2012, Diagnosed

It was a good year.

All years are good years.

I am trying to get less attached to ideas of emotional happiness and instead learn to see the fluid beauty in all things...even the rough things, even the stuff we are tempted to label and discard.

It is so alluring to kick 2012 out with a big heave ho and stamp it on the hiney as it goes with a giant red "FOR DISCARD" like a snubbed library book.

This was the year..... A had an accident with a bike and spent months in ridiculous physical therapy trying to learn to walk again after the official diagnosis of "bruising and small bone chip," it was the year we had such a plague of mosquitoes in our yard that we basically spent the second half of the summer indoors hiding, it was the year our shower started leaking through the dining room ceiling and we shifted to using the kid shower (still are!) while we saving up funds to afford a ceiling demolition, it was the year that I spent a week, heavily pregnant with my fourth baby teetering on the edge of a hospital bed holding my third son while he cried and pinning his arms down while nurses gave him i.v. meds, it was the year my cherished midwife was no longer practicing and I had to walk through this last pregnancy and birth without her care, and it was the year of illness after illness, the boys never all well at the same time.

But you know...there are so many sides to life. So many pieces to stories and so often, its all about your spin.

This was also the year.....I discovered eating grain-free/sugar free and thus shed a shackling depression, the year we met our gentle, fourth son in an amazingly quick and smooth birth, the year we hauled basket after basket in from our garden laden with peas and lettuce and tomatoes and our first ever watermelons, it was the year I finally took an interior design class, the year A picked up Spanish in his spare time, the year we celebrated surviving an entire decade of marriage together, the year we visited Hawaii and swam under a waterfall with our children, the year we picked the first fruit from our mini-orchard, and the year we made it back to Michigan for a family reunion on my great-grandparents farm, the year we brought home two furry little guinea pig sisters to live with us, the year I had a painting up in a real gallery and then sold a piece to a genuine member of the anonymous public, the year a Raleigh  policeman went out of his way to help find my stolen phone and restore my faith in cops, it was the year we were graciously mega-loved by friends in our homeschool group, neighbors and church when hard times did hit, it was the year we had a huge flock of daffodils bloom by our front door.  This and so much more...

I want to always look for the ripe, warm, flavorful bits in my experiences...even the things that feel bitter at first bite. So here I am with the winter light slanting across the floor and a round cheeked baby on my lap, on the brink of a whole new story. This year, whatever it brings I hope for more awareness, more open-eyed seeing, more love, more unity with side portions of vision, and dreams, and spine tingling to boot. Here's to 2013, doubtless, a good year!

Poetry Friday: A Vacation Memoir

Happy Poetry Friday everyone!!!! Its been ages since I wrote a poem. My poety self disappeared for a bit there under knee x-rays and layers of homeschool curricula. Am back and am not to be beaten down. Feeling very inspired by all the determined women who made office during the recent election. If they can all manage to accomplish political careers and break glass ceilings then I will battle to squeak out a poem on Fridays. Huzzah!

This week I am thinking of our recent trip to Hawaii. We spent some time visiting A's brother Miq and his wife, the inimitable  Penny (visiting family is a good excuse for trips to exotic locales!) and then we also took half the vacation to island hop about on our own and explore. We came to Hawaii for our honeymoon ten years ago so we were returning after a decade to not only enjoy the tropical breeze but also to remember where we started and celebrate having made it this far, back in a kind of grand circle. It was kind of a family vacation/second honeymoon/relative visiting trip...just a little of everything in there.

It was fun to go back as a painter. I feel like it changes the way I see so much of life...I notice amazing colors, the way light glows along an edge, and the soft quality of the air in a vista. One of things that really has stayed in my mind was the fruit. Its a beautifully agricultural and lush place so there's no shortage of ripe, juicy, glistening fruits everywhere. The fruits we have here are equally lovely really, there's just something very fresh about things you don't have where you live. This is what I am remembering now as the weather crisps and blusters outside our house and December looms large.

A Ripe Visit 

Staying in their teak, jungle bungalow
Was beautiful, like the breakfast papaya:
Glistening crescents of spoon-soft gold;
Florals melting into the walls of your mouth. 
They smiled easily and shared their croquet set,
The balls rolling into a dip under the banana tree.
Life there was warm and soft, rippling onward.
We stripped magenta ramubutans slowly and read
Languid stories to the children about dragon gold.
I got up one morning with the roosters and
Watched dawn rise over corrugated metal to the
Nutty snap of a longan skin between my teeth.
We made outings like good vacationers do 
To Chinatown for highlighter pink dragonfruit
To a local farm stand for starfruit with a song
Like a raspberry catching the crest of a sunset.
And to the pineapple plantation where the fruit
Rises like trophies out of a vast plain of thorns.
We picked guavas in a baking crater and ate them
Dripping juice on the gearshift in the front seat.
We found one wild lilikoi, plump and dangling from
Vines tangled with lipstick, wild fuchsia blooms.
That night when we sawed it open at the table
And passed around sips of the jellied seeds
They told us about a friend's newborn daughter
Improbably named after the passionate little fruit.
On the last morning of our visit, hustling for the plane
We ate breakfast together standing in the kitchen
Scooping up avocado flesh with spoons
And then hurling dripping mango into our mouths.
Desperate to eat up paradise before our flight.
We drove out of their bouncing lane and
Saw them framed by an enormous santol tree
Wrapping his arms around them in the sun.

Our host today for Poetry Friday is Amy over at The Poem Farm. Please drop by and savor some of the other contributions if you find yourself sitting with a mug of tea on Saturday morning in a quiet hour. A little poetry does a body good.

Have a beautiful weekend!

The Scent of Grandmothers

We are in high floral season here at our house and when I wander out to catch a whiff of what are now the tail end of the lilacs....I think of my Grandma Joyce. She is the only grandparent left that I can visit with in the flesh. One very special grandma who stocked lilac scented spray in her bathroom all through my childhood.

There's something very exciting and alluring about your grandma's bathroom when you're a little girl...all those jeweled lipstick cases, the fluffy towels and various hydrating lotions and curlers that were such mysteries from exotic lands. I always lingered and lingered  there in that land of forbidden treasures where I was alone behind a closed door. I admit to sometimes requiring parental retrieval in the bathrooms at all of my grandma's houses.

Somehow, through their bathrooms, each of them imprinted themselves on my mind in the form of a scent. Whenever I smell lilacs I think of Grandma Joyce and smile, remembering the pretty painted design on the side of the oh-so-exotic room spray she faithfully stocked in her upstairs bathroom. I'm thinking of her often these days since the smell of lilacs is always on the wind and really looking forward to putting Baby into her wise arms for the first time this summer when we visit.

My artistic Grandma Sally is the oiled scent pressed out of geranium leaves. I climbed up on her bathroom counter and sat cross-legged, fondling tiny, little guest soaps, printed with geranium blossoms that she brought back home from her amazing visits to The Grand Hotel on Mackinaw Island and kept against another day. In her sun room, a few steps below the kitchen, live geraniums were in near perpetual bloom, creeping along the windowsills in numerous colors and varieties no matter the time of year. I think about her every time my watering can brushes the leaves on my geranium as I make my rounds in my own sun room now, giving out plant drinks.

Great-grandma Grace lived in a farmhouse, out in front of the family vineyard where I was married. I was a very small girl when I first absorbed the hot pink smell of old rose in the little half-bath off her farm wife's kitchen. I am remember washing my hands an extra time or two just so that I would be sure to smell that dusty scent on my hands after I had dried them on her pretty little terrycloth towels. She was a little woman with translucent white waves in her hair, incredibly soft palms and a soft smile, always there, standing quietly in her kitchen....living forever in my memory in a misty cloud of eau de old rose. All June I'll think of her whenever the scent drifts down the sidewalk from a neighbor's garden.

My First Birth

Had one of the most fantastically inspiring nights of my life last night. Nutmeg and Carpenter Man's sweet second baby was ushered into the world and I had the great honor of attending the birth (can words express what kind of a friend-gift that is???? I think not.)  at the side of the midwife who delivered most of own children. I cannot even describe to you all the sheer, scream-at-the-top-of-your-lungs feeling of peak experience I felt walking out into the crisp, cold February air re-playing the visual in my mind's eye of Baby's placid, buttermilk-velvet profile, slipping into his mother's waiting arms and then being cradled to her face for first kisses.

Life is peppered with a few crystal moments and I knew--standing there on the curb, helping my mentor load her birthing supplies back into her trunk and then hugging her under the golden halo of the streetlights---that I had lived one of those great times. A time that will always be hung in space as significant.

So, to better remember, there on the sidewalk at 1:45AM, I pulled out my camera, squeezed my cheek against hers and held it out and snapped a memory. A little salute to one of my heroes.

So, here's to you, Martha, I feel so blessed to have knelt at the side of a laboring mother, next to you and to have peered over your shoulder as you worked and helped you lug your bags out to the car. I know that yours are big shoes, and I hope someday I'll be able to keep a pair on as I slosh down the road of midwifery. You're super inspiring.

Sweet Baby Nib

Sometimes, I can't believe how sweet Nib is. Heaven knows I love all my boys very dearly but there is just something so easy and uniquely sweet about him at this stage in particular.

He has learned pointing and it is his new hot trick. He points at everything, one dainty finger pinging out into space, clearly aware that it's an impressive trick. He also shakes his head no wildly now. I think he's the youngest of my children to learn to do that. Not that he understands what it means...I'm pretty sure he has no idea, honestly. But still...there he is, shaking his head wildly all the time: "No no nonono!"

He looks to see if I see him when he's about to cruise down the sofa or free-stand for a second. He loves books will come climb in my lap if I sit down to read the big boys a story and gravitates towards any storybooks he sees on the floor. He comes over to get hugs and give snuggles at all times of day, just because he suddenly thought of it. He lights up light a Christmas tree whenever I walk in the room and grins at me. He says "Dada" as clear as day and he's madly in love with my canned peaches.


Have you got a sweet someone at your house that you love at this moment in time for special small reasons? List 'em out. Why are you madly in love with them...at this specific point in history?

Cozy, Little Rituals

Been thinking about the holidays and parenting and doing a little post-processing. I love family tradition so the holidays feel like they're all highlighted as "Best Time Of Year Ever" or at least that they ought to be. It's the time of year when we actually do special, little family traditions, right? Although that's true, I am starting to feel like the December mania is a little too panicky to be my favorite and it feels slightly absurd to press all our energy for family ritual and "specialness" into that one month.

Instead, I've started thinking about the ways that we have little rituals scattered through our whole year, or even every day. We don't just hang stockings, make wishlists and sing carols...we also:

• Make a traditional clown cake for childhood birthdays (if they want one). A special passed down tradition from A's mother who did it for her seven children.
• We Eskimo-kiss. This is a new one, I started nose rubbing with the boys as our own variety of a family secret handshake. 
• I pray the same blessing/prayer over the boys, every single night before they go to sleep which, my Mama did for me too. I remember finding that really comforting as a child.
• We tell old family stories in the car. Not every time we're driving, just when I or A can think of a good tale and we're in the mood to spin a good yarn. The boys love it and we've been able to enliven a lot of the family legends and past figures this way.
• I light a candle in the morning when I get up to do my yoga and I slowly wake up to candlelight.

What do you do? I'd love to hear what little family traditions or rituals you've woven into your life, little ways you have made familiar, sweet or silly moments for yourselves.

A Christmas Date

A and I are taking time out tonight to go out alone together and get a little couple space. It's really good to do this anyhow, in normal life, but right now...when I am doing daily battle with the holiday gremlins of chaos, it's even more important.

 I need to remember that I love him, even if he drive me crazy. That we can enjoy being together. That love is the deepest, best good in life. That we are a couple, not just parents, employees, homemakers, schedulers, packers, bakers, cleaners, policemen, caregivers, creators, and homeowners. I hope this will be a new tradition. Our own, window of love in the madness of the season. A time to be still together, to step away, to absorb the beauty around us, and to purposefully make a small memory.

I'm not sure where we're going...we haven't had time to plan anything, so we'll make it up. After we go somewhere fun to eat and hopefully laugh a little bit, we're going to try to find a special Christmas ornament in a shop somewhere, for each of our boys, one that we can label with the year and their name and hold in our hands and imbue with all the warmth and richness that this year has held for our family. A small way to remember this time and try to help ourselves stir the aroma of purposeful hope just before we rush wildly out of town.

He's Two Months Old!

I do this all the time with a receiving blanket....wrap it around like a scarf to hold the pacifier in. A laughs and says that when he's older Nib will manifest a curious affection for neckerchiefs and not know why.

Still a little froggy, and getting pretty chubby.

He has a little, flat, pink strawberry birthmark on his back. Kind of looks like someone kissed him with lipstick on. Sidenote: WHILE I was taking this picture...he rolled over for the first time.

He has a freckle on the bottom of his left pinkie toe! So cute! I just noticed yesterday.