Hmmm

So Martin and I are downstairs with a huge pile of pancakes and coffee. The girls are watching Madeline for Treat Day. Martin and I are talking about stories and publishers and so pleased that we're alone to talk, right?

And then it dawns on me: Bea is not here. She's upstairs--we hear rattling and banging. How is it that she has kept herself so busy up there?

Martin comes down with a report: Bea has stripped her clothes and diaper. She has started a bath for herself, pulled down the bath toys, and is squatting in the tub. On the landing: a perfectly laid turd.

Happy Saturday, everybody!

Today: Martin plants sugarsnap peas, the kids play outside in the garden and under the tree that split in The Snow (here with our friends the T. children), and I frost two dozen cupcakes for a violin recital.

Right Now: Six robins and a squirrel beckoning us to leave the pancake dishes and run outside!

poetry vs prose

Martin is a pencil point
I'm a stack of scrawling scribbling ink blots

This is Martin writing poetry: 24 lines
Here am I writing a short story: 24 pages
And I have a sneaking suspicion his story is better

It's nice to hold one sheet of paper
with a body and soul on it
I've got a fan of characters
and plot shimmies and blasts
If I let it go in the wind
it would be lost forever
on hedges and in gutters
and in pedestrian faces
if Martin let his go
we'd pin it down
easy as one foot stomping
one short laugh as he bends
folds it in four
sticks it in his pocket

____________________________________________
ps. the picture above is actually a photo of when Martin and I organized his book of poetry for submission: we used the entire living room floor and crawled around among the pages, rearranging--what a good feeling, to be with poems in such a tactile, physical way.

O-O-O-O-Being ALONE

There are fireworks of crocus in our front bed by the brick path: deep purple with golden centers. . .the tulips are pushing up strong and thick and the daffodils are wisps of green in the front garden. The forsythia bush, though bent and bed-headed from the drifts of snow, is covered with buds.

I just wrote a letter to my mother--here's a very brief portion that explains how wonderful life felt this morning:

The babysitter came after a long time away and I felt almost giddy as I stood in the sunlight in my own room, alone to write for four blissful hours!!!! Hallelujah, there is nothing so good perhaps as that feeling--even when I'm most happy over the girls it is a more complicated happiness, a happiness that includes still being responsible for them and concerned for their welfare and one that is mixed with a little sadness that they are growing up so fast. . .but the bliss of being alone for the first time in a long time with sunshine and a computer and your own room--oh, it's so uncomplicated and so good.

Currently there are three girls in the bath; it is almost eight and Merry has a spelling test tomorrow. Elspeth has been screaming because Merry is threatening to put her in the dungeon and the floor is flooded with discarded clothes--so I'd better go.

"Martin" Lookalike Stars in "Mentos Commercial"

Click here:
MARTIN LOOKALIKE APPEARS IN KNOCK-OFF MENTOS COMMERCIAL

But, Honestly. . . .

The blast of light caught us all by surprise--after a month with three documented days of sunshine. The hands that had held us so tightly in their dark palms finally opened and we found there was a world outside!

Today is grey again, and I resigned myself to the fact that the sun was sleeping again (as Bea says). I slogged through the puddles in the supermarket lot this morning, shopped in the florescent glow, and urged myself to be patient and enjoy myself as the shopper in front of me chatted at great leisure with the check-out woman. It is one of the charms of a small town, after all, and when my turn came the checker greeted me with similar ease and asked how old Bea was now, and then we had the conversation I've had one-thousand times since the birth of my first daughter: how time flies, how you turn your head and your first child is twenty-four, and how you can't keep your eyes off them or you'll miss it, it's so fast.

And the air was cold and wet and heavy with the smells of snow-melt and exhaust and mud.

Tomorrow, my friend Sally tells me, sunshine will return. I looked up with a jolt: really? I had forgotten sunshine comes back faster in March!

So with my children: so much of life, like last night when Bea broke eight eggs all over the freshly mopped floor and Elspeth fell of her chair and then down three stairs, and Merry was full of a sense of injustice--so much seems endless, a long winter of enduring. And then there are these bright, blinding flashes of light--small hands on your face, the down of a child's head under your palm--and you realize that life is a privilege that you are given. Turn your head, as the checker said, and you miss it. And the realization of the gift socks you in the stomach and you think, I will never forget this feeling of gratitude; I will remember to treasure every moment. But then a long grey day comes and the cuffs of your pants are all muddy and wet and you wish you were on the other end of it.

The trick is, I guess, to somehow embrace all that as well. This is the hardest discipline I have to master: embracing and living with all things, whether easy or hard, happy or miserable, anticipated or unexpected. Sometimes I come across someone I think has that gift, and I am always disarmed by their shrug and the smile that spreads across their face, their admission that they only have it down some days and not others. Some days are diamonds, as Kenny Rogers says, some days are stones. I add: some days are winter, some days are spring.

Though honestly, folks, let's be honest: aren't we ready for spring, now? For the season of waiting to end? Who doesn't want the sun-blast? ME! ME! I want it and I want it now! Lent, finish! Easter, come!

Rites of Spring

Last Week
This Week

Snow Eaters and Sun

A much-spotted, red Snow-Eater at Wazoo Farm:


Now--
Sun for two days straight! Is it to be believed? March, I adore you! There is nothing, nothing, like awakening to sunshine on your pillow.

Coming

I wanted to grab a robin
bury my nose in his feathers
take his head between my fingers
search his serious black eyes

Now don't fool with me mister
You do know about spring
how it is coming down from those snowy hills
about to steal over sidewalks and redbuds

Instead I watched as he burst into the sky
all warm feathers and claws

Pick up a bird

Pick up a bird by its bony head and ring it like a bell until it's springtime!

There are such things as exploding birds. As we drive into the hollows of our snowy county, a bush KABOOM sends a cloud of cardinals rising into the air. So maybe it is the bushes exploding with birds!

I noticed while I was in my bird-obsession not so long ago, that EVERYBODY writes about birds. But nobody loves birds the way I do. Nobody, no sirree.

Martin and I have been sending piles of poetry and short stories and essays off to journals and yesterday was a record day: four rejections between us; three of them were mine; two out of four were fairly stock rejections; Martin's had a note he described first as 'snarky' and then as jolly good because it referred to his poetry as "high energy" much as a tired parent might refer to their toddler. I got a great rejection from the Missouri Review asking to see more of my stories, so now I just need to write more. And I stayed up almost until midnight getting two more submissions ready, so as to make up somewhat for the rejections. It's a rewarding process :).

I have to say, it's much more fun to be rejected with someone else than by oneself. We almost bought dinner out to celebrate but we thought we'd wait: as Martin says, if we keep buying ourselves dinner every time we're rejected, we're going to be broke (between the two of us we've got, say, about 100 plus things out). Maybe we'll wait for an acceptance. There was that bright week when we both got accepted to two diffferent publications. It is a nice memory and we're swimming in our rejections with humor and comraderie. So far today neither one of us has been rejected, except by our children, which makes us feel all is right with the world.

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