Christmas Past

My good father-in-law sent pictures. . .

So, late in the game, here are a few, almost all from Texas.

I had a post planned in my head--two days ago--but I am currently at BLAH stage. You know what I mean. The three girls are finally in bed, two so tired that they cried. Funny children. I feel as though I have earned my hour or two of mindless entertainment before sleep tonight.

So enjoy the pictures. Don't I have gorgeous extended family?

Merry and her cousin Isabella.


My beautiful new nephew, Jacob.

Elspea and her cousin Lilia.

Elspeth in her element, or one of them.

Merry and Martin embarked on a day of art in downtown Houston--they sketched, created poems about a Mark Rothko painting in the Mark Rothko chapel, and Martin conducted an interview with Merry. Merry's earlier art has been compared to a Twombly, and here she is outside the exhibit.

Two birthday cakes in one day: Merry wanted cheesecake, and Elspeth got the lemon-glazed vanilla gumdrop. Aren't they rather pretty?


Out of the warm TX weather, back to snow! Snow! Snow!

Bodums Up--Another School Day Tomorrow!

Dear me, my fingers are so cold. I usually have a space heater up in this room but my sister's family gratefully moved it down to the guestroom so they wouldn't have to wear ski bibs to bed. They are gone. I could retrieve it. I am too lazy. This old house boasts a fireplace in every bedroom--beautiful old fireplaces that must have warmed the toes and fingers of the occupants so long ago. Modern convenience triumphed and now we have one vent--in the hallway--that blows warm air toward the attic door. We bundle ourselves in robes and slippers and pray that the warm air finds us in our bedrooms.

Elspeth, darling girl, snuck in the room earlier, flung herself upside-down under blankets on my bed, and fell asleep. Sleeping children. Something eternally wonderful covers them, bathes their faces in summer sunlight. I want to put my head down on her chest and feel her breaths like the rolling of the sea. . . .

But enough of that somewhat sappy mother moment. Tomorrow it's back to school for Martin--Merry and Elspeth start their second weeks back. I must face my to-do list: Christmas bills, letters and my grant report to write. School lunches to pack, early mornings and homework evenings. It's been a splendid break, utterly splendid I tell you! We capped it off with a leisurely day spent with good friends who like to eat and laugh. This holiday has been full of such deeply good moments: eating, laughing, drinking hot tea and listening to the coffeepot burbling away. My mother declares a personal vendetta when she glowers at my Bodum Frenchpress (too fragile, too fiddly, too cool too fast). To please her I brought in Mr. Coffee. He spent a couple weeks at our house as a welcome guest--wreathed my mother's face in pleasure, and which daughter would not pay 15.99 for that? He left with the company and my intimate friend Bodum is back again, waiting for me to start another school day tomorrow.

Bodums up, mes amis!

Taking a Swim

Honestly! More snow!

I was on the phone this morning chatting away as my soul became more and more engaged with the tableau out my back porch window--fluffy black birds huddling on branches of what I call my "Bird Tree." Their head feathers engulfed their little faces like wreaths. The Bird Tree is incredibly messy: tall, gangly, hung with grapevines, not unlike a new, greasy-haired adolescent wearing too much jewelry. But the birds love the mess and cling to the branches and stray vines through the winter, which means I love the tree too. My Bird Tree and I are old friends, especially in the midst of the cold and lasting insideness. Here I am, happy enough but inside, with a baby on antibiotics, eating leftover Christmas chocolate and watching the snow blow across our porch roof.

I have boiled yet another pot of water in my jolly tea kettle. Here are my plans for the afternoon: to dig a deep hole in my living room, fill it with tea, pull on my bathing suit, and take a nice long dip in Darjeeling. Anyone care to join me?

After

Outside my window the neighbor's strings of white lights twinkle in the snow that has whisked about for days now. Usually, in wintertime, this time of day fills me with a sense of gathering gloom. The lamps I click on in defiance of sadness seem swallowed by darkness that deepens and creeps into the hidden spaces between my mind and joints. Tonight we said BOO to the gloom and set our little table with a bright orange checked cloth, a plate of jam tarts, and cobalt blue tea cups. We drank to being a simple family again, quieted for a second to listen to the happy, calming hum of the heater. . .and NOTHING ELSE. It's quite a change from having twelve people, half of them children, in our house for the past ten days. Before that we went awassailing to Texas--before that, endless parties and visits and a flurry of good intentions. The yells of victory over games, the child admitting defeat to another with tears, giddy laughter, the rustling of wrapping paper, snowy scarves, books and clinking of good eating with so many people I love so furiously.

Ah.

Silence.

Happy New Year.

Newsflash From PA

For immediate release

* * * * *
RESPONSIBLE OLDEST GIRL RECEIVES THRILLING GIFT

Merry Cockroft, responsible eldest girl of three, received a bright pink case of make-up Sunday afternoon. Her response?

"It's a relief and pleasure for me to receive something frivolous," she said, or would have, had she articulated the look of bright excitement that lit up her large eyes.

"Merry gets a lot of books," her mother said. "Everyone thinks Merry likes books the best, and she does enjoy them, but sometimes she just wants to be a kid. I try reminding her that she is the most responsible, the most mature, the most grown-up of young women. But she is eight. Wanting a frivolous present is understandable, I guess."

Watched by her younger sister, Elspeth, Merry carefully applied purple eyeshadow above and below both eyes. Then she walked around like "she was somethin' hot," a bystander observed.

"I like the black eye appearance," her father commented. "It makes Merry look older and more mature."

Both parents are processing Merry's unexpected glee at the pink duffel of make-up. "It will take us a while to get over the shock," her mother said, quietly zipping the bag around the twenty shades of eyeshadow, "But we must remember, children are complex. We may think they only like books and lists of spelling words, but they are full of surprises."

Elspeth, who is enjoying her book of Tinkerbell stickers, also shocked her parents. "We always expect Elspeth to do the unexpected," said her father. "Her mother and I were sure we'd find stickers on her baby sister, on the walls, possibly up her nose, and on pots and pans." Instead, her mother reported, Elspeth covered papers with the stickers--"Paper!" her mother emphasized, wiping a tear from her eye. "Just like really responsible children! It just goes to show you," she added, deftly swiping the makeup duffel out of reach of Elspeth and her baby sister, "Children are full of surprises. Truly. That's my Christmas message to you and your family this year: Enjoy the unexpected. I have."

Happy, Busy Weeks and Elspeth

Well, it's been an extremely busy holiday season here, and we're on the cusp of a trip to Texas. On the day we arrive back (Christmas) in PA, so do all of my family members!

Before I get carried away in the final pack/clean, here's a little Elspeth story I've been saving for some days now. A little background: Thomas is a boy in Elspeth's preschool. He features largely as a character of mischief in her stories, and the troubles he encounters and the devious nature he shows in her narratives are certain embellishments of what I am sure is a peaceful, calm demeanor. When I try to pry details of preschool out of her, mostly what I get are Thomas Stories instead. This one was too good not to record. Following are her words:

Thomas was inside his Mommy waiting to be born. And he ate one of his Mommy's bones. Then they jumped over the sea and he got swallowed by a fish. He jumped over the moon and that's all of the story.

Happy Christmas season, everyone!

Up Toward Ohio Pyle Park

Last Friday we took a long, long drive up toward Ohio Pyle Park so Martin could purchase his Rock-Collecting Permit. Ten tons of rocks from State Forests for five dollars a ton! Not a bad price, really, if you love collecting rocks. More about that later.

The drive started beautifully, dipped into Ugly and stayed Ugly for a while. But then Beauty rewarded us for enduring dreariness as we climbed in altitude--hills lush with rhododendron, ornamental pear trees still blazing orange, running fences and horse farms.

After a brief stop at the Park Office, where Martin obtained his rock-collecting permit (first one ever issued) and the girls flirted with a huge statue of Smoky the Bear, we drove a short way to Lynn State Park where we piled out of the car for our mile hike past Lynn Falls. Seemed as if it would be a simple hike until we realized that the thick carpet of leaves hid jagged rocks. We held the two little ones, since every time they began running they fell flat on their faces. Near the end of our hike, Elspeth chanted from my hip: "Stumble, trip! Stumble, trip! Stone man! Stone man!" I joggled over and around all the hidden rocks. As we hiked the light shifted through Canadian hemlocks, delicate fans of needles like frost patterns. The light began to take on a wintry quality as the sun fell. Underneath the leaves and among the rocks we saw thousands of acorns with hats lying askew. What lazy squirrels had missed these riches?

Occasionally, a crashing in the brush would make me look up for another human or a deer, but a little striped back would disappear over a rock--all that noise from a chipmunk! I wanted the children to see the little chaps but they moved too quickly and the children were too loud.

Night was falling quickly as we drove back toward home. Running colonial-style fences, constructed of crudely hewn black lumber, fenced in a field of dun colored sheep. On the hill behind them, black cows grazed; behind them hills rose, covered in bare armed trees against a the bright pink streaks of sunset. Trees arched over the dipping roads as we passed old stone farmhouses, bright red barns. A man outside his door stretched his arms out as if he were welcoming the warm evening.

And then we were back to Ugly again--bars and roadhouses forced us to stop at Wendy's, where we grudgingly ate our junky food under blue and red balloons given to our children by a clown dressed up with fake eyebrows and perky braids as Wendy. I glanced up from my bacon cheeseburger to see a giant cheeseburger passing by the window on the side of a semi.

Ugly shook us into Eerie as we drove by the powerplant with its huge towers white against the night sky, billows of white steam chugging from gaping mouths. We looked at a city of lights and electric spikes so close we could have tossed our giant Wendy's diet coke cup over the fence.

Ugly, Beautiful, Eerie, Exhilarating and Sad. That's our piece of America, rural coal mining country. Today as Martin collected ancient rocks covered in moss, he listened to the sounds of mining across the street, looked up to see the twisted stumps of recently felled trees and the deep tire tracks of excavators that bare mountains to dirt.

Post script:
That Friday night a magnet from the Forestry office, discarded on Martin's bedside table, advised me to "Get My Smoky On." What does this mean?

Greene River Trail

The Hiker in early spring
Bea in her green longjohned legs sprouting out of her sparkly pink nightgown, damp hair. . .she should drop off to sleep quickly. She gave a good, May Westish "Buh-bye" and then blew kisses indiscriminately as we walked up the stairwell. We had a funny sort of supper--tons of leftovers--but I told the girls they were having a four course dinner (better than what most princesses can boast) and they were utterly delighted: first course, scrambled eggs; whisked away to be replaced by beef stew; a plate then instead of a bowl and they ate up a piece of pizza; and finally I gave them each a rice bowl full of whipped cream for dipping their fruit.

We spent such a lovely afternoon by the Monongahela River--a tugboat pushed two barges down the water, which was so still it looked like a lake; the girls played in leaves and Martin built a rock fence by the Hiker, who was made entirely out of scrap metal by an ambitious boyscout. The Hiker signals tea time, but when we spread our blanket in his shadow I realized I'd forgotten our mug. This gave me the pleasure of a very brisk walk to the car and back whereupon I fell at the Hiker's feet and ate chocolate cake with my fingers.

On our way back Bea crouched down and crawled after a tiny cricket, marking his progress with her animated exclamations. At one point she became puzzled because he had suddenly disappeared; it turned out that he was rather squashed under her fat baby hand. I think he may be crippled for life, but how he was adored! At our right the hill rose up into a fringe of trees. At our left the horizon smoothed away in the glassiness of the still river. The air was unseasonably warm, but as we passed by the waterfall, a cool, muddy breeze blew down at us. We stopped and drank it in--the change was so sudden it was as if we'd passed into another world, another season, a memory of our childhood.

Then back home through the golden light spilled over the hills, the old beautiful houses and cows grazing and the smoke of a leaf fire. Finally the sheen of late sunlight was behind us; there was home and our funny dinner and baths and loud noises of children thumping up our stairs on their way to bed.

Hide and Seek

I observed Elsepth and her sweet friend Ben yesterday playing Hide and Seek. They were both hiding; nobody was seeking. At least nobody I could see. As they crouched in the front hallway behind a heap of shoes, Ben said, "We're hiding from God."

"People have tried that before to bad results," I said. Watch out for large fish with capacious mouths.

Later I reflected playing Hide and Seek with a three- and four- year old is probably a bright spot in God's rather serious schedule of disasters and dreary requests from the rest of us. Ben told me God can't see through doors, so maybe he turns that off as a sort of handicap to level the playing field.

In other news, I have a new nephew! Born this morning to my sweet sister-in-law Caroline: Jacob(nobody knows?) Guerra.

Martin's already announced his intentions to call the boy "Yakov." Caroline's husband, Ilich, is Columbian and named for a character in Russian literature, and Martin thought it only right that the tradition continue. Congratulations, Guerras! Welcome, Yakov!

My Friends

I lost my three half-days a week, and though I mourn the absence of our dear friend who is now student teaching, the cut in hours has been good for me. Now my nurturing friend (Bea thinks of her as another of her mommies) takes the non-school girls for two mornings a week, and those two mornings are so precious to me that I do not squander a single minute. If I have three hours, I sit down and I write the whole time. I am glued to my chair, no getting up or lollygagging unless I am DESPERATE to urinate or my three-baby bottom falls asleep. I write two new chapters a morning. Having limited time (say, over the past seven years) has produced one very important characteristic in me: Gratitude. I don't take even ten minutes of writing time for granted. I imagine that's a key: not having too much. Generally speaking, having just enough and making the most of it seems to be one of my keys to contentment. And what do those keys look like? Do they gleam like ice or are they dull from burial? I suppose it depends which day you catch me.

My dear Maple Mullihan and her oddball family feel, like my friend LJI in Missoula reflects about her novel's characters, like good friends by now. I hear Martin playing a song ("Dancing in the Moonlight") and I think, "That's a song the Mullihans would LOVE. I bet they're singing it." For a while there I felt all caught in the morass of publication (I had missed my by-the-time-I'm-thirty-I'll-have-a-book deadline) and then I turned a corner, and like Arnold Lobel's Frog, I spied spring! Why do I write? I asked myself. And I answered: Because I must to be happy; because I enjoy it! And so I jumped into the rather brisk waters of the new book and splashed around like a happy idiot. I must admit there are fairly muddy eddies here and there where I'm not sure what's on the bottom and I'm afraid to put down my toes. But why do something if I can't find a shred, or a hunk, or a whole lot of joy in it?

My girls are always spinning such delightful tales, and they have no use for time lines or inner pressures to produce. Elspeth turned her face to me at nap time the other day and reported in all seriousness: "Mommy, when I was born someone threw a pie in my face."

That's good stuff.

So is the warthog story from my dear friend Rachel that you must view. It's not every day warthogs eat your hand cream.

Driving

Hello, lovies.

I've a peeling nose from overblowing, a full heart, and a swollen gland. I just finished my morning goal of writing two more chapters on my Maple Mullihan sequel (never mind the first book hasn't yet been accepted--a mere detail!) and I'm rather happy with the sunshine filling the whole of my window pane. I'm rather less happy with the rotten fish smell outside, but that's different mining-town Pennsylvania story altogether. I did want to share an account of my mystical drive to church yesterday while my gratitude for it is still fresh in my innards:

I left the children with Martin yesterday morning. With my travel cup of coffee and my materials for Sunday, a sandwich and pumpkin cookies in a crumpled paper bag, I left a screaming Elspeth and headed down the front steps. I'd been complaining a bit about making the drive by myself, especially as Martin seemed fabulously comfortable in his slippers, but as soon as I sat behind the wheel of our Subaru, I knew I was in for a happy time. I banished NPR, my usual background noise to the cacophony of children, for the silence that sat beside me companionably as I pulled out of town and onto the highway toward Morgantown, West Virginia.

The highway cuts in between rolling hills, which were once mountains of the western america magnitude, but are now comfortable and more like an old grandmama who is a bit saggy and droopy but all the more beautiful for the marks of her children, who have eroded all her sharp edges. Occasionally you spot a house on a ridge line or in a valley, and occasionally there's a blight, like a box store or a car dealer, but mostly there are just endless trees, curving upward and out until you find the horizon. The morning of my solitary drive, the sky was clear blue, the sort of blue that makes you wait for contrails and swooping birds.

The deep green and thrumming reds of our autumn seem to have burned away to give way to a golden blaze. As I drove down toward the edge of Pennsylvania, the maples burned on all sides. The trees seemed to have drunk up all the summer sunlight and were alive with gold. The maples were like a blast of music, ringing in my head, bringing tears to my eyes, when suddenly the road curved upward into a cloud.

All the singing hushed, and everything was white and soft and far away, echoing out on all corners of the road. I thought the mist would last only a few seconds and then I'd plunge back out into the color again, but it went on and on. I turned on my headlights. The cars around me slowed a bit. The mist moved through the hills and as I moved more deeply into it.

It wasn't until I was in West Virginia that I realized the fog was gone. I don't know when I drove out of it, but suddenly I noticed I could see the striated browns of the rock walls to the left of the highway. Shafts of water darkened the rock in solid waterfalls. Then it was out of the mountains back to the rolling color, the spheres of yellow and red, the flickering of leaves, the dipping of the road. I increased speed to that good old West Virginia pace--78 and curving through autumn, descending finally to my exit and to the university traffic and to the responsibilities of people and noise.

A Full Tea Kettle

Here is my short Friday wish list:

A full tea kettle always ready to whistle but not screaming. Perhaps I should like the heft of the kettle under my palm and fingers, enjoy the filling. Still I wish it were always full.

Also a silent person who puts the tea cup, with perfectly blended milk and no sugar, at my elbow, whom I do not thank but who knows I am thankful.

Beds that change their own sheets.

More tunnels.

I think maybe I would miss the snap of the sheets and the way I feel my mother is with me, at my elbow, watching every time I tuck a hospital corner. I would perhaps miss bobbing the tea bag by its string in the hot water, watching the swirls drift into the corner of the cup.

So I'll whittle my list down to one:

More tunnels to beautiful places.

And add one:

A yard full of mature maples and pines. I awaken one morning and there they are, standing in my yard like old uncles, hands shoved in corduroy pockets. They have always been in the room.

Autumn, Continued

Bea's face looks like mine when we take drives these days.
New England may be fine, but our autumn is pretty glorious, too. I wish you all could be here to see it. Today I cooked up an acorn squash and my o my but there isn't anything better, especially with a little cinnamon, brown sugar, and apples.



Lest you be tiring of the odes to autumn, I do have a luscious piece of news: my man Martin just got a poem accepted at Beloit Poetry Journal! Pretty proud of that guy. So proud, in fact, that I whipped him up an acorn squash tonight. That's the kind of wild way we celebrate around here.

Autumn Now

For my parents in Bangkok and Martin's parents in Houston, here's a little of what you're missing:





Our first hoary frost lay over everything--the stroller, railings, car, trees--zapped the zinnias, but melted quickly to give way to a perfect autumn day. Beatrix's favorite new thing: chasing squirrels in the park. One threw down nuts at us today as we waited for Martin. My mother has always had a particular knack with squirrels--one at the Episcopal Church in Maryland chatted regularly with her.

Are there squirrels in Thailand? I won't list what I'm missing by NOT being in Bangkok. Martin cooked Thai noodles tonight, so it's almost as if we're there. Hmm.

Zippitydodah! Hoorah for yellow and red! And for Thai noodles!