clothes: Age 3, so that Younger Girleen would have shorts and skirts and sundresses for the summer. Sitting on the floor of her room unfolding them was like thumbing through a photograph album:  oh, the dress Elder Girleen was wearing the night she had her first S'more, that week we spent at the beach...the skirt that arrived in the mail from Godmother M... When Elder Girleen was three, she might as well have been seven:  I had no frame of reference but younger:  three-years-old and she seemed grown-up, enormous.  

At the same age, Younger Girleen is still a baby.  So little!  We carry her around like she's a newborn. Those hand-me-down clothes seem so diminutive, so "cute."*

I was an older sibling myself, and I found my parents' laxness regarding my younger brother such a bitter pill to swallow!  I mean, the first PG movie I got to see in the theatre was The Bad News Bears — I was probably eleven.  My brother, a mere 8 1/2 at the time:  what was the first PG movie he ever saw?  Bad News Bears.  I undertook a careful accounting and the results were clear:  he got to be the baby but at the same exact time he got all the perks that should have gone only to me, being older.  No fair!

 Yesterday, I was putting away clean laundry and discovered a stash, a cache, at the back of Elder Girleen's underwear drawer.  There, carefully tucked at the back, were at least half of the 3T skirts and shirts I'd unpacked for Younger Girleen two weeks ago.  

But these are too little for you, I pointed out to Elder Girleen (secretly impressed by the extent of her subterfuge).

But I LOVE them, she said.  They were my baby clothes.  

I thought of the way teams retire jerseys in commemoration.  They were yours, I agreed and closed the drawer, letting them stay there, an homage to her younger self.    

*I would say that girl's clothes reach the pinnacle of cuteness at size 3T.   

  

Pure Luck

"Hang on to me, baby, and let's hope that the roof stays on."
— Brownsville Girl, Bob Dylan

Spring in this neck of the woods tends towards the effusive, the overblown. All the time I spent further west, I grieved over missing it each and every year: the tender green of Bradford pears as they begin to leaf out after an excess of blossoms, the gaudy yellow cascade of forsythia, the Ikebana-like branches of flowering quince, flesh pink and thorny. The smell of earth warming and air thick with humidity. Spring can be practically unmanageable around here, and last Friday's storm is nothing if not evidence of that.

This week, lots of Bradford pears, practically just minutes past their flowering, are either splintered or stacked up on curbs: they may be pretty but they're weak, and tend to give up the ghost during rough weather. Not more than spitting distance from our house, chain link is still hung with insulation blown there by the wind, and the air is full of the bite and roar of chain saws. The Weather Channel... I heard one construction worker say to the other as I drove slowly yesterday morning, window rolled down, through Cabbagetown, the neighborhood that lies between ours and Younger Girleen's preschool. Overhead, the sky's a lovely ceramic blue, and later on, when I short-cut back through the neighborhood three blocks further east, there's not a single shred of evidence that anything untoward even happened. I mean, there are mattresses stacked up on the curb but that's because somebody got evicted a week or so before, not because of any kind of weather.

And what were we doing when the storm hit? Elder Girleen was at a sleepover at a friend's house, Younger Girleen was sleeping, and the Husband and I were sitting in front of the living room window, having the following debate, having just seen a crawl at the bottom of the television screen announcing a tornado warning:

There's nothing about a storm on the radio...
Maybe it's a mistake?
Fulton's a big county... maybe it means North Fulton?
Is that a plane?
That's not a plane...
I think that's wind...

I may be Texas-born, but I grew up here: I ought to know enough to head for the basement during a tornado warning. But I was in my nightgown and the basement's nowhere you want to hang out unless you're in a haz-mat suit; it happened fast; we didn't know.

Luck. A small word, overused. "That was lucky." "Good luck!" But there's nothing like driving down a street to see one house, serene, unscathed, and that the two flanking it and across the street are now sprouting hundred-year-old oak trees from their roof lines to make you think about the thin divide between things: good luck, bad luck, there's just a few short blocks between the two, a few tricks of the wind.

Weather Report: March 15, 2008

Our neighborhood missed the brunt of last night's storm by a hair -- we are FINE; in fact we remained oblivious of the damage a 1/2 mile north of us until this morning.

Weather Reports

The sky today beyond the curve of window today is such a lovely ceramic blue, completely cloudless, but there's something stand-offish about its expanse all the same.

We are at the wintery heart of the year here, nothing like the wintery heart of the year out yonder where they really have winter, but all the same, it's time for the thaw. Time for the furled squirrel-ear of the pecan tree buds, and for life to feel practically translucent, vulnerable sap barely congealed into substance.

I recently undertook some work that involved a great deal of reading, in fact for a couple of weeks there I was awash in a sea of words. I cannot tell a lie: all those words were actually slopping over the gunwales. Hold Fast, I tell myself in times like these, that being the towrope sailors once had tattooed across their knuckles to remind them to cling tight to the rigging. Hold Fast — that being the tattoo I idly imagine I'll have, some day.

So many words. Here at the wintery heart of the year, I feel almost speechless in the face of them, in the face of all those bits and bytes that document what it means to be a parent at the beginning of the 21st century. Every bodily fluid, every sleepless night, every epiphany, has been essayed and storified and faceted and honed until it's not unreasonable to wonder if there's anything left to say.

On one level, this is simply an extended way for me to explain why so little blogging seems to get done around here these days; but on another, it might be a real, legitimate question.

These days, I primarily identify as a mother. Not as a writer, not as a Georgian, not as a... whatever. And I suppose that in the face of that, I fall prey to viewing writing and its attendant issues through the prism of motherhood. (To whit, toilet-training a child takes up more space in my brain that the complexities of starting a novel set in the mid-19th century). Does such an identification diminish or enlarge me? (And, to make that question more universal, you can replace writing with any of the creative arts, or with anything you considered jettisoning from the boat to keep it afloat during those early days with children).

Remember The Cult of True Womanhood read about in our college history texts? The Victorian ideal of the mother as the Angel in the House? I certainly wouldn't float the idea that many of us mother-types have become the Angel at the Computer, the work we chose to engage in shaped by social, political and self-imposed constraints.  (Especially since saintly behavior is not the name of the game here).  

Or: Is there a creative glass ceiling that seldom gets talked about? And is the blogosphere, allowing us all to be captain of our own ships, a way around that?

(Huge apologies to friend and fellow blogger B for hijacking her ocean metaphor).

State of the Union: January 22, 2008

Snow, snow, glorious snow! Feathery, quarter-sized flakes, perfect for packing into snowballs. Now it's just cold and my thin blood's resisting getting out in the weather, business-as-usual. My hat's off to Minnesota moms who deal with the hats-and-mitten dance daily for months.

Yes, the snow was three days ago and is entirely gone now, but this is the south, after all: it'll take a week for us to get back to normal.

Happy Thanksgiving: Another List

Younger Girleen, according to her teacher, is thankful for Mommy, Daddy, Sister and CAREBEARS.

Elder Girleen is thankful for her family and her friends.

And me?

The lovely blue glaze of the sky the past few weeks, especially when coupled with the brilliant yellow of the gingko leaves.

The pair of hawks taken up residence at the pinnacle of a neighborhood oak, and the fact that I have enough time in my day (at least a few times a week) to take Younger Girleen on a walk past them.

That I made it through the last school fundraising auction without spending over a thousand bucks on a mosaic table or a bauhaus-style playhouse (but o, how I wanted to!)

That we will be having pumpkin chiffon pie with candied pumpkin curls rather than a storebought pumpkin pie from Kroger (since I am making this, we may wish for that Kroger pie before it's all over).

That, since starting this blog, I put pen-to-paper at least a couple of times a week.

For friends and family.

And of course, god love them, for CAREBEARS.

Down at the Drive-In

Last night was Movie Night for Elder Girleen's school at the drive-in, so we made a nest of pillows and hello kitty sleeping bags in the back of the station wagon and headed out to see Bee Movie.

Well, ladies of the evening may use the play structure at our neighborhood park as a great place to ply their trade; the biggest hill around here might actually be the old landfill; but a straight shot down the thoroughfare leads you past Nail World, Dollar Land, Super Valu and the Foxxxy Lady straight to... the drive-in, and I wouldn't live anywhere else in the city (except maybe a huge Victorian manse complete with cupola on the other side of I-20).

As luck would have it, we ended up positioning the station wagon RIGHT NEXT to Elder Girleen's two favorite kindergarten guys. She almost exploded. Groups of kids ran recklessly from car to car, possessed by the anarchy that takes over when the adults of your world are otherwise occupied (in our case by figuring out how to extinguish the light in the back of the station wagon for primo movie watching).

The cold front blew in, we settled in: and I give the experience an A +. About the movie, though...

Ratatouille was at least about a rat expressing his creativity through cooking. Bee Movie, on the other hand, is about a LAWSUIT. The hive is sorta like the city in Metropolis but not in an ironic or interesting way, the whole honey making project isn't very ... scientific and the best thing I can say about it is that it made me realize how LUCKY we are that it's not the 90s anymore, when we all thought Jerry was the funniest thing since sliced bread.