Red Sun in Morning ~ Sailor Take Warning

This is what the sky looked like this morning.

Before we went to bed last night, we blew out the candles on the alter and went to sleep anticipating a very long, dark morning. Just as we'd thought, it was still dark when Ella came down for breakfast, when usually, by then, the sky has opened in morning light. She was off on the school bus and I was on my way to run a thousand errands, leaving behind my ethereal Thursday of alter building, woodswalking, tea drinking, and cow milking.

Solstice

I woke up this morning to do chores for Bill, to let him sleep in, and to watch the sky grow light. I crawled out of bed at 6:12 a.m., a half hour after the alarm went off, pulled on fleece and hood and socks and poop covered Muck boots. Milk pail in hand and dogs in tow, I stepped out the door to an eerily balmy morning. I could hear the cows ruminating in the dark, their jaws grinding thrice digested grasses like humans ponder reiterated good ideas. Over and over. The cats come pouring out of the barn when they hear the mudroom door pull open and MuShu, goopy eyed, club footed, tom cat, like ritual, comes halfway between house and barn and starts rolling from belly to back, from back to belly. Warm milk on his mind, stomach grumbling.

The barn on a dark morning is a sweet thing. First, I unplug the tick tick tick of the electric fence. It must be like the heartbeat of the barn to these animals. The constant dripping sink. I switch the radio button off so that VPR won't come on half way through chores. I can tell it's one of these mornings to maintain the quiet.

This summer we had ten cows on our farm. A mixture really of cows, heifers and bulls.

(Cow note: a cow is not technically considered a cow until after she's birthed her second calf. Young female cows are considered heifers. After their first calf, they are referred to as 'first calf heifers'. After the second calf, they've acheived 'cow' status. Bulls are just bulls. Through and through. I think if they're "nutted", they're called steers. I'm not totally sure.)

We now have two cows, four heifers, and one bull. Apple is the bull, the baby of the bunch, a deep shade of auburn and he loves to have this neck stroked. His eyelashes are long and gorgeous and he's like the baby brother of the bunch, taken care of by the pack of older sisters. Little do they know that by the end of spring, he'll be "bullying" them all out of grain and hay. He'll be mounting them with every 21 day heat.

There is a set of heifer twins just a bit older than Apple. They were born last spring on the organic dairy that Bill has worked at until very recently. Both Ella and I had yet to witness a bovine birth ( a freshening) and after the first girl came out, we were waiting to see the placenta birthed. Instead of the placenta, and to all our surprise, the second girl came out in the caul. Bill went into the stall and broke the bag open, her little nose lifted to the air, hooves milky white, all drenched in amniotic fluid. They look like dear, but a deeper shade of red. Dairy tradition is to name the calf a name that starts with the same first letter of it's mother's name. Ella named them Comet and Cupid.

Patience is our milk cow. She was the second cow to our farm four or five years ago and had her first calf here. Another auburn eyershire. We were eachother's firsts as far as milking goes and she was named aptly. Each of us needed a great deal of patience to get through that first winter. Eyershires tend to be nervous cows by nature, not as slow to react as other breeds. That first winter, it wasn't uncommon for her to spook at someone just standing up or just walking into the barn. To the slightest rattle of the milk pail handle. Oftentimes she would pull right out of her stantion, other times she would kick her left foot right into the pail. She had her second calf last winter, which I was alone to tend to for the first time, and she has settled gracefully into her second round of milking, motherhood and becoming the alpha of the barnyard. When she hears me walking out to the barn now, she starts her slow gaited ascent up the hill, past the apple tree, and to the barn gate. In the summer, when she's out to pasture, she waits at a standstill for me to loop the harness around her and walks sweetly beside me back to the barnyard.

It's rare that I'm not totally struck with wonder about having a relationship with an animal of this magnitude. Sometimes, when I'm sitting underneath her, cats rubbing alongside the pail, my fingers around her teets, squeezing in accordian rhythm, my head resting against her back thigh, I can feel the heat of her, hear her belly grumbling, digesting, and it just blows me away. I've spent the better part of two and a half years developing a trust between two species. An understanding.

I've also spent the better part of those two and a half years shoveling a ton of shit. There are mounds behind the barn, as long as a Ford F350 and 8' tall, growing taller still every year. A concotion of food scraps and poop. Leftover zucchinis sprouting out of the heap every summer and in the raw cold of winter, a plume of steam rising from it's mound.

But what comes of shit but compost. So, five gallon bucket after five gallon bucket, I guess it's worth it. I can live the metaphor.

Quote of the Day

And still, after all this time, the Sun has never said to the Earth,

"You owe me."

Look what happens with love like that.

It lights up the sky.

Not sure who said it. I think it might have been Rumi. Maybe Hafiz.

Heard it in a Solstice performance called Night Fires.

Mother Night

It's 10am on a Sunday morning and Ella is still asleep. Bill has left to finish the decking on the house we built last year and I'm alone with the woodstove and the laptop. Outside, grey clouds hang low and the grass, half green half brown, looks naked and exposed. There is a reason this season is called stick season. Everything can be seen through. Neighbors houses, utility poles, trees past trees past trees. Just waiting for snow.

There are four days until the winter solstice. The longest day of the year and one that marks the onset of more gradual light. We have a cut-out of Mother Night that we put on top of the tree each year, in place of a star or angel. In her arms is another paper cut-out of a beautiful sun.

The story goes that Sun, after a full year of rising and setting each day, becomes incredibly tired and doesn't think he can continue with that tiresome cycle any longer. So Night wraps him up in her arms for a good, long rest. All the children wonder why the night has become so long and they wait anxiously for Sun to reappear. While they wait they sing songs to encourage Sun and give thanks and light candles. All the candles were like little sparks of Sun's light and when Sun peeked out from the arms of Mother Night, he saw all those little fires and began to feel warmer and brighter and younger. When the children woke, they climbed a hill, faced East and began to sing to the sun. The sky grew from black to blue to bright and eventually Sun burst forth from Mother Night's arms, all brand new and ready to begin again.

Living here, not just high in the Northern Hemisphere, but in the cloudiest county in the state, I've had to adopt living metaphors to emotionally survive the long winters. It began in 2001, a particularly difficult year. I was taking a long walk when the first small flakes of the season started to fall. I was walking and watching them melt into the packed down dirt beneath my feet and realized that, come spring, all this snow would be melting into the soils, feeding the dormant life beneath and bringing new blossoms. New beginnings. In the still, thick, white of winter, even though we understand the cycles of the season, it's almost impossible to envision the landscape green and buzzing with life. It's a matter of faith and faith, as Ann Lamott puts it, is "just revolutionary patience."

So with those first flakes I cast my prayers. My deepest intentions. I sent them to lie dormant for the winter, trusting that when the Earth started the thaw, something beautiful would rise up where I'd left them. And I've done this now year after year, as a matter of survival. I've had to.
All around this river valley lie my prayers in little hollows, streambeds, compost heaps. Little vibrations of hope and ambition and release.

Going into this darkest night I feel the weight of it in my heart, in the atmosphere, in the hearts of those I love and it takes some strength to be able to just bend with it. To wait it out. I'm collecting my prayers and intentions, waiting to cast them with the first flakes, like gardeners tuck little bulbs into garden beds.

Thoughts on Ella

Sitting at the kitchen table last night, eating dinner, Ella asks me, very thoughtfully, "Do you think Dad is really a Jedi?"
"Do you think Dad is really a Jedi?" ~ I don't want to give anything away.
"Well, sometimes I do. But he's ticklish."
Like, a true Jedi would just use the force, right?

__________________________________________

When Ella was four years old and we were eating Chinese food, she pulled open her fortune from the cookie and handed it to me so that I could read it for her.
"You will marry Ellis Leominster" I read out loud, eyes wide, astonished!
Ellis is a toe headed, brown eyed little bad ass in her school that lives just down the road. He's so shy that he mostly just looks put out, but he's awfully sweet. And I really wouldn't mind having his folks as in-laws.
Ella is nine years old now and still she believes that that fortune was the real deal. At one point, I wonder, will she put two and two together? I don't know if her crush is just a strong crush or if that fortune has just written it in stone but I can't figure out how to go about it at this point. Just let it organically happen? Like the tooth fairy and Santa Claus? Can you imagine if she actually ended up with Ellis?


____________________________________

How do people rationalize spending $87 on a doll that doesn't even do anything? Oh wait, it does stuff. It wears expensive clothes and collects expensive stuff. How on earth did I get myself stuck in this situation? If I'm going to spend that much money, the doll should be doing my dishes at night. Maybe feeding the dogs and bringing in firewood.

I've somehow ended up in the American Girl universe. I flat out told her that I wasn't going to buy her an American Girl for Christmas. No way. So, she says a few days later, "Maybe Santa will bring one...."
Then, in Pennsylvania, visiting my folks, she find the catalogue in my mom's pile (my mom is a consumer with perfect credit. You name the catologue, she gets it in the mail.) and she spends the entire four days with the thing under her nose. Not asking, mind you, for anything. Just looking.

Ella hasn't ever really asked for anything for Christmas. I don't think she realized until this year that that was even an option. And still, other than that American Girl request, she just wants "surprises". When people ask her what she wants, she tends to look at them like they're aliens. Like they're breaking the rules. Blasphemy.

Three or four years ago, she was looking through the very expensive, very dreamy Magic Cabin Dolls catalogue in the living room. She came tearing into the kitchen, all red faced, with the catalogue folded over to the page with the beautiful flower fairy ring that you can hang outside on a tree limb or over the bed. She was out of breath and all electric and I figured the next question out of her mouth (it being early December) would be, "Can I get this for Christmas?" But it wasn't. It was, "Can I rip this out of the catalogue and hang it on my wall?" Like, that would have been sufficient. It might have satiated her wanting.

So, I somehow ended up with a check from my mom, covering half the cost for the doll. In the hypnotic blur that usually happens during those visits, I somehow rationalized that buying an $87 doll is okay if I'm only covering half the cost. Like $43.50 is a reasonable price for a doll. And now I can look forward to scrambling around, looking for those homemade American Girl doll clothes so that I won't have to buy them from the catalogue. I'd much rather support some local granny. Too bad some local granny doesn't perfectly replicate American Dolls.

But I remember deciding to go ahead and buy that flower ring. At no point did it ever occur to her to even ask for it. But that Christmas morning, she unwrapped that thing and I still have yet to see her more thrilled. She was like a child on hyper speed. Her pupils dilated, she started jumping on and off the couch and running around the room, screaming, "oh my god, oh my god".

Maybe as a parent, I'm just trying to get that high again.

___________________________________________

Speaking of Christmas, Ella had another strange request. In my Buffy post, I'd mentioned my friend Teri, with the purple streak and the essential oils..... Well, I guess last year, after her mother passed away, Santa delivered a letter from her to her daughter. Her daughter told this to Ella and it got her thinking.

My great aunt Margaret was very much like a grandmother to me and was well in the throws of Alzheimers by the time Ella was born. But they're very much cut from the same cloth and if she had died before Ella was born I would be very convinced that Ella was a reincarnation of Margaret. They both have the same shaped twinkling eyes, the same coyote trickster personality. They have the same coloring, love of songs and poetry and jingles. They're baby pictures are eerily identical. They are always trying to pull one over on you and never ever give a straight answer.

I think because we talk alot about our ancestors, especially as Halloween draws near and we build our alter every year, Ella is very aware of these older relatives and their relevance in our lives. After her friend told her about the letter from her grandmother, Ella got it into her head that Santa must be able to do that for everyone.
She wrote him a letter yesterday and fastened it to her stocking with a safety pin.

Dear Santa Claus,

How are you doing? How old are you?

Can you get a letter from my aunt Margaret?

How are the reindeer? Can I give you this bell?

How do you get from house to house?

I wish you a merry Christmas.

Love, Ella

Help.

Rent-A-Center

I just spoke with my friend, D, who lost her mother this past weekend, out of the blue. She's still in Pa, dealing with loose ends, and the wake is this evening. As is par for the course with D, she's already found her sense of humor about how this whole thing has gone down. She's had to. It's her survival mechanism.

As far as D knew, her mother, Jean, had no life insurance. She'd left behind a house full of furniture from Rent-A-Center, a car payment, and credit card debt. In yesterday's run around to get copies of the death certificate to all of the necessary establishments, they went in to Rent-A-Center to check that one off the list. The clerk at the counter mentioned that it was good they came in, they would need a copy of that death certificate to cash in her life insurance policy.

"Her what?" She and her brothers stood there, thinking they had to have heard wrong. "Who the fuck gets their life insurance policy from Rent-A-Center?"
"Your mom," answered the clerk.

Fortunately, most of the furniture and appliances in her house had already been paid off, so the five thousand dollars from Rent-A-Center, of all places, will cover the cost of the wake and pay off the fireplace she had just purchased for her son for Christmas. He gets to keep it.

D thinks she'll photocopy the life insurance policy and put it in a real bling frame and keep it on her wall at home, as a kind of homage to her mother. With all the shit she grew up with and all the craziness of her mother that she's learned to laugh about with time, the policy really just kind of sums it up.

Buffy

Sunday morning I went to pick up Ella from a sleepover, leaving enough time to visit with her friend's mom, Teri, who I'd befriended this summer. She's a really dynamic woman, whatever that means, really. She's keeps a purple streak in her honey colored hair ~ to keep her connected to the divine, I think. She sells essential oils on the side and her scope of knowledge of how scents heal is pretty astounding. After twenty minutes at her kitchen table I concluded that I really don't like the smell of ylang ylang. I learned what oils aid in brain power, stress relief, sexual function. I smelled a $100 bottle of sandalwood.

The sun was in the sky, glaring off the snow and the girls spent the duration of our visit out there in their snow clothes climbing mounds, disapearing in and out of poplars and birches, being beautiful.

I somehow left there with the first disc of the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I don't know how, really. It just kind of organically happened. I gave up watching television in 1992 and what I see of it now comes via Netflix. Old episodes of Punky Brewster, IMAX movies to watch with Ella, lots of independent (and some not so independent) movies. We went through the Six Feet Under series like junkies, willing to give up just about anything for just one more episode.
But never has it occurred to me to take on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The few fans that I do know are serious about it. Devoted. Die-hards. I guess Joss Whedon, the creator, has got a following.

Teri has been telling me about this series since we met in the summer. Her daughter talks emphatically about it. About the shadow world and the archetypes present within the show. I guess it makes for some great, productive, insightful conversation in their household. The only glitch for me is that I'm terrified of vampires. When I have nightmares they tend to be apocolyptic, not about monsters or demons and while I've only had less than a handful of nightmares about vampires, they've stuck to me like burdock brambles. Have you ever watched a billy goat chewing peanut butter? Like, that stuck.

So we signed on for episode 1 last night before bedtime (note: don't watch vampire flicks with nine year olds before bedtime on a school night). I just don't know. I can see the archetype thing, I think I'm even willing to see this first disc through, but I aint sold. Like, why did they have to name her Buffy? And why are their skirts so short? And why do the high school girls look they could have graduated with me in 1992? Crows feet, for god's sake.

I appreciate putting a female in the lead as the superhero against vampires. I think back in the 90's, or whenever it came out, that was a fairly revolutionary idea, and I think stuff like that can have it's positive effects as it ripples through commercial media culture. But when, within the first ten minutes of the show, Buffy stands in front of her mirror trying to figure out what dress she's going to wear for the evening and holds up the slinky black one and grunts, "slutwear", I don't know. Ella doesn't even know what a slut is. How do you explain that one?

We'll see. I'll have another report after Episode 2. When we left off, Buffy had been pummelled into a stone casket in the dark of a graveyard, the prince vampire's key assistant pouncing down. to be continued.....


or not.

Swinging Doors

I woke up last night at 2:48am to the telephone ringing. Hard as it was, I dragged myself downstairs to check the caller ID. It was my good friend, D, who I'm supposed to meet tonight in Southern Vermont to catch up with some of our other hometown friends. She had just gotten home and received a message from the State Police in Pennsylvania. Her mother had been found dead in her home, sitting at her computer. The dog had been barking for days.

D's mother isn't your average mom. Is any mother? D has spent the better part of her life trying to make some sense of her childhood and has learned, as the adult she's become, to welcome her mother back into her life, to share her own daughter with her mother, scary as that might have been. Her mother's childhood was so loosely and painfully strung together that she had little to no resources when it came time for her to parent D and her younger brothers. I met D when she 14 years old. I was 20 and had no idea she was so young. She had just moved into an apartment with a friend of mine and it never occurred to me, coming from my own sheltered youth, that a 14 year old could be living among our ranks.... all the LSD, crazy nights, music, travel. She held her own impressively. And we've grown up gracefully.

I may be getting in my car to drive to Pennsylvania now, instead of Southern Vermont. I don't know if there will be a funeral, a wake, a memorial of any kind. All I know is the phone call I received a few hours ago, in the quiet of night, and the hammering of thoughts since. D has a journey before her that so few of my friends have had to walk yet. We aren't quite at the age where our parents are starting to acquire the debilitating health issues of old age. I can't imagine the things she will discover about her mother, her own childhood and the deepest parts of herself, now that her mom has died.

Between the inhale and the exhale is a swinging door where we are constantly existing. Each swinging door has it's own story, history, herstory. D's mom's swinging door has both been closed and left wide open. We leave all kinds of ghosts behind when we die, in our letters, our sock drawers, old photographs. My heart is so not at this keyboard, not sitting in this morning office looking at the cows I need to go feed and milk. It's pressed up close to D, hoping I can provide enough support. Say the right thing. Pull her through nice and slow and steady.

Old Poems I

I've just recently stumbled upon an old journal. Stuffed within the binding is a collection of poems that I've written throughout the years. For lack of anything else to post these past few days, I've decided to occasionally post one of these poems. So here goes:
Old poems ~ First installment.

Baghdad,
Birmingham,
Sudan

It's all our own backyard,
no matter how far sighted you are

Revolution of change
always awaiting it's revolutionaries

War paint streaked across my conscience
like the spear thrown to stake it's prey

This small woman practicing pacifism
with still,
an ounce of angry strapped to her shoulder

When we victimize ourselves
with the thoughtlessness of convenience
we forget that half the world is screaming with war

When we stop noticing the gentleness of good practice
our own wars kick up inside our guts
and demand our attention

Notice more and transformation happens.

Quote of the Week

Our life is a faint tracing in the surface of mystery,

like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners

on the surface of a leaf.

We must somehow take a wider view,

look at the whole landscape,

really see it,

and describe what's going on here.

Then we can at least wail the right question

out into the swaddling band of darkness,

or, if it comes to that,

choir the proper praise.

Annie Dillard

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Drawing the Moon

I shut down the computer last night and looked out the window at a cloud covered sky. No moon in sight. Resigned the full moon walk and settled myself on the couch with chocolate trail mix and Goddesses in Everywoman by Jean Shinoda Bolen. Fifteen minutes later the clouds rolled over and the moon was bright enough to come streaming into my living room. Winter having finally descended, it's delay a little creepy, I threw on about forty sweaters and headed outside to walk up the hill and hang out with the bright light in the sky.

The night is always quiet where I live. The houses are spaced by about a quarter mile and the only noise I usually hear, other than the bard owls, is the male donkey down the road. When Blue hollars, he sounds like he's on the verge of a painful death. He's the only stud among nearly forty female donkeys. Can you just imagine the pheremones in that barn!? Ella's little friends get frightened when they hear it in the dark. It's a combination of deep, passionate, primitive longing and pure torture. Hormones can be like that.

But Blue must have been satiated because the valley was quiet. And the ground was glittering with the new snow of the season. I walked up the road to where the Dezotelle's old farmstead used to be. There's an old trailer now where the brick farmhouse used to be before it burned to the ground. Beside the trailer is a gargantuan barn and beyond that is a long stretch of Sound of Music pastures. The location of this place is a wind turbine's dream. There have been times in the past when I've found myself up there, at the end of the dirt road and under the bright moon, dancing slow and feeling peaceful. Like prayer in movement, all covered in wind.

I think this what I had in mind with this moon walk, but on my way up the road I noticed that my boot tracks were not the only ones in the newly fallen snow. There was another track, much bigger and with a much longer gait. A man's boot. One heading in the direction I was walking and then the same boot track heading the opposite way. But I didn't know which direction had come first. The coming or the going. And I knew that at the top of the hill I wouldn't feel alone enough to pick up a dance. To pray to the moon. To even feel safe, safe as this mountain town is. I grew up in a weird little town where men with no teeth whistle at 11 year old girls and turn their car around to gawk and be creepy. Too much of that is still with me. I tried walking in his tracks for about forty seconds, just to try it on for size and maybe overcome my jitters, but my dog is old and I didn't trust her to protect me so I turned around, feeling a ghost at my back.

I climbed back up my driveway and found myself behind my house, in my own yard, which isn't really a yard but about 20 acres of pasture. I walked out to the middle of it until I felt like I was in the center of someone's hand. In the palm. And I stood there looking up at the moon until I was dizzy with how fast the clouds moved.

I stood listening to the wind move down valley along the western ridge. It sounded like a creek in mid-April after the snow has melted from the mountains. It sounded like a freeway or the constant crashing of the tide. It was that glorious nothing kind of white noise of nature that doesn't get heard above the boots crunching in the snow. And I had to walk a long line down my memory to remember the last time I afforded myself this luxury. The last time I just sat and listened to wind. How much motion there is in just standing still.

Being Heard, Hallelujah

Well, I'm writing from home for the first time. We've been off-line here at our house for almost two years. Our laptop (that could probably be considered retro at this point) got one of those fatal viruses that just wipe it clean. Fried it. I swapped two hours of bodywork with the tech guy who takes care of the computers at the mongo jongo B&B I work at. I've got my work cut out for me, too. He's one big dude.

But it's nice having access to this blog from home. To sit at my desk in front of my window with my own tea cup. My daughter sleeping upstairs (or trying to read her Avatar comic book in the dark).....

I just checked in to my blog and it turns out I had my second comment from someone I don't know. It's taken about three weeks and hopefully they will continue to come. If you're still tuned in, I'd like to say thanks for checking this out and I'd love to hear more. I received a comment on the last post (about mi madre) from a woman of similar age. Thanks for the feedback. If you have a blog, I'd love to know about it.

I'm getting closer to sharing this blog with those I know. I've told some folks that I've been doing it but, so far, I've been enjoying the anonymity of writing for the sake of writing and not knowing the readers. Not really even counting on having readers. When they show up, it's like a great perk. Now that I've had one or two, I crave more.

The moon is full. I think it might be a good night to pull on the wool cape and go say hello. Go talk to the moon. Now that's something I can't do from my office.

Good night world.

Teaching the Blind to See

I just got off the phone with my mom. She was weepy and depressed. (Much better than manipulative and vibey.)

I was just there last week for a visit and she had just purchased her first computer. My dad has one upstairs in his office and uses it soley for work. Most of my parent's friends are on-line at this point and my mom has been anxious to join the ranks. It will live on the kitchen table where she daydreams of checking her email with her morning coffee, Good Morning America on in the background.

My mother has never used a computer. Like, ever. And it's a laptop, a new laptop, the really touch senstive kind where if you look at it with enough concentration, it will draw up your webpage or scroll on verbal command. My dad can pretty much navigate his way from email and back but my brother had to spend about five days of nose-to-the-grinding-stone lessons when the insurance company dad works for started requiring their employees to submit insurance claims via email. So, my father isn't the guy to give mom lessons on how to maneuver her way around in the world wide web. And my brother is a redhead like my mom. It would surely be a trainwreck.

I've acquired my dad's low blood pressure and good nature. Plus, I do a really good job (most of the time) at keeping my mom's nervous break downs at bay, so I was the one elected to give her the step by step directions.

I set her up with a Hotmail account so that if she has questions she can call me and I can help her find her way around. I also helped her set up the Oprah home page in her Favorites list (which she doesn't know how to get to anyway).

She's called me a few times so far but it's been pretty hard getting her to where she needs to be. After the first three minutes are up she starts to huff and her voice quivers and if my dad is in the room, she finds something to yell at him about. I think it's her comfort zone. And it's such a shame. He's a really nice guy.

So, I helped her into her inbox this morning, where she found something I had forwarded to her. I gave her the job of replying to my forward. I even sat on the phone with her and directed her to the Reply button, the Subject button and showed her where she should hit Send.

This last call from her was weepy because she had written me a nice long lettter, which probably took the better part of an hour (her typing skills are rusty and her nails are kind of long), and then when my uncle came in to check it out, he somehow lost the whole thing. I think both he and my dad had been exiled from the kitchen when she called.

So she closed the computer for the day. Needs to come back to it tomorrow. I keep telling her that eventually it will be second nature and that she needs to be patient with herself but I think she hears the grown up voice from the Charlie Brown cartoons when I talk like that. It just doesn't register. It's a strange dialect.

I don't know if she'll stick with it. And I wonder how long I'll last as her instructor. When I consider what a nightmare I was when it came to homeschooling, I get the heeby jeebies to think about what I've signed on for here. We'll see if she eventually barks at me or if she'll remember to breathe and forgive herself the mistakes she's bound to make.

It's hard to try to understand your mom's psychology. I spent the better part of my seven hour drive home from my visit with her wondering about a tactful way to suggest she try some therapy. It's a good thing that Ella has a portable DVD player with headphones because I had about twelve different conversations up there in the front seat, all by myself, trying out different approaches. I know that her anxiety isn't with the computer. It's about failing. Not being good enough. And that anxiety spills over to her every interaction, perception, and consideration. At 60 years old, her body carries the stress of chronic panic like a border collie with it's signals crossed. A really fine breed that thinks it's job is to chase it's own tail. And it breaks my heart.

I want to suggest therapy because I forsee a phone call in my near future.... one or another relative calling to tell me about my mom's heartattack. Part of me wonders if this is her journey. Is it my responsibility to do what I can to avoid that? Or do you teach old dogs new tricks? Teach the blind to see?

Right now, I'm just focusing on a home page, a browser list and an inbox. Let's hope we can get through that.

Come Winter

As I drove into town this afternoon, flakes started to fall. I usually wear flip flops and no coat until I just absolutely can't deny anymore that the seasons change here in the hills. This year has been an easier transition. Maybe because the wood has been stacked for almost three months, there is a winter's worth of hay in the barn, we aren't building a house outside in ice and freezing temperatures, and we aren't living under the stress of a construction loan and deep poverty. I can feed my girl. My self. My animals.

My car might be buried under an inch or two of snow when I come back out tonight after my massage shift. I don't have the ice scraper in there yet and my shoulders aren't exactly ready for the aches that long drives in the snow cause, but the moon is almost full and when there is snow on the ground it serves as a mirror to the skies. I'm so much more likely in the winter to come home after a long night at work and pull on my wool cape and walk up the hill to talk to the moon. There's a quiet, a solitude, a serenity when things quiet with winter. There is the understanding that it is temporary. A time to pull within and listen to the bulbs in the soil resting and the deep breath of hibernation. For the softest sounds. To enjoy the waiting and trust that the soils eventually thaw.

Notes from the steering wheel

In the past hundred years,
as many highways have been laid across the globe
as we have veins beneath the skin

communities scatter,
families spread,
a spectrum of Mobile stations between points A and B

a caligraphy like stretch marks
marking the growth

food picked from the vine in California
ripening in the dank shade of an 18-wheeler
on it's way to the mid-Atlantic seaboard~

a schmorgasboard
of truck stops
green house gasses
and transistor radios
along the way

all a part of the invisible toxic blossom.

Rosabella

On my drive home yesterday I pulled off of 81 North, into Dunmore, to visit two sisters I used to spend alot of time with when I was younger. I told Ella, on our drive, that these two ladies may be as close to fairies as she'll ever get. In saying this, I guess I created quite a mystique but I wasn't at all off course. I met them years ago in the back room of a bar where our friends used to play. That's how we spent most of our nights then. In that crazy turmoil of youth and identity and a buffet style of spirituality, dance was my main source of prayer and it served me well. Those I danced with were a part of my congegration. Nights were holy in the smoky back rooms.

It's been years since I've seen them. I got in touch via email when they ran into a good friend of mine at one of the band's reunions. We set up a time to meet on my trip home.

The older of the two, an incredible artist ended up marrying the drummer, had two children, made their best go of the marriage and then decided to let it go after many years. She moved back to the area, put herself through school, bought a house and, out of the blue, met a man from South Africa and fell in love. During my visit, I got to meet their beautiful daughter, Rosabella. The following poem is about this sweet girl.

Rosey rises,

sleepy eyed,

Africa in her blood.

Her mama's got the magic of the cosmos

where her paintbrush meets the canvas

and her auntie must have been dropped

from the branches of some pixie's family tree.

I'd forgotten how deeply her eyes hold you

from one thought to another.

Rosey,

all in red,

curious and wordless,

watchful and walking.

Rosey

Rosey McNosey

wondering

wondering

all the world about her.

Two continents for lineage.

Old mine shafts beneath her toes

and an African grandma

in the place where her imagination goes.

Rosey rises,

sleepy eyed,

sparkling mama in her heart

and Africa in her blood.

Remembering the sun

Found this old poem from the summer time, folded up and coffee stained in the console of my car~

This summer her legs are longer,
her skin darker with sun,
her eyes more watchful and her words more candid.

She is still full of clumsy youthfullness, spills and forgetfullness.
She still leaves quakes and messes in her wake.
But now, the grass that grows midsummer does not cover as much of her,
she wanders farther now from the pastures of home,
she demands less attention as the world around her demans her imagination.

This summer she can hold her breath longer,
she can swim deeper
and emerge from the river's bottom with bigger rocks in her hands.

This summer, she dances under the garden hose,
an absolute freestyle verse of summer,
the grass and topsoil collecting the drops
her skin does not absorb.

Hometown and Back

I spent seven and a half hours on the road yesterday getting back to Vermont from Pennsylvania. If I wasn't so happy to be coming home, those long drives would be torturous. I've been making the trip with Ella since she was three months old and she continues to be my most favorite co-pilot. For a little kid who can't keep still long enough to finish a thought, she does remarkably well strapped in to her little booster seat for the long stretches between pee stops and coffee breaks. Now that she can read (and has been witness to more than one of my speeding tickets), she's become my constant commentator on the current speed limit. Except she reads it like she's an airline attendant or a Verizon computerized operator.

"The speed limit is now 55."

"The speed limit is now 35"

"Reduced speed ahead."

We went to Pennsylvania to visit my folks but mostly to visit my uncle Bobby who was in from El Paso. He's kind of a retired bad-ass mother fucker who now has a pace maker and defibulator in his heart. He's been military most of his adult life and so we haven't spent a great deal of our lives in the same place. When he retired though, in 1991, he moved back to Pennsylvania and stayed for just a few years. Those few years happened to be some of my most difficult. I was just fresh out of high school and trying to carve my own way but I had a bunch of baggage that I was trying to drag behind me and couldn't seem to summon the balls to drop it off the edge of some ravine. Having Bobby around was kind of like having an emotional drill sergeant who was also a really good listener. He also wasn't particularly partial to my mom's school of thinking and that made him even more of an ally than he already was. I didn't realize it at the time but having him available to me during those years made me feel just a little more human.

In March of 2005, he lost his son in Iraq. No one really even knows why he was over there. He was more the long haired, VW beetle, tatooed bartender kind of guy but out of the blue he went and joined the Marines. He was run over by a HumVee while waiting to be picked up for rounds one morning. He was squatting in front of a mound of sand and the sun was in the driver's eyes. The whole thing just seems too ridiculous and stupid for words and makes it all the harder to digest. Bobby wears his tags every day and can't summon enough foul language about the war and the administration.

This past spring, his wife got sick. While in the process of diagnosing her with sclerosis of the liver, Bobby went into major cardiac arrest, threw out his back, and was hospitilized as well. He made it out. She did not. It's been a tough 19 months.

So, it felt good to be with him. To be the listener this time. To put him down on my massage table and get him to snore. It felt good to hear the stories about how he met his wife (his third ~ they married after he left Pa. in 1993), to see that he can tell those stories now and not deflate. He still drinks too much and smokes too many cigarettes but he's walking his own line. It's his to walk. He took me in my grittiest day and now I take him.

The rest of the trip was par for the course. Played dodge ball with old shadows and geographic phantoms. The town used to be a coal town. Blue collar industry gone under and now it's like a Virtual New Jersey Box Store Extravaganza. The whole valley was flooded in '72 and most of the homes and schools and businesses are loaded with asbestos and molds in the basements. When I was about 12 years old, my friend's parents and siblings and aunts and uncles all started dying from random sorts of cancers. It hasn't gotten any better. The place is fairly toxic. Half due to consumer choices. Half due to the environment and pollution. My folks moved out of the valley, out of the toxic house, out of the flood zone and now live on top of the mountain. There are trees on the streets there and the sound of a train late at night. It feels safe to let Ella play out in front of the house. The houses aren't a half a foot from one another like the streets where I grew up. It's not paradise but I feel like we can breathe a little easier there.

My hometown isn't what it used to be. It used to be the typical American melting pot of ethnicity. Mining towns are like that. The Irish and the Welsh, the Lebanese, Syrian, Italian, Polish and Czech all congegrate to make a living. Eventually, their kids start marrying outside the church, outside the lineage. When I was a kid, I grew up with a Lebanese/Irish Catholic family. The wife made killer hummus, grape leaves and baklava but she also prayed to Saint Anthony if she lost something. I spent the better part of my childhood thinking that it was JesusMarionJoseph. I spent my summers swimming with nuns and having cookouts with cousins named Rashad.

But the neighbors started putting their houses on the market and heroine moved in in their place. Lots of heroine. My high school has metal detectors now and state police assigned to the hallways. It's some knarly shit. I always take a drive, though, through those streets when I go back to visit family. I go to the Middle East Bakery in the North End to pick up spinach pies and I drive through my old neighborhood. The streets are more skeletal now but I'm able to remember roller skates on the sidewalks, old men on porches and hide and seek when the street lights went on. I've got some good memories and left there in time to be able to hold onto them. I found the ravine in my travels and threw away the heavy baggage. I kept the good stuff, though. Kept the good stuff and kept some distance. So far it's proved to be a good recipe.