effervescent & pink
Where we are, now, is in a quiet, remote rented house, with a view of mountains and woods, for a few days while our son is at camp. It’s the first trip we’ve taken alone in nearly a decade, a little preview perhaps of the looming “empty nest.”
the map is the territory
I took my time, hibernated in white hotel sheets, emerged infrequently, shored myself up.
busy busy busy
Imagine if every building, every structure, on its surface, bore the image of its contents. A library: Love it. A restaurant: OK, maybe. But the logic quickly breaks down. Meatpacking plant? Factory floor? Morgue?
gathering up
All this morning, rain. I hear it on the street as the cars pass. How I love the small sounds of this early hour. Radiator staccato, the house creaking and settling, its ancient joints.
staggering multitude
At times, in their company — the young, fiercely smart and accomplished, so much still unknown — I feel yearning for a past that could not have been possible. A life that was not my life. But at times, I can see the anxiety and panic of their unknowing, how they are searching for boxes to check, for steps to follow, for instructions for living, so they can know, with unwavering certainty, that they are getting it right.
vividness of crowds
Cocktails and prosecco. Fancy truffles on the tiniest, most charming plates.
such revisitations
I am continually undone, derailed by my own weak refusals to engage, to abide, to persist. A heightened fight or flight that rises up, demanding slipperiness, turning away.
“stewards of transformation”
For the volume, I had written about ghosts and I suggested that as a starting point. That I am interested in not only what is visible, but what is felt, known, sensed in ways other than in language. And in working, I want to make those ways of knowing explicit, specific, in focus.
belonging
I've just finished reading Nora Krug's Belonging, with the intent to include it in my literary memoir class in the spring. She is living in New York, but returns to her childhood home in Germany to try to learn the truth about her family's involvement in WWII. Through bits of family ephemera — photographs, notebooks, letters — she pieces together a complicated portrait, the burdens of inheritance of family and of country, the long afterlife of war.
home again
The days have been cold but bright and yesterday, a light dusting of snow that by morning left no trace. The semester is winding down, at long last, and I feel like I am regaining bits of myself, energies that have been scattered and worn thin these past months.
summer’s end
Last night in the soft misty dark, we sat on the grass and watched the dogs greet each other. I was uncomfortable about the news we had received but you have always known how to set a broken bone.
bedazzling
I remember a visit to my sister's house years ago. She had spent a week "be-dazzling" everything — mirror frames, table tops, dressers, closet doors — with plastic gems and beads. It was clear that when I got there, she was seeing it all anew through my eyes. She said, "I took the hot glue gun and went a little crazy I guess."
a way of being alive
We waited for rain. The rain didn’t come. The air, so heavy with waiting. We went to the water’s edge. The water was so cold. We stayed for a while and then we went home.
collisions
Coincidences are not coincidences per se, they are simply flows of events in which every other possible event is simultaneously happening in infinite other worlds.
are holding
My son graduates from middle school next week. Last night, we watched from home while he gave one (of a few) culminating presentations from school.
I haven’t even left
This strange in-between state. The temptation to think of "going back" to a way of living, but haven't we learned by now there is never going back? There is only ever wading into the river as it flows, letting it flow.