A New Year, A New Plan

Its January. My reboot button has been pressed and I get to start over! Usually I feel instant relief that the holidays are over and a new year is curling pinkly out in front of me.

This year I feel a little slow on the uptake. I think part of it is A's new job which requires his presence on the West Coast one week a month, jet-lag is our newest family tradition. Also, the boys are more familiar with Facetime and Skype already than I have ever been. Parenting together long-distance is a new skill.

And part of the fog is my Aunt Terri's death. I feel really fumblingly blue about her transition from bodily form to memory + spirit. I wanted really badly to see her one last time but instead my kids got sick and I lost my voice and we spent our time awkwardly spreading germs and mania to my in-laws in a flurry of wrapping paper and gingerbread. I hugged Aunt Terri's boys, my fabulous cousins during one squeezed-in face-to-face greeting and sent them every bit of love I could muster, staying abreast of their mom's foggy releasing and rallying by phone as the snow fell and fell and fell. So much of letting her go is kissing my childhood goodbye and taking on the intimidating mantle of being the cool auntie instead of just telling stories about mine. I am also working through a decent amount of anger and sadness about familial shortcomings, bizarenesses, and angst. Amazing what a watershed event like a death can bring out, eh?

Also we are having crazy weather...Apocolyptic snow storms, record cold temps broken up by grey drizzling rain. And yet...must survive. It is the only thing to do!

I am working on a batch of resolutions, processing out the last year, planning new local classes for the boys, perusing the local adult ed roster, and trying to find little pockets of inspiration here and there. One day this past week I called all of my aunts, one right after the other and talked and cried and laughed with them all over the phone.....for the first time in my life. Today the boys and I signed up to sponsor a beautiful little 4 year old girl in Sri Lanka per their eager requests and then spent a good bit of time reading about her world filled with monkeys, lush banana groves, emerald tea plantations and spangled elephant festivals. (We are already dreaming up a birthday package for her!) Tonight we have A's cousin coming to dinner for the first time ever after volumes of well-intending Facebook messaging over the course of years....may it be sweet. And yesterday I went to the library and cleared all the fines off my library card and picked up the first load of good reads for the new year.

I will come around. My energy is lagging but coffee is my friend, sleep will eventually get caught up and in the meantime.....it ain't nothin' that some good tunes can't cure!

Happy New Year, World! xoxo

Terri Jean in Collage

My Aunt is in a coma.

She is improving and I hear that she is slowly, slowly coming around. Making hopeful little steps towards waking. I am thinking about her, sending her a lot of love and long-distance encouragement and connectivity and feeling nostalgic. I made this collage about her five years ago, during a random online obsession with collaging those who have been influential in my life. She was a wonderful aunt to a little girl with wide eyes. She fed me amazing, exciting things, lived the vibrant expression of an artist in front of me and was the carefree, silly kind of warmth that I still copy in crowded rooms.

Tonight I am thinking of her and rooting for her and telling the world how much she means to me! Come on out, Aunt Terri! We love you so!
xoxo
Your loving niece,
 

A Woodcock Echo

What does it mean to receive a woodcock echo? I just got one and I'm still mulling it over.

Two years ago when we lived in a condo unit near some swampy marshland a couple of towns over I wrote a blog post about birdwatching out our back windows, inspired by my sighting of a woodcock. I hadn't seen one since my college ornithology class and was surprised and excited to catch a glimpse of the funny, plump bird shuffling through the leaves out back.

Yesterday the boys and I were on a foraging expedition in a leafy, forested sliver of property around the city block from us. Its kind of a forgotten, weedy little patch of land with a little-used trail winding through it, mostly a lot of overgrown brush under some big oak trees a place where the surrounding houses dump their garden clippings in big piles along the path. The boys and I were hoping to snoop out some wild witch hazel but came home instead with wild cherry bark, sassafras root, ribbed plantain leaves, heal-all stalks and white pine needles for various medicinal syrups and salves and recreational cups of tea. (Hooray!)

On the way into the woods scuffing through the leaves we almost stumbled on the small, fawn-bellied body of a dead woodcock. I imagine one of the neighborhood cats took him out in an evening stalking session and then was disillusioned after trying to drag the large prize home and left him there in a pile of maple leaves on the sidewalk.

Its interesting blogging one's life. There are small, odd things I notice, and sock away for writing "material." And small memories often stick in my mind more cleanly...like the last time I saw a woodcock walking along on a January evening off our back patio.

I am not a squeamish girl but dead animals make me catch my breath in my throat. I stood there calming my death-panic and my brain cycled all my related memories: my backyard sighting two years ago, my college class watching woodcock mating flights at dusk, my Papa bird hunting in the fall when I was little, the funny pictures of the round little bird in our over-sized bird book at home and John James Audobon's giant paintings of woodcocks in the big, quiet library at Yale...especially the one of a dead bird, posed so exactly like the still one at our feet.

Life echos are strange things.

The boys and I stood there quietly and then I told them everything I knew about woodcocks: how they were once thought to live part of the year on the moon, how they have eyes that can see almost 360 degrees around them, how they probe their beaks into worm holes and cleverly tweak even hidden food up to the surface for themselves, how they migrate in the cold, how shy they are, how they lay their nests on the ground and how the female raises the babies alone and all about the rocketing sky-show a male gives in the spring sky at dusk. They listened and admired the pretty shades of rust and chocolate on his feathers and his long, fine bill and the gentle tuft of his small, fluffy tail. We talked about animals dying and the circling pattern of life and Nib bent down and wished for a doctor, concerned over what it meant for this pretty bird to have left his body empty, here on the sidewalk.  I squeezed their sad little hands and we scuffed off together through the echoing leaves.

At dinner over a pot of sassafras tea the boys told A all about our encounter and all the things I'd told them about the little bird. I didn't say much, mostly listened but I was interested to see how much they'd soaked in and wondered about what it meant for this bird to echo in my life this way.