The Curious Adventures of Angela Christine

NonfictioNow Conference!

2010-10-14T08:34:00.000-07:00

If you are anywhere near Iowa City and you write, or like to think about writing, you need to come to this.
You may sleep on my couch.
I will make you pancakes in the morning.
We will be beautiful together.

NonfictioNow! Conference

November 4th-6th 2010

2010-09-27T07:03:00.000-07:00

here's the thing: most mornings i go outside with a candle and coffee and books and sit in the dark until the squirrels wake up and start flying and the rabbits hop out from under that bush along the garage that they sleep in and the sun rises and turns my little candle into a joke again. and every morning it strikes me as strange that all this happens without a fattened calf burning up on the altar or a pretty young virgin being tossed into a volcano.

Metaphor

2010-08-03T09:56:00.000-07:00

I am a literalist more than I would like, and so, when you say, hares are soft meat, I think of our honeymoon out west, and of that restaurant, that floating restaurant we went to on the ship in Vancouver, or was it Victoria? And of how there was a buffet with frog’s legs and shark and rabbit – which isn’t hare, I know, but the closest I’ve ever come to knowing soft hare’s meat, though I don’t think I ate it. I think you were the only one who ate it, and I probably stuck with the chicken, or maybe, no, I tried a little piece of thigh off your plate because I usually feel compelled to at least try something once. It was dark and tender, like a small taste of wild opening in my mouth. It was not a taste I enjoyed, but it was an expensive restaurant and we were poor, of course we were poor; we were so young – you too young even to be eligible for the insurance of the rental car that we used for the wedding. The white Crown Victoria. Like the city we were headed for with money stuffed in our pockets from our parents. (What were they thinking letting us go off like that so young? Not that we would have let them stop us.) Driving out from the prairies with our shiny rings to wake the next morning inside a heavy fog over the lake and blue mountains, and fat flakes of snow falling down to smother the summer green. We couldn’t see a thing, and we had paid so much money for the view, almost as much for one night there as half our new couch in our new apartment with the good light and the blooming lilac in the backyard, and the neighbour who chain-smoked and filled our place with the smell. Snow in June. We didn’t know what it meant. Not that it mattered. We only closed the door after waking and burrowed back into the rumpled sheets. Like rabbits. Or hares. So young. Soft meat. Quivering.

Hello? Wanna be Friends?

2010-08-03T09:53:00.000-07:00

I've been in Greece. And Turkey. And the Canadian Rockies.
I've been spoiled rotten. Pictures here.
More on that sometime, but this is to say I'm still alive and writing. Sort of. Trying to. Miss you.

Home Coming

2010-06-10T15:48:00.000-07:00

We travel by names. Choose by the pull of them. One summer we follow a map to Peachland just to eat up the sound of it. Twelve hours of driving to arrive at night to an over-packed campground, fire bans, R.Vs parked along the gravel road with unrolled turf and potted plants. I pitch our tent in the crowded dark - the semi dark of patio lights strung like stars between awning poles, electric constellations. Later, we walk the path from site to site to see what we can see, see, see: a lone purple plum drooping over a fence, tiptoe height, beside the sandy volleyball court. All she wants that summer is to pick fruit from a tree to eat, and so I lift her to it. The plum as sweet as a plum should be.

Tonight, we are sleeping in St. Cloud. I found it floating on the map between where we've been and where we will end. Patron saint of weather, or shade, or rain? City of what? In St. Cloud there is a woman who works the desk at the hotel lobby with sharp, pointed brown teeth. When I tell her the washroom is in need of a cleaning, not because I am angry or disappointed or looking for my money’s worth, but because I assume she, or someone, would like to know, she tells me she can’t very well clean the washroom and work front desk and the breakfast table at the same time. “No, I say. You certainly can’t.”

No one seems to know why the name St. Cloud. “But that’s a good question.” I would also like to ask if growing up here makes it easier to believe in God, or, at least, believe in a world where clouds are holy, and if the clouds than the rain that falls from them too, then the ground it blesses, the food it sprouts, the bodies that eat from it, the feet that walk on the soaked and holy mud?

We swim in the pool in the early morning before we leave because this summer all she wants is to swim. The chlorine is so strong our eyes sting from it, and though I shower when I am done I smell St. Cloud on my arms all day long as I drive away from it. Exit north, my directions read. Turn. Merge. I check the map for names to pull us along. Check every twenty minutes that I’m headed right because I am so easily lost, distracted from the point by sweetness. That dot on the map above me with the name I have never asked any questions of.

Oneirology

2010-05-08T14:08:00.000-07:00

I dream of a book and I wake to the memory of it; small, square, accordion folded; thick white pages; a Jacob’s ladder of pages, climbing and falling away from each other. I collapse it together with my fingers and tuck it into my shoe, so that now we both walk with a limp like sockets wrenched by a wrestling angel.

Why talk of dreams in an age without prophets? (But have I told you the one where I wake inside a dream and rush to you in a late panic? That you only touch my shoulder and take me inside, smiling, through your door, past the old woman in the rocker on the porch, into a waiting newness? How I know, even inside the dream, that despite appearances it’s me forgiving you?)

a.) The skinny cows ate the fat cows because they were hungry.
b.) The many sheaves of grain bowed to the single sheaf because grains have hierarchies.
The meanings are obvious and scientific.

The prophet Wikipedia on dreams:

1. They are ever-present excitations of long term memory

2. They have the function to erase (a) sensory impressions which were not fully worked up and (b) ideas which were not fully developed during the day

3. Dreams are a memory reinforcing itself.

All those times I could fly. I want to remember flying.

I dreamt of the book and woke to a fierce rain breaking the new spring flowers, climbed from my bed onto the porch to watch the streets flood. The shower
a.) finicky faucet, now hard, now soft
b.) a curtain lowering and blowing itself before me.
On the last pouring rush I took off my coat and walked from under the roof, shoeless over the flowing ditches and stood bare armed, bare legged in the empty road. Rain babbling in its mother tongue, untranslated through clothing. Why talk of rain in an age without forecasts? (But what does this really mean? The way it will still fall on barren ground - oiled roads that only wick it away and send it elsewhere.)

Ha!

2010-03-26T11:09:00.000-07:00

How the World Just Grew Wider

2010-03-21T07:19:00.000-07:00

What I didn't know this time yesterday and what I know now, is that I have a Matisse shaped hole in my heart that I have been filling this thirty-four years with scraps of popcorn and ribbon and quotes that I like. But yesterday, I stood and stood in front of this picture and cried, tried to catch my breath, while people came and went, came and went beside me (who can say why one thing digs deep into one person and not another?). And I felt I was dying the way poetry makes me feel I'm dying, the way writing makes me feel I'm dying, the way God right up to my face makes me feel I am dying, reduces me to a moaned prayer of paralysed ecstasy. My skin, my heart, my eyes, my stomach, my bones all liquid, so ready to fall away, fall to the floor and leave standing that spinning centre that only wants to inhale. To exhale some sort of hallelujah.

Eating in the Ghetto on a Hundred Dollar Plate

2010-03-02T16:26:00.000-08:00

The short version is that I messed up.

The longer version is that through a confusing and nail bitting and nerve wracking serious of stupid events, India ended up with no health insurance in a country that, well, charges lots and lots for a visit to the emergency. $1600.00 later, and this single-momma-grad-student-living-on-a-fellowship has been bumped from person to person to person in government/social services trying to figure out how to pay for that sucker - the bill, not the daughter, or me, though I am a bit of a sucker. Today, a very nice man named Scott told me that the best he could do for me was to let my bill go to collections and maybe I could work some payment option out with them. Poor Scott. His voice got all shaky and nervous and I heard him put on a fake tough-guy suit to get through it. If he wouldn't have sounded so darn nervous I might have let mean Angela out, just because I was feeling a little freaky by then, but, I didn't. But holy smokes: COLLECTIONS? Isn't that one step away from debtors jail where India will have to bring me meals of bread and water and work in a factory making rugs because her little hands are perfect for those tiny embroidered flowers that all the clean rich ladies like?

Damn it. I need to learn how to make money writing. Imagine that. (And while you're imagining that, ask me how much money I got for that children's book I published. Yeah. You know. The one that won that award and sold out. Just ask.)

(*I should add that India is fine now. In case you're the worrying kind.)

In other news: I think I like writing again. It was touch and go there for awhile. I think I might, might like it still. Ask me again next week.

AND, AND, AND... HOLD ONTO YOUR HATS!

This Friday by 5:00, you will be able to pick up your phone, dial 319-354-0214 and reach ME ME ME! And India. The "No Phone" experiment of 2009/2010 is done. It was a flop. It is darn near impossible to function without a phone and you would not believe the rigmarole you have to go through filling out forms without a phone.

Boys and girls, ladies and gentlemen, I am full of heart. And dinner. And the desire.

Good night.

So, So Yes.

2010-02-24T10:46:00.000-08:00

“I’m hopelessly, futilely drawn toward representations of the real, knowing full well how invented such representations are. I’m bored by out-and-out fabrication, by myself and others; bored by invented plots and invented characters. I want to explore my own damn, doomed character. I want to cut to the absolute bone. Everything else seems like so much gimmickry."

- David Shields

The Semester Has Begun

2010-01-28T07:43:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, even with their famous kindness here, it feels a little like they have stripped us naked and thrown us out into the blizzard with a pair of tap shoes, saying, "Dazzle us. We know you can." I sat down to class yesterday, next to the other student who has the same fellowship as me, and he said, "They told me they expect more. More from us. There are expectations," and the anxiety billowed off him like storm clouds on a mountaintop. "Fuck that," I said, and we laughed, because how else can you respond to such expectations and live? This is all I've got. I'm giving you all I've got. But I walked home from class talking to myself and swearing into my scarf and the wind all the way back after a teacher's biting comments to me.

Some days, I feel like all my interactions here are with people needing propping. We all need to see that kind face and those scrunched eyebrows looking back at us and saying, "I know, I know, IknowIknowIknowIknow." There is so much fear of failure. We're writers. Of course there is.

"I feel like a seventeen-year-old asking this," says a man in class, "but is it even possible to write and be happy?" The room is silent because we are all afraid of the answer, and later I lie on the hardwood floor of my office crying, because no one tells you how to jump into those dark pools and not drown, they only tell you to dive deep and bring up treasure.

"Fuck it," being my favourite phrase of late. Fuck it. Fuck it. I think Jesus understands.
I will not can not should not shall not play that game. Fuck it. And my mouth tastes like happiness as I say it.

2010-01-27T07:25:00.000-08:00

I spend hours on my blue and white checkered couch everyday, supposedly reading, but mostly looking out my window perfecting my ability to be distracted. Right now, I am supposed to be reading this, but it's snowing down tiny flakes and I've got a mug of coffee, the furnace is up as high as I like, there are a few hours until class starts, and I miss this place. I miss you.

Have I told you this? The way when I was a kid I would sit in church on Sundays and take the prayer cards on the rack of the pew in front of me and I would write out prayers and drop them in the collection plate, sending them out like little magical letters headed straight for God, until my dad, who was a deacon for awhile, back when there were deacons, was asked by the prayer group to ask me what was up with all my prayers, and I had a vision of reality - of all those church adults sitting in a circle and reading my prayers and wondering what to do with them.

Last week in church, like every week, the preacher held up the cheap paper duo tang that holds the "Prayers of the People" and he prayed them out, one by one, whatever anyone had written. And when he got to the prayer that asked God to help the teenagers who are smoking to stop from smoking, his voice didn't waver at all, or cringe and turn self-conscious at the oddity of it - at the way I couldn't help but immediately hear an old grandma berating her grandson for his long hair, bad skin and SMOKING! I liked the preacher all the better for his steady voice through it and his faith in its receiver, though I squirmed in my hard pew and wondered what the visitors must think.

I've been talking and thinking and wondering here about my writing and my praying and my living. "Every poem is a prayer," was said to me, and I thought yes, but to whom? And what is a poem, never mind what is a prayer.

I write to you in my head all day long. And sometimes your name is the name of ones that I love, or of a best friend that I miss, or my family, or a teacher, but what I like, what I've always liked and only lately understood is that you are my placeholder for God. The way I write to dear you, safe you, good you, and you gather up the longing, the missing - because it is all a round longing for the fullness I can't yet hold - and in your receiving you send it like the prayer cards were meant to, like the preacher on Sunday, like so many letters freed and flying through space, into waiting hands that meant to hold them all along.

2010-01-27T07:24:00.000-08:00

I miss you.

Also,

2009-12-26T14:36:00.000-08:00

you know you are a momma when you take off your shirt and nestled in your cleavage is a fishy cracker.

Ha!

2009-12-26T14:34:00.000-08:00

So I'm researching St. Valentine and I find this:

"Saints are not supposed to rest in peace; they're expected to keep busy: to perform miracles, to intercede. Being in jail or dead is no excuse for non-performance of the supernatural. One legend says, while awaiting his execution, Valentinus restored the sight of his jailer's blind daughter. Another legend says, on the eve of his death, he penned a farewell note to the jailer's daughter, signing it, 'From your Valentine.'"

The Curious Adventures

2009-12-19T13:59:00.000-08:00

I want to write and tell you all about how we missed our plane ride home yesterday, how I tried really hard not to cry in front of the gum snapping girl at the airline counter who rolled her eyes at me, how another kind woman got us a different flight home, how we were met at the airport with so many wide flung arms and hard hugs, how I almost cried when I saw my momma looking so thin in her black coat, how when we got to her house at 1:00 in the morning we sat on her bed and poured over the flavour map of chocolates and ate three in a row, one right after the other, and then drank tea on the couch until we were sleepy and warm. But mostly, more than anything, I want to tell you how my family is safe. How we will be together for Christmas, how my little brother and sisters are staying, how this time joy beat out grief, and how all I want to do is stuff all my family into one room together and just look and look and look at them all. And look.

Stop

2009-12-16T07:30:00.000-08:00

If you pray, at all, I need you to stop and pray for my momma and my little brother and sisters - the three foster kids. Please. Please? It's not an over statement to say that their entire lives are about to be determined for good, or for very very bad today, in the next few hours, and my family is on the verge of collapsing and we really need your love. Stranger or not. We need you.

What It Became

2009-12-10T19:32:00.000-08:00

The Ecstasy Of

Beside me on the left appeared an angel in bodily form . . . He was not tall but short, and very beautiful; and his face was so aflame that he appeared to be one of the highest ranks of angels, who seem to be all on fire.
-St. Teresa of Avila

She wakes to the floating moan. At three in the morning she had been lying in bed, between the red sheets, beneath the white quilt, limbs and hair floating loose inside the watery black night, a book asleep on the pillow beside her. She hears the moan, wakes blind in the dark and waits for the shifting tilt of the real to return. She has been pack muling desire for so long now that for a moment, until it returns, she thinks the sound may have slipped from her own mouth to wake her. What had she been dreaming.

In his hands I saw a great golden spear, and at the iron tip there appeared to be a point of fire. This he plunged into my heart several times so that it penetrated my entrails. When he pulled it out I felt that he took them with it, and left me utterly consumed by the great love of God.
St. Teresa of Avila

She holds her breath. The air moans again above her, soft but unboundaried, and travels through the dust that is trapped in that secret space between floors, between the neighbour’s suite above and her ceiling below, over eighty-year-old plaster and nails and joists still smelling of sawdust, and out into her room spilling spirit.

The pain was so severe that it made me utter several moans.
St. Teresa of Avila

He’s all doe-eyed, the boy who lives above her. And when they talk about the things that neighbours talk about – like parking spaces and garbage pick ups, he stumbles on his words and looks anywhere but her face. Because she makes him nervous, she smiles more, though it’s lost on him; he’s not looking at her. And he licks his lips again.

The sounds from his suite funnel down the stairs and pool in her bedroom all day long, rising up at night over the edges of her sleep and waking her, have been waking her now, for weeks. She could mark off on the wall the journey to this rising moan like waterlines on a riverbank: here, when the girl first came to his place; here, with a small group of friends when she laughed so loudly and left so late; here, the first time alone; here, tonight, at three in the morning, and the climbing, unclothed little sound carving out a sacred hollow in the air and flowing down into her hall, her room, against her neck and in her hair. The moan and moan and the moan.

She could prophesize its future, thinks she understands these things, but for now she is only trapped below it. Were it his voice instead of the girl’s she would have snapped on the lights laughing, banged the pots and pans. Or had the girl cried like a banshee, knocked books off bedside tables, broken lamps, cracked bed frames that liquid moan would not drown her like it does, leave her with a mouth full of river bottom and fish nibbling at her ribs.

The sounds bodies only know before.

This is not a physical but a spiritual pain, though the body has some share in it -- even a considerable share.
St. Teresa of Avila

Once before, she had lived in an another apartment with paper-thin walls. Once, when she was wide-eyed, laughing in surprise at all the sweetness there. And though the neighbour always banged when the T.V was too loud, he was silent then as she laughed her way through every room, from bedroom to kitchen to couch. Now, in her bed, in the blind dark, she wants to gather up that gentle moan and hold it safe. All its concentrated sweating, hurtling toward morning and post-ecstasy light.

The sweetness caused by this intense pain is so extreme that one can not possibly wish it to cease, nor is one's soul content with anything but God.
St. Teresa of Avila

She has had visions. In the bedding aisle of a crowded store she has seen the folding back of her thick white quilt to cinnamon coloured sheets like the peeling of a fruit to a soft warm centre. Like a burst pod to a rich and pulpy heart. She had wanted cinnamon, but they only came in red. No angel aflame, or golden spear; no point of fire. Only red.

Modern ecstasy being what it is her vision comes as common as bed sheets, as romantic as animal love and sex in the barnyard, but it is, she thinks, all the same. All hunger and ache, all sweet secrets guzzled and bodies laid bare, to a turning, and the waking up.

Things That Delight

2009-12-09T05:08:00.000-08:00

Marilynne Robinson tied the bow on my dress this Sunday.

India gave her first ever reading of a poem and two jokes that she wrote to a packed house on Friday. It was pure awesomeness.

Nick Flynn is coming to class next semester and I am dying, dying of happiness.

One of India's babysitters just published a piece in the The York Times.

I was just accepted to go to Corfu for two weeks this summer to write. Ha!

I'm taking a class on St. Augustin next semester.

We're going home in nine days!

Angela is...

2009-11-24T13:28:00.000-08:00

soaking raisins in rum for apple strudel.

Not Coming for the Kill

2009-11-19T07:10:00.001-08:00

Spider

2009-11-16T08:18:00.000-08:00

We are sitting at our round kitchen table eating peanut butter toast with bananas, and she, who is six, wants to know about the Nazis (Who did they kill? Brown skin? White skin? Black skin? Old people? Children? The sick? Handicapped? Us? Me?).
“Would they kill us, momma?”
And I say that yes, they would kill us. If we were brave enough to stand and say they were wrong, that their ideas of perfection were wrong, and that all people all people all people are valuable, that they would want us dead.
I say this in my housecoat, in my unwashed hair, with one eye on the clock and one eye on her heart. She smacks her lips, and says that she hopes she would be brave enough.

I think of you. Of your cracked bones and split soul, of those crooked healings we were blind to, the secret brokenness, of your stunning new styles of self-deception, and of the way this one has eaten up those cupped crusts of hope we were feeding off of. The failure.

She asks me what the Nazi symbol looks like, and I trace it out on the table top with my finger, imagining it there between us, black and thick, that unforgiving spider spinning out its sticky perfection.

2009-11-11T12:10:00.000-08:00

Because I want new words like I want new blood, like I want new teeth, new elbows, new claws. Because I am sick to death of the whiny moan, the sad heart, the hopeful tales, because enough is enough, because when is growing up, because don't be a child - magic is real, fool, because words are so thin and bone and I want ripe and round. Because, oh, because, ah, because ah, ah, ahhhhh. God almighty, a new thing rising up.

The Liturgy of the Hours

2009-10-31T10:11:00.000-07:00

From the Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 16:

As the prophet says, "Seven times in the day I have given praise to Thee," so we shall observe this sacred number of seven if at the hour of Lauds, Prime, Tierce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Complin we fulfill the duties of our service. Therefore, at these times let us give praise to our Creator for the judgments of His justice.

Lauds

“O God, come to my assistance. Lord, make haste to help me.”

5:50 am – The alarm goes off and I turn in my warm bed of red sheets under a white feather duvet. It is still black out the window and the announcer on the radio is blathering on about the pre-dawn weather as if weather, as if anything can really exist at this hour while the world sleeps on. But I am not ready for forecasts or dawn or God, and so I grant myself ten minutes more, banking on God’s mercy and on his memory of a warm bed on an early morning.

And then, I am up, grinding the beans, boiling the water - four minutes to brew the coffee in the press until it is thick and black with a foam on the top, and I pour it into my warmed brown mug. I sit on the couch with the windows that face the street, the dripping leaves beyond my front porch, the trash cans, the wet lines of dropped brown cedar needles, the dying grasses. I balance my coffee with my lectio divina, my sacred reading, my daily meditation: a verse, a sip, a thought, a sip, a verse, a sip, a thought, a sip, and I poke at the God that is hanging in the air around me. But I am tired and easily distracted, and most of my prayers are grafted onto lists of things to do and ways I should stop worrying or women I should become. Until I have only five minutes left. But then, I sit looking out the window at a small orange spot on the trunk of a skinny maple across the road. It is so bright and out of place that I wonder for a moment if it has been painted onto the bark, except that I can see now that it is growing. The orange moves upward like a spreading blush along the trunk and into the leaves, so that for a moment it is glowing and golden while the rest of the trees sleep in quieter colours and the sun pulls itself into the sky and into another day. I watch and inhale the light’s movement and the blooming of the colour across the morning.

Prime

“O God, come to my assistance. Lord, make haste to help me.”

Waking her is the worst and sweetest thing I do. Her folded six-year-old self with it’s sweaty curls, sprawling limbs and parted lips sleeps so unaware and open, like a love letter left lying on the table. I sing to her and she smiles. I whisper to her that it is time to get up and she smiles still with her eyes closed. She moans and hides under the blankets to stay longer. So I practice some mercy and let her take her waking slow. But at 7:20 when the breakfast table is full of crumbs and she is talking or dancing or daydreaming more than she is eating my patience bashes up against the wall of its boundaries. “You need to hurry up, sweetie.” “Come on. A little faster.” “Get going.” “You’re going to be late. Now hurry up or you won’t get to finish your breakfast.”

7:45 am – Teeth brushing.

7:50 am – Her in the shower.

8:00 am – Both of us dressing.

8:10 am – Hair brushing.

8:12 am – Lunch made, bag packed, shoes on.

8:15 am- Out the door.

We arrive at her school at 8:20. Kiss. Hug. The bell rings. She smiles at me one last time and follows the line of wandering first graders inside. I’m not used to her being away from me all day, or of the way the school swallows her up whole and leaves me empty-armed standing on the pavement alone.

Terce

“O God, come to my assistance. Lord, make haste to help me.”

Now, I am running. Up Church Street, toward the river, down the hill and across the bridge. I think as I cross the river, as I do every morning, of the man that ran in front of me here once, bare chested, shirt in hand with the early morning sun already hot, and of the way he all at once unfurled his arms as he crossed the bridge, crossed the water, and flew down the sidewalk like a bird riding the wind, and of the way that some blue sky, a brown river, and an early hour can gather together and loosen the string to a heart’s unwinding.

I cross over the bridge and am down past the houses, the theatre, the same older couple that I see most mornings with the woman that smiles at me as I run by. I leave them all behind me and slip into the cool green trails of a treed park. My lungs rage, my legs burn, my skin is slick like a fever, and as I round a corner with gravity heavy on my back I am stopped by the cool liquid movement of a deer, two light brown deer as they slide from one green jungle to cross my path and back again into a greener side. I take off my headphones and peer into the undergrowth after them, but they have already slipped away into the secret world of animal.

Sext

“O God, come to my assistance. Lord, make haste to help me.”

I have rushed from my run back home again. Showered. Dressed. Checked my email. Cursed at the time and at my impossibly tight schedule, and then raced out the door to the type kitchen, and now I am setting type: one silver letter at a time without even the possibility of a shortcut; my fingers cannot cheat; they smell of ink. I love the drawers of tidy letters, the sound of the roller, the white sheets of paper, the language of typeface and picas and slugs that I am just learning to speak, that I’m slow and awkward, that I fumble like a four-year-old with a pencil in her sweaty fist, that attention must be paid.

None

“O God, come to my assistance. O Lord, make haste to help me.”

When I started applying to graduate schools, I held my daughter up to the map of the world that hung on my bedroom wall, and I pointed to the places where the different schools were: British Columbia, Ontario, Alberta, and then some that passed over from the orange coloured form that was Canada into the dark green space of America. And though she was only five I could see her calculating her quantity of fear from distance to distance.

I broke something then when I told her we were crossing over that boarder line. I held her when she lay in her bed night after night as she sobbed and begged and cried with her face to the wall saying that she couldn’t move to that other country, away from all her family, her friends, and that no, it wouldn’t be alright, and no, she couldn’t trust me.

So now, I am crying in the media lab of the English Philosophy building on the university campus. I am crying in part because I am tired and rushed, because I have to leave to pick her up from her school in an hour, because I do not know when I will get my work done if I don’t finish it now, because I don’t have a damn clue about how to record my voice track for this assignment, or how to add music to it or, hell, mostly how to save the entire thing. I can’t even figure out how to save my work, and so I am crying in the media lab of the English-Philosophy building, but mostly because she still cries at night and I broke her for something I wanted and I can’t even figure out how to save my fucking assignment on this stupid fucking computer while the sacred moments tick past like a time bomb and where the hell is my lectio divina now?

When I finally knock on the studio door beside mine and confess to the woman working inside, like a sinner to a priest, that I’ve got nothing, am coming up empty, my voice catches on my failure and I do not want to cry again, but think that I might. And she saves me. In a moment. In five minutes. With grace, and with her pretty white teeth in a tidy row smiling back at me.

Vespers

“O God, come to my assistance. O Lord, make haste to help me.”

On Friday nights we wash our hands, put on our aprons, and she pours and mixes while I measure and read from the recipe my mother used when I was small. While the pizza cooks we put on our pyjamas and then eat on the couch and watch a movie that we’ve rented from the library and that I will probably return late because I can never keep track of due dates. She tries her best not to spill, and I try my best not to overreact when she does. We do alright, though she spends most of the movie on my lap wiggling because she scares easily, and I let her stay because I snuggle easily.

Complin

“O God, come to my assistance. O Lord, make haste to help me.”

It’s night. I lie in bed with her and the cicadas saw outside the open window while she chatters away about her day and the movie and all the things she’s thinking of, until I tell her again, for the forth time, to go to sleep. When she does, I stay and watch her for awhile. My days are bookended with me in my pyjamas, with the darkness draping the outside world, with my tiredness, God’s closeness. Her lashes are so long, I think again for the hundredth time. Her lips so sweet. I wait. And listen. I watch the sacred reading spread out and sleeping before me.

Little Ghost

2009-10-28T08:43:00.000-07:00

She wakes to a moan. At three in the morning she had been lying in bed, between the red sheets, beneath the white quilt, limbs floating loose and hair streaming under that dreaming black sea with a book asleep on the pillow beside her. She hears it. Wakes blind and waits for the shifting tilt of the real. What had she been dreaming.

She does not believe in ghosts. She believes in the dead and in secrets and in the way truth gathers more thickly around anchors to the unknown when she is looking left instead of right.

She holds her breath. The air moans again above her, soft but unboundaried, and travels through the dust that is trapped in that secret space between floors, between the neighbour’s suite above and her ceiling below, over eighty-year-old plaster and nails and joists still smelling of sawdust, and out into her room, spilling spirit.

Her sheets were once white, but she has had visions in the bedding aisle of a crowded super store and changed the flat and fitted ones to red, imagining, in the folding back of the white quilt, the peeling of a fruit to a soft warm centre like a burst pod, or a surgeon’s knife drawn along tight skin to a popped bright wounding. She wanted cinnamon, but they only came in red. So she is lying between her red sheets with the book beside her, when she wakes to this ghost in the groaning air. A climbing, unclothed little sound.

In the hall, in her room, up above and beside her bed, against her neck and in her hair the moan and moan and the moan. Her throat still full of her dream, her lungs, busy exchanging visions for wakened air, push up against the quickening lub dub. The book on the pillow sleeps on unaware, a loud boozy snore from its opened mouth, even when then, the ghost pulls back the quilt and slips in beside her, and she sees that she knows that she knows her dead face. And is pinned to the sheets by it.

But such a sweet, unpretentious little soul, warm and singing, carving out a sacred hollow in the air with her breathing, no rattling chains, or banshee screaming, just an unadorned ascending. And the mountains, wherever they say they are, do not move in their places, and the earth’s crust still solid as always. But there is sweat and maybe love, she decides from the red sheets below. But if not love then at least a gentle exposure, which is something in itself for the dead.

Sweet Sweetness

2009-10-22T18:42:00.000-07:00

Meeting John McPhee was pretty cool, talking with Michael Silverblatt was super cool, but today these hands, these here very hands with their busted up and ragged nails touched the pages of the very first run of the very first book EVER printed - the Gutenberg Bible.
I almost cried right there in special collections.

Dear You

2009-10-19T09:40:00.001-07:00

I'm digging in the garden looking for something to bury
a coffin to contain it
and put it away from me
sorting through my costumes for a little black dress and armband to match
with the fishnets that are hoping for an easy fuck to fix it all.

After I punch straight through the crust and out into China
he sits beside me on the couch and tells me to slip on my sadness,
to pull it over my head and wear it next to my skin for the day
-as if sunrise and sunset could be the walls of that box
and the allowing the body buried.

So I do, and it smells freshly laundered
worn and familiar
and ready for the wearing.
What it wanted all along.

A.

For Now

2009-10-05T19:58:00.000-07:00

While it may be true that I feel as though I need to schedule time to breathe, that heart break abounds back home while I am here instead, and that India is getting increasingly anxious about EVERYTHING, it is also true that I am about to go to bed with a glass of wine and a book and call it homework, and that I get paid enough to be here to just think and write and learn.

That's all I've got for you right now, kiddo.

Ow ow owwwwwwwww

2009-09-17T19:22:00.001-07:00

Don't you wanna know why it keeps getting hotter?

2009-09-15T19:40:00.000-07:00

I've been sick. Again. With a fever of of 39.9 (that's over 103) and sweat rushing like a glacier melt between my breasts every time I sat up. There was a lot of vomiting. Shaking. Bizarre dreams and the guy above me funnelling his party noises straight into my bedroom on a Saturday night. There was me praying God would strike all the revellers sick and send them home. And me not knowing what to do, what to do, what to do in the middle of the night with the fever climbing and me not even knowing where the hospital was. And then the next day there was me being driven to the emergency for an I.V. and some tests and, good glory, I love me a saline drip.
The nicest thing about a kidney infection is that it isn't contagious. India would be no fun at all with one and someone's gotta keep up moral around here when the momma goes down. She's doing a pretty fine job of it. She told me yesterday that she had been too hot at school in her bright orange tights and skirt and so to fix the problem she took off her skirt. Problem fixed. The image of my baby girl in her long scrawny legs walking around class in her big runners and orange tights until the teacher noticed and told her to put her skirt back on gave me a whole lot of joy that's gonna last awhile.

The Lowdown

2009-08-30T18:35:00.000-07:00

I am, these last few weeks, living with all my emotions only one cell layer deep below my skin. I've been walking around in that place of all joy or all sadness, like in grief when there are no shadings to anything but black and white, happy or sad, confused or asleep. The move could not have gone better, the house could not be sweeter, the neighbours kinder. It has been like walking through a dream where every thing slips into place when you tap twice and wave your hands. There's magic in these here fingers; tell me your wishes and I'll make 'em come true.

But there is the sad, too: India crying and crying that she misses Canada, me finally having a house of my own but without sisters and a momma to bring over for coffee; all the missing; I still don't have a phone. And this weekend I was sick. Caught somewhere between sick as a dog and on death's doorway - maybe more like two blocks away than his doorway, but still, I could smell him from where I lay and it was awful. I spent hours curled like a peeled shrimp in the bottom of my tub trying to stay warm in the hottest water I could get until it drained through a leak somewhere and I filled it again until I ran it cold, but still I was shaking so much that I thought I might snap something. It was not fun. I wanted my momma. I wanted a friend I knew. I wanted to pick up the phone and have someone take me to the hospital, but I don't have health insurance until the first of the month so I toughed it out and India watched movies and played with the neighbour's friends' kids for an hour at the park and I still don't know who they were, but God bless them good.

But, John McPhee is coming to my class for a question and answer in September (hahahahahahahah. I know), the people here are knock-you-over-in-amazement friendly, my classes are going to be a-freaking-mazing and India's been invited to two birthday parties already. We are swimming around in thick goodness here. I feel blessed; I feel lonely as hell; I feel anchored; I feel worried as all get out; I feel brave.

And that's it. The way it goes. And right now, tonight, it is very good.

Notes On Our Americanization

2009-08-21T15:35:00.000-07:00

India and I have been "taking our coffee" on the porch after supper. She has her little brown mug full of sweet and milky decaf and I have a big brown one full of not. We sit in our rockers and dip our cookies and make up games usually involving the passing cars. A couple nights ago, India, with her little legs crossed at the knee said to me in a very grown-up passing the time, serious sort of voice, "I can't believe Obama smokes." Which was all sorts of wonderful, but especially so with her little lips pursed and her face covered in chocolate.

The Tree

2009-08-14T12:19:00.000-07:00

The maple in the back holds the sun and shade in varying measures, a god blessing and withholding at will to us below its branches. A little breeze, a little wind, and the cool places shift with the ones that burn, and the rise and set of the sun that turns it all. Once, I had thought, here below, that I could gather the sun in little cups and shoot it down with a shot of shade to walk a straighter line. Or only learn to the point of an easy prediction the rustle of leaves and the bending of arms that let the light in. The comfort of those limbs.

But a tree is a codeword for God, a planted map of chloroform, rough bark, blood sap to the root of eternity. And the shushing of mystery as she moves.

What I mean is that I know nothing. Not hows or whys, yeses or nos, not even sin or safe. Only that like an animal, I need, snuffling around for bits in the ground, the grasses. And that I pray to the tree for mercy and she exhales. The patterning of us beneath, as we live between the soothed and burnt, writing a lacy word across our skin. Light and dark, we are coloured green.

Relief

2009-08-10T21:07:00.000-07:00

Read me here, if you like.

And he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel

2009-08-09T20:43:00.000-07:00

I am her momma, so when she told me, all excited and flushed that she had found a snake in the garden, I lifted my eyebrows and practised my delighted with joy face. I went and had a look, and lo, and behold, there he was. Sitting on one of the fat big flower leaves all shiny with his sides panting in and out in this steam room heat. I did a very good job of not screaming, or jumping, or of letting the sound waboloahmobagadageta! out of my mouth. "Wow. Look at that," I said instead. "A snake where I had been planning on kneeling and digging in the dirt with my bare hands. Really. Wow." I think she bought it. We've been on the look out ever since, but for different reasons.

So, I don't have a lot of experiences with snakes. Actually, I only have "experience" with a snake. Singular. My uncle caught a garter once in a grassy field outside his house and showed it to all us kids playing in the backyard. It peed something yellow on his hand. Maybe pee. And then he let it go. And that was that. But, apparently, or so it seems, in Iowa, in my backyard even, snakes abound. My sister found a snake head in the campground shower that they were staying in. Just the head. And she made a face to show me what it's mouth looked like. Not pleasant. But worse than that was the bizarre and upsetting experience of the Amana Colonies. We all drove out there for a day of hand carved clocks, weaving looms, German sized schnitzel and all around old tyme fun, but instead we met a snake. A big shiny stripy thing that slithered sideways across the dirt road and shook its tail at us like it thought it was making a rattle. And it was amazing. And beautiful. And I gave it plenty of room to get where it was going without worrying about me. We all did. My whole family stopped to have a little look. And then we noticed a car, which was being driven slowly toward us gathered on the road, and we all "Oh, no'ed" and willed the snake to hurry itself along. My dad stood up straight and pointed toward the road so that the driver, an older woman with a white puff of grandma hair, could avoid it. She saw my dad. Saw the snake. And turned the wheels of her very slow moving car. But she turned them right toward the snake. She drove over it slowly and deliberately with all of us and all the kids watching in slo-mo horror, until the last second when we turned away to avoid seeing the inevitable pop that we would hear. When I looked back, the snake had contracted into a tightly coiled rug of itself. It spasmed and jerked and India celebrated that, "It's alive! Look momma, it's still moving!" I think someone swore. I think my dad shook his hands at the car and started to walk after it.
Later, I asked an elderly lady if there were any poisonous snakes in the area, thinking that the woman had maybe driven over it for our safety, but she said that there weren't and that in fact, she hadn't seen a snake there in ages, not since she was a girl.

One of my friends, a good friend that I've known for years, told me that he found a snake once in some rocks by a lake. A harmless little snake, he knew, but he had killed it when he found it. The meanness of it bothered him, and when I asked him why he had done it, he said that he thought that it was because he was afraid of it. And it surprised him, I could tell; he hadn't known that violence was sitting in him.

I read once in a book on child development that around the age of two or three toddlers begin to develop a natural fear of slithery things like snakes and bugs and spiders - a built in safety mechanism to give the kid a fighting chance in a world where bears or cougars or, I don't know, the flu might do them in. So it could be argued, I suppose, that the creepy feeling I get when I see a snake in my own yard is a natural thing. I've a right to be afraid. Maybe it's even natural to want to kill it, though I think we all know that's not going to happen with me. I just wonder though, about this tendency toward violence when we are afraid, about the different manifestations of violence we morph our reactions into, about my own hidden versions of violence. And fear, of course, about all sorts of things - like failure or insufficiency or shame or sex or embarrassment or loneliness or death or powerlessness. One day I might write a book. It might be called something like, "The Way I was Afraid," because I'm not great at titles. I would probably also like to put a snake on the cover.

The Thing About Time

2009-08-06T19:42:00.000-07:00

Something happened to me on the way to summer: my heart stopped feeling so alone. And I've been meaning to tell you.

Being single is hard. Make no mistake. The world is set up for twos and at every turn you can find a slap on the face without even looking for it when you are newly one, but, (and this is where I can't decide if I'm at an advantage realizing this or not) being married is also hard. Teeth shatteringly hard. I know it full well. And, if pressed, if pushed to the wall with a gun to my head, I don't know if I could honestly say one was easier than the other, or more suited to me, or more likely to carve me beautiful. I just don't know, though I guess the point was never to find the easier. What I do know is what I have known for years: that single or not isn't the point. Whether I am in love and loved, or not and not there is goodness for the finding. My head knows it, could argue it till it falls off my shoulders, but my heart, that silly old girl, has a mind of her own. Not that I blame her, and she's done me fine in the past, but she follows as well as a cat on a leash, which is to say, not at all.

But back when I was smack dab in the middle of suddenly being without a husband and India was nine months old and not sleeping through the night and we were living with my parents', the smallest things, like going to a nephew's soccer game and winding my way through the devoted families, made me want to vomit. It was hard, and sometimes still is hard, not to feel constantly on the cusp, the fringe, the edge of life -- the one you're missing out on because you are single, unmarried, uncoupled, uneven. So, things like this would happen, and my brain would have a chat with my heart, and we would get it together, and then I would have to take India to the doctor's alone, or plan a holiday alone or hell, crawl into bed one more night alone, and I would strain and pull and try not to take that easy out by imagining that my life would be so much better if I were not alone but then, of course, eventually throw my hands up at it and fall flat on my face in the middle of it. Poor, silly heart.

But lately, things have changed, and I am cautiously hopeful. Maybe, in the language of my dad, I've been granted a special grace for a time; maybe, God knows I've got my hands full balancing school and mothering and a new city in a new country and so has lifted that off; or maybe, my slow and doe-eyed heart is listening more than she pretends to because, other huge life change induced fears aside, she's doing just fine on her own, imagines she will always do fine - come what may, alone or not, which, of course, she tells me in her smiling and secretive way, she always knew she would.

For the Night Shifter

2009-08-05T19:57:00.000-07:00

Dear Little Knives Seeking Sore and Wounded Hearts,

Pardon my French, but it's time you fuck off. I don't mean to be crass, but you seem to have not heard the prayers for strength and peace and "your will not mine," so I'm giving it to you straight.
Enough.
Fuck off.
You don't belong here, so get your damn feet off the coffee table and your sorry ass out the door, you poor and withering fool. That we breathe in gasps, taste our hearts in our mouths, feel our stomachs turn to stone at the sight of you, at the thought of you, at the out of a blue of you, damned little knives, means only that we are not yet dead and so nowhere near to lost.
You and your razor edge, your fine slice, your blooming blood in a bud of split skin are a midnight's flowering, and though the dead will rise, death will not. You are not the only lion prowling for a meal. Light on the horizon. And it will devour you whole.

And did you catch that part where I told you to fuck off?

Right Now

2009-08-04T19:27:00.001-07:00

If I knew how to make the word "OVERWHELMED" flash in neon lights on the screen for you, I would. Everything is good and great and perfect, and I'm scared as all get out.

Nothing to do but live it out like the lady said, and ride it on, baby.

Also

2009-07-30T20:51:00.000-07:00

My mom, dad, daughter, two sisters, brother, uncle and aunt are in the motor home in a campground in South Dakota after a loooong day of driving. The adults are drinking, my dad is playing some crazy Latin rock music from the 90's and teaching India dance moves that will win her friends and influence people. Possibly the wrong people, but people who will love her.

I love my crazy family.

The Little Brick House on Church Street

2009-07-30T20:42:00.000-07:00

419 Church Street
Iowa City, IA
52240
U freakin' S of A

Write me, and I'll love you forever.
Also, I think it goes without saying that I'm friendly. And I've got a comfortable couch. C'mon knock on my door. Cha cha cha.

If you don't, at present, own a six-year-old, I would seriously recommend that you get one.

2009-07-21T09:21:00.000-07:00

This morning, India showed me a text book she's been working on called, "Magic for High Whistlers". Man alive, If I ever write another children's novel, it's gonna have a chapter with that name. It doesn't get any better than that. One of the spells requires: Three dry leaves, a ladybug and pepperoni.

The Pocket, The Hideout, The Secret

2009-07-20T09:41:00.001-07:00

Hey.
Come on in.
Take a look.
Have a listen.

The Thing Between Us

2009-07-19T23:11:00.000-07:00

I just got back from my book club. We sat around and talked and laughed about husbands and vaginas and breasts and kids and God and disappointment and hope and a fucked up world. And some about the book we read. I don't hang with any slouches. These women are smart and quick, a little fierce and fine edged, and I don't tread the ground there, or the couch I sit on, lightly. The reality is that as hard as I try sometimes to think in full and well-rounded thoughts, that really, I am only able to supply my single line, my thin contribution, and truth - that complex tension of layers between layers - is somewhere stuck inside the collaboration of our lives lived and stories shared. And we pile them all up good and high so that sometimes, most times though not all times, when we are through, looking at our watches and getting text-messaged to come home, there is this thing filling the room that wasn't there before, alive and growing, threaded between us all, fragrant and unfurling. And maybe the smell of it wakes me up a little, turns me a degree to the right when I had been leaning left, brings me a sweater and hands me a shovel or a mirror or a glass of wine to drink at the end of a long day. What I need. What I hadn't seen before. I don't know. It's something. The way it appears and grows up between us all. As if it were planted. As if it were magic.

Home: On leaving and Travelling to

2009-07-18T02:38:00.000-07:00

I'm back from two weeks of camping. It was mostly cold and wet and sleeping in a damp sleeping bag on nights when you could see your breath but not the stars. But it was also full of good. India played her heart out with her cousins, I got in some good time with my brother and sister and brother-in-law, and we spent our nights huddled, almost standing in the fire with chocolate, marshmallows and mugs of wine.
And now that we're home, when it's not 2:30am, it's moving time.

People keep asking me how I feel about The Big Move. I think the best answer is: practical. I feel practical.
I know I will be lonely sometimes. I know I will feel overwhelmed and scared sometimes. I know I will wonder what the hell I've done. But what do you do? What else is a girl going to do? How could I not go?

And, also, I'm so, so, so excited. I picked up a collection of essays about writing before I left for camping, and I almost spilt my heart right out onto the sandy beach reading them. I sweat. They made me sweat happiness. Getting to talk and think and eat and breathe writing for three years (three years!) feels like the most incredible gift ever. I guess that helps with the fear.

But also, there is this strange undercurrent of calm. I'm loved. Wrapped up in prayer and kindness and my heart feels safe because I'm going with God. Not because I was supposed to go to Iowa, or that it was God-ordained, or meant to be, or any other hullabaloo - which I am not discounting but also not looking for comfort in - but because I've been places, I've travelled this hard terrain before, and I know it in my bones that come here or there, come Iowa or elsewhere, come flying high, or crashing and burning I go with God. I go with God.

Though it would be nice to not crash and burn. I'd rather not do that.

So, here I go. Hold me up. Love me good. Pray me into God. I'm banking on it. What else is a girl going to do?

Hello Boobies

2009-07-02T21:35:00.000-07:00

I wanted to stop and take a moment to tell you that I love you, despite your rapidly diminishing selves; I love you. When I put on my running clothes yesterday and saw in the mirror that you are mere shadows of your former selves, I smiled and made a mental note to go bra shopping. You've been good to me - I'd like to be good to you. Plus, I'd also like to think there are still good times ahead to be had. Who knows? In fact, I think I should say that I might like you even better in this humble one-handful version that you are now, rather than the stuffed to overflowing you've been before. In truth, you're more manageable like this, not always popping out of dresses and tank tops, screaming for attention and then getting all sweaty and nervous when you get it. Good grief. Especially when we were breastfeeding. Do you remember those heydays of yore and the looks we got then? You were each bigger than my baby's head. Where did she ever get the courage to come at your ginormous, hard and tight-skinned selves with her little pink mouth mewing and agape? She could have been knocked out and down for the count with one careless swing. But we did good, didn't we? We could have fed an army then. Though distribution might have been problematic.
Ah, dear boobies, we've been together through thick and thin. From the days of clumsy teenage boys trying to figure out if the clasp did up in the front or the back, to refusals of wearing any bra at all (for which I sincerely apologize), to lace and silk, push-ups, boning and under- wire, to strapless, to stick 'ems to corsets, to now, I thank you. You have not once let me down. And I will do my best, dear boobies, to do the same for you.

Love,

Angela

Dear Jesus,

2009-07-02T03:41:00.000-07:00

I miss you.
Sometimes, I look over and realize I've been talking for the last three hundred kilometres, chattering away like a magpie on the rooftop about all the shiny things that catch my eye, and you haven't said a word. Or, maybe you have and I missed it.
I keep knocking up against the lines that I've drawn, imagining myself borderless to you, only to turn and find and crash into all those keep out signs that I've hand painted and sunk deep in the ground.
I think I left you there on the seat beside me, forgotten, to fade in the sun like a pretty scrap of paper folded into a flower or a swan or a boat. Crumbling at the edges.

Can we just stop and try this again? Or, can I stop and turn again and admit that I don't know where I'm going. Again.
I think I'm lost. All those circles I've been wandering.

I'm sorry.
Here.

Any Warm Sunday in June

2009-06-30T10:07:00.000-07:00

I finished my last shift at the group home on Sunday. I went out and bought everything I could think of that the boys liked for breakfast, and then I cooked up a storm and set it all out for them. I wanted to leave before they woke up - to hightail it out the front door and not have to walk through that awful ending, but I didn't. I made myself stay, and I sat with them while they ate, took some pictures and hugged them all good-bye.

One of the boys kept coming upstairs the last night I worked, kept saying a word or two, and then would go back down again. I could hear him waiting on the landing, but I didn't say anything. Finally, he came up again and said, "Since you're going in the morning, I might as well give you a hug now." He was all nervous and awkward and pulled away from my hug before I was done. I love that kid. I love that he gave me that.

I cried all the way home when I went, loud and ragged, not for the missing I will do, but because I was leaving them like everyone else had done and like so many will again; because their lives are so full of leaving that they don't even expect a reason for it anymore; because they have been so shaped by being left that they have so little left to leave; and because those almost-grown boys seem so small to me, so in need of a momma to tuck them in and be that waiting place to crash and fall against, but they will never have that, and they will never know that safety.

I drove away and the gravel crunched beneath my tires. There was only the sound of the birds calling, the squirrels chattering and the slap, slap of a ball being shot with a hockey stick against the garage door, like any boy might do on any warm Sunday in June.

I don't expect I will ever be back.

2009-06-26T12:11:00.000-07:00

If a writer writes, but doesn't let anyone read it, does that mean she is wasting her time?

I think I finished my manuscript.

!

And Jesus Withdrew to a Lonely Place

2009-06-25T23:58:00.000-07:00

Dear Secret,

I like you so much.
Would it be alright if I stayed around awhile?

This is me unpacking.

Angela

2009-06-25T09:41:00.000-07:00

India was part of a fund raiser to help kids with juvenile diabetes a bit ago, but she kept getting the name of the disease mixed up, and then couldn't remember what it was called. She told the people who asked that she was helping get money for the kids who had the heebeejeebees.

Sometimes, I can't get over how much I love being her momma. It's so good. Last week, after her graduation from kindergarten, I packed us a picnic lunch and we drove down to the river. We sat on big rocks and ate our lunch, watching the birds and bugs live out life on the sand. And then, we played in the mud. I'm not always the best at playing games that five-year-olds-almost-six-year-olds like to play, but I can do mud. I plain old love mud, still. So I let her boss me around and make the rules. I dug up the mud, mixed the mud, transfered piles of mud from one rock to the other for no seemingly understandable purpose except that she asked me to. We smeared it on the rocks, let it dry, added water. Carried the mud to another rock. It was a good time.

After, we went for a long walk, found a bridge and collected stones to drop into the water and hear the plunk. She said hello to everyone we passed, made chitchat with the dog owners, and pet as many of the dogs as she could. We walked through the trees and she carried a ziplock bag left over from lunch. She called it her thankful bag and put all the treasures she found on our walk into it, until it was stuffed with leaves and rocks, a shell and flowers.

I got a sunburn; we were filthy and exhausted; thanks abounded.

Thankyouthankyouthankyouthatnkyouthankyou

2009-06-25T08:01:00.000-07:00

Come good or bad, God is love. I know it full well. But damn, that goodness feels good.

Shake it.

Come In, Come In

2009-06-23T22:10:00.000-07:00

Today, I rented a room at Kidz Quarters for India's sixth birthday. It's the first time she's had a real friends' birthday party, and I was a little nervous - I still don't feel grown up enough to be a real mom who does things like throw birthday parties. But all the invitations went out, all the parents responded and all the kids showed up, as did I, early, with loot bags and the cake and candles. And just as things were starting and the sugar levels rising like the helium balloons tied to their skinny wrists, there was a phone call from my sister. My sister-in-law, who is six months pregnant, was carrying a plate of cupcakes down the stairs to the basement of her house, had tripped at the top of the stairs on her two-year-old's toy, and fallen all the way down to the bottom. I kept shoving my hands over my mouth like I was trying to shove her words back in. "Her water broke. She's in the hospital. We have no idea what's happening."

And then three hours of birthday party with ten six-year-olds. I took pictures, sang the song, cut the cake and kept praying that this wouldn't be that day. The one you marked and looked back on as the day where loss changed everything.

I stayed home with the kids while my mom went to the hospital and for now, my sister-in-law seems to be stable. She's not going into labour. The baby is alive. We'll know more in the morning. I walked past my brother's house later, but it was late and all the lights were dark, so I went around back and called to him through his bedroom window because I could hear the T.V. on, but no one answered, and I didn't want to risk waking him. It made me think of the time when we crept through the mall with our walkie talkies spying on people and reporting our findings to each other.
"The house is dark. No movements inside. T.V on in the bedroom. Lying in bed alone, probably afraid."
I wanted to walkie-talkie him and tell him that I was outside, thinking of them, praying, that he wasn't as alone as it must have seemed in that dark house, in his empty bed where those two other bodies should have been sleeping.

2009-06-22T21:16:00.001-07:00

I wanted to be at the sea on a rainy day.

June 21

2009-06-22T14:42:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was what should have been our twelve year anniversary. Every year it comes up and surprises me with how much it still hurts. A paper cut hurt. Quick and unexpected. Bleeding more than it should with my pulse pounding in the red wound. We still mark the day. I don't remember when we began again, but it's been a few years, and last night we went for dinner and then a movie. My favourite things.

We talk in safe circles like friends with a dangerous lion crouched to pounce between them. We are honest. I think. Mostly honest. I forgive him those woundings without always understanding what that means, without always knowing what I hope for in it. He forgives me my superiority. Holds his head up as high as he feels he is allowed, disdains me on occasion to show he hasn't been completely flattened, while I admit wrong to show that I haven't become completely inflated. Still, I want to shake him. Hurt him. Wake him up to life as I know it. The burden of loneliness is more than I can manage some nights, I'm so free. But mostly, I don't want to let him in to those places. They aren't for him anymore.

We sat in the dark theatre after supper, and there was a moment where I thought I would crack, just split down the middle like a stone popped on its head by a hammer and neatly halved. I do not miss him anymore. Not his person, his self, his individual being, but I miss like hell, like hot, burning hell, the shared life, the partner, the togetherness. I miss the generic facts of being bound to another human equally. I miss. I scrambled in my seat in the theatre for a finger-hold on God like a frantic mother looking for her lost baby. I found her in the empty seat beside me and passed some burden over the armrest.

The movie ended and we walked to his car through the mall like we had done so many times when we were so married, and I remembered for an instant what it felt like to be moving together toward home. The day still makes me sad, I said to him on the drive home. Yeah, me too, he said, and we steered around the sadness to another sentence. That crouched lion. It was something. It was as good as we could do, but it costs so much.

We pulled up to my house and I reached for the door handle, said thank you and turned to smile. He reached out to hug me, and we stayed stretched from our separate seats for a moment. I love you, he said. I love you, too. And then we let go.

Jiggle, Jiggle, Gasp, Gasp

2009-06-20T15:16:00.000-07:00

There are two posts that I write in my head nearly every night. One of them is about how I've been running lately, listening to This American Life, but that now, since I've run out of all my podcasts, I've been listening to David Sedaris', "When You are Engulfed in Flames," and how ridiculous I must look staggering down the sidewalks of this suburb, trying to keep running while laughing my guts out. Everyone must assume I'm crying, and it kind of cracks me up to think of how completely loopy I must look.

The other thing I've been meaning to say is how mind boggling it is to me that nearly every night as I'm sweating my weary way over sidewalks, red-faced and jiggling in places I would rather not, some ass in a pickup truck or shiny car honks his horn at my ass and scares the life out of me. I actually jumped once. And really. Seriously. What are these men thinking? Is their mating honk from the road supposed to impress me? Am I suppose to be flattered? To leap over the curb, throw the truck door open, the empty McDonald's bags aside and into their waiting and muscular arms? I've contemplated giving them the finger, and I haven't written that off completely, but, I haven't done it yet either. I think because I realized the other night, after another horn attack, that this is really just another way that men and women are ridiculously different and yet still the same species.

I don't think I've met a single man who would be insulted to have a woman honk, whistle or catcall him. I'm guessing even a little ass pat might go over well for 90% of men - if you're a reasonably good-looking woman. Now, I'm speaking in stereotypes, I know, but most men seem to not only like, but desire, this kind of attention, which is funny,and probably dissatisfying considering most women won't give it. And then, of course, I have also met very few women who are comfortable with men doing these things to them. It makes us feel vulnerable, reduced, diminished. So here, on these suburban sidewalks every night, while I sweat and jiggle away and have my short socks scared off, communication between the sexes breaks down again. Good grief, I think. Is it no wonder we have such a hard time understanding each other? Staying in love? Agreeing on which movie to rent?

Still, I'm keeping my options open. I've got my finger on the ready.