Warmed Me After Yet Another Snow

Here is a story that warmed me after yet another snow yesterday. My father sent me this BBC story about a woman who gave birth in the flood in Mozambique in March 2000. I have a personal connection to this flood, since my mother and I were painting a basement room in their house in Wheaton, IL, when we received a call from my father's organization, telling us that Meredith Long was missing in one of the worst floods Mozambique had ever seen.

The water rose with incredible rapidity, they told us, and apparently Meredith decided not to evacuate. Someone reported that as she fled the flood, she saw a tall white man with white hair who was not running away. I looked at my mother and said, "Well, what do we do now?"

"I guess we keep painting," she said, and so we did. As we rolled the walls with blue I thought, Maybe this is it. Maybe this is what finally happens to Daddy.

Later we heard he had spent the night helping people evacuate. From the tops of roofs he helped mothers and children climb into hovering helicopters, and then finally he jumped into one himself. My father tells this story with the sort of reining calm that characterizes all his stories, his stories of the tsunami aftermath, for instance. Matter-of-factly, in his quiet, unassuming way, he tells me details that kick me in the gut. Sometimes we have to pull details from him, and sometimes when we get him talking he tells us more than we expected, things that are hard to hear.

He's travelled my entire life. My childhood is filled with the smell of his suitcase, the way he unzipped it at the foot of the bed, swung open the flap, and dug around in his well-folded clothes to find a treat he'd brought us.

Both my parents possess this immense calm--I'll never forget my mother's even answer to my question when my father--her love and best friend--was missing, the way she prayed and just went on painting. Now I am a mother myself, I struggle to find that same peace my mother and father always gave us: the world might be exploding around you, but everything will somehow be okay, even if it's not immediately okay. Meanwhile, you keep on helping people. . .or painting a room.

Anyway, listen to the story--I thought it was wonderful.

Update: More Snow, Etc.

Merry wails from her room, where I sent her because Elspeth will not play her game. Her game consists mainly of telling Elspeth what to do. It is called "School" and when Merry started it today, fresh in from the blowing snow, Elspeth was a bad, bad student. According to Merry she stuck out her tongue, made other assorted faces, and then tore around the house like a banshee instead of staying politely in her seat in rapt attention and completing worksheets.

I believe Beatrix is knocking things off the piano.

Elspeth came to the supper table yesterday and drank huge quantities of water. We thought she was surreptitiously pouring water somewhere but she was drinking it down, demanding more, guzzling and quaffing. Today Merry brought me a big bowl of salt from a hidden shadow of the library table. She informed me Elspeth has been eating her way through it, like a buffalo in the African Wild.

There is a great deal of noise on the stairs, as if someone is dragging a huge, heavy object. It almost drowns out Merry's whimpering. It is Beatrix who is carrying the partial contents of my purse up the stairs. And. . .here. . .she. . .is. She has seized the mouse. Anything can happen.

Merry is panting, silent on my bed. Waiting for me to turn around, crush my face into sympathy and say, "Oh, dahlin. . ." I am waiting too.

Now Bea's abandoned the mouse. She grabs a permanent marker, a small post-it. She sits on the ground, uncaps the Sharpie, and says "Draw!"

Better go.

Merry Flash of Pink

Bus whines up the road and flashes its lights.

Merry in her bright pink coat high-tails it down the dirty bank of snow. A cobalt car swerves to the centre of the road alongside her. Watch out for my daughter! I'm thinking and blowing my nose and watching more snow swirling against the wooded hills.

The snow has been melting in glorious sunshine today, revealing the bright flesh of broken tree limbs.

Five days of dwelling in the house, four days of sickness, and I finally got out this morning. On my way down the front path to my friend Sally's car the sun was so warm that I started shouting like a loon. THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU.

Let me spare you the details of the sea of laundry, scrubbing, etc., that accompanies a winter illness with two sick children, and leave you with the sunshine at the end: a bright blast that hit me deep in the pit of my stomach and made me feel like a person again.

Just In

Just In: It's GRAY OUTSIDE!

And. . .Wong K. Foo has a finance proposal for me! Do you think I should take it?

For those of you worried about little Bea, you'll be happy to know that she
a. kept down her antibiotic this morning
and
b. last night ate mashed potatoes, ice-cream, and bacon,
and this morning ate mashed potatoes, a bit of banana, some lolipop, and some cookie.

Anything she asks for, she gets. So far she has not asked for nutritious peas or carrots but tends to concentrate more on "poptoose" and "chocate" and "ike-keem ees cooooolt!"

Sally my good old pal across the blocks sent me a revengeful message in my in-box that read: Toot toot chugga chugga big red car
For those of you who have small kids and listen (or try not to listen) to the Wiggles, you understand this is like receiving a virus in your mailbox. You. cannot. get. the. song. out. of. your. head.

More of the Same

It's so very very gray.

Go see a wonderful green elephant ear here. Scroll down past the elegant ice women in the arboretum; look for the rant about late winter and there you will have a glimpse of my dear Aunt Margie's magical green thumb.

Sadly my butterfly bush, weighed with snow, broke at the stem and this makes me terribly sad. I hope somehow it recovers.

Also Bea suffers again from an ear infection and will regurgitate her antibiotic. Ho hum.

On the plus side I've been writing lots of poetry, two new Kenya ones. . .I think it's the longing for dappled sunlight.

Rain on snow, four brown birds, dried black yarrow head

Bea calls

Poems and other things

Last night I picked up a book my mother gave me to read and tossed it back down again. Eight point font! What are they thinking? So I opened Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey and read it for a while before I realized I had already read it. This happened to me not long ago with Vanity Fair: about 2/3 or so of the way through it, I thought, hold on, this sounds very familiar. Of course! I've read it!

My mother told me the other day, with a hint of panic in her voice, that she had just baked a quiche without the eggs. . .and I reminded her not worry since I have already held up her tradition of forgetfulness by baking a cake without the flour (she's done this at least twice, not to mention forgetting where she's driving in the middle of a trip, forgetting my father was home in the middle of the night when she screamed: Ah! There's a MAN in my bed! Etc. Etc.) And may I remind you, mother, that your own father was so absent minded that he removed his own birthday cake from the shower (where someone had hid it), took his shower, put it back, and then was genuinely surprised later when they threw him his party? We're all totally wack-o. Crazy and loving it.

I have managed to read some very good books lately. I have some recommendations for you all from my winter so far:

Book: Davita's Harp by Chaim Potok. This was a new Potok book for me, and I devoured it--such beautiful prose, seamless and with told with impeccable timing.

Children's series: Betsy and Tacy by Maud Hart Lovelace. My sister gave the first three to Merry for her birthday and we are speeding through them quickly. Excellent characters, wonderful worlds, a lovely balance of imagination and reality.

TV series: The Impressionists. I thought it might be a bit dull, but it wasn't. Martin and I were enraptured. . .and educated to boot. Plus all the warm and beautiful scenes of France were a good balm to our winter-wearied souls.

What I'm writing: Poetry! I've been on a poetry kick lately. My favorite poems to read are the ones that open a door somewhere inside me. Here's a good one Martin sent me a link to from Poetry Daily, which I guess is sometimes hit-or-miss but this one was HIT: Witness by John Burnside

I've been writing lots of poems about birds, birds moving and appearing, sipping wine, travelling and, my favorite--exploding. I've got two exploding bird poems so far. . .and so many to go.

Martin and I were discussing this morning how poetry is such a freeing genre--it's belted and constricted neither by fiction or nonfiction. I looked at Martin as he edited one of my poems the other day and noticed that his concentrated pose was identical to his puzzle-solving and rubix cube posture. He's a good master of form: he loves the music of lines and words and the way they all fit. We have wonderful times together around the kitchen table, passing back and forth a poem, mine or his, cutting lines and chewing on a single word, spitting it out, finding something else, laughing at an image that seemed so clear to one of us and seems so ridiculous to the other person. My favorite from last night: my Grandpa losing his eyes and teeth, and that one, combined with the exploding birds, led to great hilarity, especially since Martin acts it all out.

I don't know what silly person said that art is a reflection of life, because I am coming to believe that's a skewed metaphor. What you really want in art, in this case, a poem, is not a reflection of life, but the life itself, the colors as bright or brighter than what is banging around in your faded memory. Let me see if I can explain it--the other day I was struggling to write down a dream I'd had that was haunting me: there was a long beach that got wider and wider as my dream progressed. I was walking down the beach to reach my parents, who were walking toward me, but no matter how fast I walked, they were always further away from me. To my right, white wild horses galloped, their manes thick and lustrous, and in mid-stride, vanished, as if they were running through a hidden curtain. There were other details too, but no matter how I tried to record the particulars of my dream, the words would not cooperate. I accomplished what I thought was a fairly decent job, but Martin took out his scissors as usual and began snipping away. "Wait!" I said at one point. "That's not how my dream was!"

But then I realized, it didn't matter what was, only what is in the poem. The poem is a new moment with its own colors and music, not a somewhat dim reflection of reality: if an image works in the poem, than it belongs, but if it doesn't, it should go. I love that freedom. In prose, especially nonfiction, there's so much struggle sometimes to be true, or at least true enough, but a poem is its own thing. And I love having a small space to work a world in: one page, maybe less, maybe only three words, and I've got to find words just the right color, tone, and smell. So I pick over maybe a hundred words, turning them over in my hands, feeling them, smelling them, bringing them to my ear to listen closely, rapping them to see if they will explode--and I pick three or six or twelve and they are the right ones. It's a process of discovery and discipline, and it's so good.

An E-mail I Just Wrote on the Eighth Day of School Cancelled. . .and Counting

Martin--

I have recieved a message in my e-mail: Im Li Yu is offering me a better future. Do you think I should take it?

How's the cleaning going?

I am JUST sane over here. Back aches. Beatrix has poop. Elspeth's socks are wet and she is despondent about her prospects in general.

Guess what? It's snowing!

Me

More

Currently I watch a blizzard out of my window. A woman in a black hood walks down the road and picks up speed as she turns up her front path. Two cardinals, blood red, seem to jump out out of the bush by her steps: in a second they disappear. Where in the world did they go?

There has to be a porthole somewhere where I could poke my head above this white, white, and gray that has taken over our town for the last three weeks. Merry's been out of school for six and a half days straight, and even Bea (who wakes up and demands, "Where's sunshine?" and then concludes: "Down to seep" or sleep) is starting to find her own ways of coping: popsicles and chocolate. Every time we put her in her chair she looks at the freezer and demands: "Poptoose!" The other day I found her with a chair up to the freezer, holding an ice-cream scoop from the drawer. Goal: sherbet. Hey, if the poptoose is "all down" (all gone). . .

Today Merry gleefully led me to a pile of gold coin wrappers and smeared chocolate behind the couch, where Bea had been taking advantage of the left-overs from our Valentine's/Birthday tea. I cleaned it up while she napped but then later as she and I sat sharing a banana, she said: "Chocate!" and scrambled down from her chair and made a bee-line for her happy place behind the couch. "All down?" she said. I must admit I have been indulging in similar coping mechanisms, such as "evening up the cake." You know that game. With a fork, you trim the cake so it's even, and that takes a lot of concentration and a lot of eating.

Elspeth and I were having a knock-knock fest the other day when we deviated mercifully into riddles:

Mommy: Why did the elephant go out of the house without his coat, hat, scarf, and boots?

Elspeth: Because the stores were all closed.

Mommy: No. Because it was summer outside.

Elspeth (eyes round, astonished:) I didn't think of THAT!

Well, I've been pouring over the calendar, and though for a few blissful hours a couple weeks ago I forgot entirely about the existence of March (I like to skip right to April and the first robins), winter can't last forever. Right? Right? It can't possibly. . .last. . .forever. . . .

I'm Dreaming of a White February. . .

Yesterday when I awakened from my nap with the girls (I've had a nasty cough and been a bit tired), the snow had finally stopped. The sky was a stunning blue and huge clumps of snow were falling from the trees. Two happy birds circled one another in the sky. Below my window I could just pick out the shapes of our picnic table and forsythia bush, and the hump where our brave young oak tree was bent double under the drifts.


Yesterday morning, standing in the front path, Bea was rather puzzled and upset at the wall of snow blocking our path. The snow came up to her shoulders. Sledding proved a bit frustrating since at first the children could not find the sleds at all under the drifts. . .finally on their sleds, they tipped off again and again in the wet snow, topped by layers of freezing powder. . .but hey, it's pretty fun all in all, at least for we lucky few who have a warm house and hot tea to come back home to.

Up in Seattle my parents have been walking along the coastline in sunny, 50 degree weather. Thanks to us here in the east, they're enjoying an incredibly mellow February! Bully for you!

I've never seen so much snow, bar the one trip we took through a blizzard when I was eight or nine to Buffalo, New York. During our blizzard yesterday, I realized what a monochromatic world looks like: everything was covered in a heavy, blinding whiteness. The tall, spindly trees on our property line suffered heavy damage (see below).

We are one of the lucky families with power, which means we have heat and water. Our friends up on Poplar Ridge (see their link in my Calling Cards) are completely snowed in without power, water, or telephone. They're gathering wood for their stove, plowing themselves out oh, so slowly, and melting snow for water. The beleaguered power company estimates that power will be back next Friday!


Much of our county is without electricity and there are warming stations set up around town. While our corner of PA is not unused to heavy snowfall, it turns out this one was especially damaging because of the weight and wetness--beautiful, half-dollar size flakes that the children caught on their tongues also accumulated quickly to collapse power lines and tree limbs.

At this very moment I am looking at a fellow pushing his car up out of a slippery driveway--apparently the woman behind the wheel got frustrated with waiting and almost ran the fellow down--he jumped out of the way just in time.

Church was cancelled but we sang a happy song of thanksgiving for our warm house, our electricity, and good food.

Martin Cockroft, One Year Older, A Billion Times More Gorgeous

My man, Martin. One year older on the thirtieth (I remember his birthday with this rhyme: Martin is sturdy! January thirty!) Truly, my brain for numbers is so awful that this is the only way I could remember his big day. My mother called late on the 28th (note: we have been married for 11 years now). I thought someone must have died and I was just waiting for the other shoe to drop. But a very happy voice on the other end in Seattle said she had called to wish Martin a happy birthday and--that's right--it's later where we are, right? So I tell you: I come by my number befuddlement naturally.

But back to the main attraction.

Martin was celebrated all weekend long on four different occasions. He baked his own birthday brownies but he did not cook his own birthday meal (and neither did I, for that matter--I kept on wishing myself a happy birthday until I realized, that's right--it's Martin--you're just standing in the right place at the right time.) I even gave him a luxurious sleep in, though the two older girl's CLEAN UP! song and Beatrix climbing all over him made it a bit of an interrupted one.

But this, by far, is the gift every Daddy really wants, and the one Martin got Saturday morning after his birthday pancake:

A MAKEOVER! He looked so pretty for his big day.

I wish the colors of the eyeshadow would have come out a bit better in the picture, but you get the general idea. As we were driving out to lunch, I had to tell him he still had lipstick on. . .a lovely light pink. I think something darker would actually suit him better.

I told the girls--(helped by our dear friend Catherine)--that they were really very lucky to have such a nice Daddy.