SNOW DAY ~ 12 hours later

We made and have been eating chocolate covered strawberries since 3pm. Bill came home with a nice bottle of Chianti at 5pm. The jungle house pygmee is officially in bed and the snow hasn't taken even one breather. In the very a.m. the snow leveled at Ella's knees. By sundown today, it was up to her waist. When she dropped to sitting position in the yard out back, she was practically swallowed by the storm.
I called off work this morning, rationalizing that I'd go in tomorrow to make up some hours. After my third glass of Chianti, I've reasoned that the roads will not be passable tomorrow either and I should just write it off as a loss. Dana will be here by 3pm, Ella's recital's at 7pm and then she and Bill are off to New Hampshire and I've the house to myself with Dana, her two friends from Salem and the makings for a weekend of chocolate martinis. Oh, and I'm sure we'll finish off the strawberries, too.

SNOW DAY!

We're getting our first Noreaster in more than two years. It started dumping snow here after midnight and by 6am this morning every school in Vermont has been closed. The storm is supposed to run straight through till tomorrow. Right now, the house pygmee is still asleep, Bill's on his way to work and I'm sitting here bundled up and wishing I hadn't offered to do chores so he could get to work earlier. I know, though, that by the time I reach the barn door, I'll be in heaven.
Ok, the house pygmee is now in my lap, hair all ascew, and she's wrapped inside my bathrobe, her arms running down the length of it's sleeves and her hands resting on my moving fingers. She's watching letters jump onto the screen. I've talked her into bundling up and doing chores with me. The bribe of hot chocolate afterwards might have been the clincher.
SNOW DAY!!

myspace junkie

I've become a myspace junkie.


I hate to even admit it. I feel like I'm giving in to some greater force that I've always seemed to be able to sidestep. But in checking it out, I'm suddenly in touch with about a dozen people that I haven't seen since my early twenties. There were so many of us back then, travelling in packs, like a thousand circles on a pond. Now we're all spread out all over the country and everyone's story is different but I keep getting little messages throughout the day from this person or that. It's like being in a bar in your hometown during a holiday when every time you turn your head you're taken back a decade and a half. It's been a long time since I've put myself there.



There's one person still fixing Volkswagon buses. Another is working on the set of Law & Order. One beauty just performed in a local show of the Vagina Monologues. One is a DJ in New York City half the time and in San Fran the other half. Several are still playing in bands somewhere or other. One just finished her degree in Colorodo and she and her daughter, who is exactly two full moons older than mine, will be visiting the East Coast this spring.



We travelled together, she and I, the summer before we both got pregnant. I flew out to Oregon where she was living at the time and we hitchhiked up and down the coast. Spent some time with EarthFirst in the Oregon mountains, defending the madrone trees and the habitats of little creatures, digging trenches to keep the dozers out and building tripods where copters could otherwise land to kick our asses out of the forest. We walked the streets of San Fran for a week or so, drinking real Chai tea from small, hole-in-the-wall Greek restaraunts, and climbing the hills to eat real Chinese food in Chinatown. If you ever get there, check out the House of Nan King. We spent a night in the Redwoods on the Pacific coast during the absolute blackness of a new moon, exploring the magnificence with our hands and our noses.



I keep getting messages saying So and so would like to be your "friend"..... and I think to myself, honey, you have been now for some time.



If I played connect the dots with all our geographic locations now, I wonder what kind of image it might construct.

Life just gets more.....

In 1999, when we first started our search for land to buy here in Vermont, we drove up into the hills of the town we now live in. We ended up on the above hillside, which resembles something from The Sound of Music. From there we went to the town clerk to see if we could get the name of the owner and find out if they'd be at all interested in selling their land to us. Totally presumptious, I know, but we were young, wet behind the ears, and really wanted to get our hands in the dirt and start farming. We spoke with a lady, who said she owned the land with several other people, and that the other people weren't interested in selling. We moved on.

We ended up finding 32 acres about ten miles north of that hillside. We cleared an acre, built up a real bare-bones cabin and lived, with no electricity or running water, for a couple of years. The first summer there, we had four or five friends stay on the land as part of a work-trade situation. One of the couples built a tree house and stayed in that. The other couple of friends put up a tipi in the woods behind the cabin. We built an outdoor kitchen and lived this strange, communal summer through. We called it The Compound. I don't know how much work was actually done but we had a really good time.

Bill and I didn't survive cabin life. When we split I moved in with a girlfriend for a couple of years. By the time we got back together he had rented out the cabin and begun leasing the farm we live on now. Strangely enough, that Sound of Music hillside we had inquired about years ago was the adjacent land to the farm. It's the hill I've mentioned in prior posts, the one I climb at night and sometimes talk to the moon.

When Bill began leasing the farm, the owners made mention that prior renters had worked out hay contracts with the woman, Sara, who owned the land next door. She lives now in NYC and we ended up calling her again, five years later, and we're still in the processing of building up her pasture to eventually hay it. Turns out that she owns the land with her husband, father and maybe a sibling or two. I guess her father was the one who didn't want to sell the land and from what Sara has said, once he passed they were going to think more seriously about selling. She's driven up to meet us a couple of time, once with her father, a sweet old man who just wanted to come up and take a look at this land he's owned since the seventies.Her father passed away a year and a half ago. Sara knows we're still passionate about that land and this fall, we even went so far as to write her a letter, explaining that now that we had finished building the house on the land we own and it's all rented, that we're starting to actively look for land to buy. While the letter was still in the hands of the pony express, a surveyor/appraiser that she had hired came up our driveway looking for directions to that hillside. Sychronicity.

Sara called us this week to let us know that they had gotten the appraisal back and wanted to let us know first before they put it on the market. I feel like I could cry every time I think about it.... and for mixed reasons. This little river valley has become my home. As far as having a place to put my roots, it's here. Ella has become a part of this landscape just as much as I have and there have been so many times that I've sat on that hill and dreamed of calling it home. And now that might just be a possibility. What scares the bejesus out of me is the prospect of having to build another home. I'm putting my faith in the hope that the second time around would be smoother, what with having more experience and know-how and having learned from the mistakes of the first attempt. That first house is a beauty and the finished product is amazing... it's hard to believe Bill drew it, designed it and created it. But executing it was a two year long nightmare of financial, physical, emotional and relational exhaustion. Can we do that again? Would it be as hard? Would our relationship survive that kind of wear and tear again?Whether it's worth it hardly seems a question but it's scary. Plus there's the matter of the debt we've accrued in finishing this last house. It seems almost silly to go to the bank asking for another mortgage on land when we have these random credit card debts not yet paid off. Relative to most Americans, I don't think our debt is all that much but still............

So there it is. The big hub bub of life right now. There are a thousand options now and we're not quite sure what the timeline is. How soon should we put in an offer? We're half afraid that if they go to a realtor they'll be told that they could sell that land for WAY more, which they could. I'm already envisioning where the barn might go, watching the geese overhead in the spring, where I could graze some sheep, maybe a small wind turbine?

One thing at a time.
Part of me feels like I want to just bundle up in snow clothes and lay on the hill and hear what it has to say about all this. HHHmmmmmmmmm

Mountains

I drive forty five minutes to work every morning. Sometimes I listen to books on CD, sometimes I listen to music or to National Public Radio (depending on whether or not I can stomach the news that day). Every morning though, I feel like I'm some kind of active participant in the scenery. Today, looking at the mountains in the distance, rolling all over themselves, I was taken with thoughts of what water looks like when it boils, what the fabric of long skirts look like when they blow in the wind, their shadows tucked into the folds. I was taken with thoughts of ladies legs, their knees bent toward to the skies, all those mountainpeaks bent like graceful round joints.

This Week in News

So, I snatched a Newsweek from work because I couldn't help but want to read the story about the recent kidnapping discovery. From what I understand, a young boy was kidnapped four years ago and recently discovered when another boy had come up missing and they followed their leads to the kidnapper.
What I'm not real clear on is this:
Why, when an abducted child who has obviously undergone an extreme amount of trauma is discovered, do they not give the kid a bit of breathing room before they throw him to the wolves of national media attention. Why the fuck was this kid on the Oprah show within the first two weeks of his recovery and WHY are they discussing, on national television, the possibility of his sexual abuse? He's a fucking teen-ager, for Christ's sake? Give the kid some time to heal.
So many parents whose children are abducted and never found start up foundations. There is the National Missing Children's Day, the Adam Walsh Act, Megan's Law and the Amber Alert. Why have no grown ups taken into consideration the potential psychological and emotional ramifications of exposing a child so publicly so directly following their trauma. I know everyone loves a happy ending and everyone loves sensationalism but why has no one started up some kind of act or foundation to draw attention to the dire need for these kids to have some privacy? Is it really necessary to ship them off to Chicago so Oprah can stay on top of her ratings? Does this kid really need to go into the check out line of his local grocery store and find his own face plastered on the covers of half the mags in the racks?
It breaks my heart.that these kids have no time to lick their wounds. That no one, on a public scale, is taking their dignity into consideration.

Let there be songs...

A few weeks ago, a whole slew of friends rented out the town hall in my tiny, little, one-horse town and set up a projector screen on the stage, surrounded by sheets and tapestries. After a potluck between thirty + adults and about a dozen and a half kids (if not more), we turned the lights down low and started a Grateful Dead show ~ Winterland '79.

Some of the women wore their old cuordery patchwork dresses. Alot of the daughters used this as an opportunity to finally get their fingers on some of their mom's old clothes, too. From what I hear, but never actually saw, there was a jug of juice in the back kitchen, just for adults.

It wasn't until later in the night that people actually started to dance. I had looked forward to this all week, and was craving the opportunity to close my eyes and dance to the sweet refrain of familiar tunes. My memories of those years come in bits and peices and more often that not have something to do with spinning around in circles in some random hallway of some random stadium in some random city. And that was only if I was fortunate enough to score a ticket that night.

In the clutter of my day to day, the structure of packing lunches, racing to the schoolbus, getting to karate class, and meeting clients, it's not that often anymore that I remember the glory of those times. But that night, after I relaxed enough to fully lose myself to the music, Ella came running over and started spinning circles with me and the two of us spun around like little helictoper seedlings until something else caught her eye and she was off and running just as quickly as she'd come.

I had only one friend during those years who had a child and she was four and five years old those summers I went to most of my shows. I used to walk around with her on my shoulders, wanting to pretend she was my own and I would daydream about sharing those experiences one day with my own kid. My friend's daughter is fifteen years old now. Jerry died the summer of 1995 and when my friend's daughter started kindergarden that fall, she came home every week, for many weeks, with a new picture of Jerry, sometimes with angel wings and a halo ~ sometimes he was playing his guitar to Jesus (she had a religious grandma).

Ella has been more curious about those years since that night at the town hall. I think she saw something in all these grown-ups that she might not have seen before, some kind of light that got turned on. It's been fun to lay in bed at night and answer her questions, to talk about how colorful the parking lots used to be and the main strip, called Shakedown Street, where people used to sell food and clothes and goodies of all kinds. She's been sleeping in a big Grateful Dead t-shirt every night and dug up my old patchworked bag from the storage room, convincing me to allow her to wear it to school. We've been playing Grateful Dead in the kitchen while we make dinner and she'll grab my hands and we'll spin around in circles together. There's a light that's getting turned on in sharing this with her. It might not be in a hallway, in a stadium, in a random city, but I don't know if that's the most important thing. There are stories within the songs and stories that go along with those years. Stories worth telling.

The night after our little dance party, I drove by the town hall on my way home from work. All the homes in the village had smoke coming out of the chimneys and warm lights glowing from inside their kitchens. Inside the town hall, the lights were turned up bright and I could see about two dozen white and graying heads sitting at the long card tables. I could just imagine the caller calling out the bingo numbers and I smiled, thinking about the absolute contrast from one night to the next.

A Matter of Degrees

It's been almost a month since my last post and I don't know why I've chosen now to get back on board. I have ten minutes before I meet a client and have no idea what I'm even here to write. The two, maybe three, readers I may have collected in this blog universe have probably given up hope of ever seeing anything new here.

It's been cold and busy and my head has been somewhat dormant. I collect things throughout the day and shape them, like bread dough or playdough, into paragraphs that scatter like dust bunnies once nighttime falls. I formulate little things to write about......like, when the temperature drops to fifteen below.... the way the tires sound on snow that frozen or the way your lungs feel like freezing metal when you breathe. I wanted to write about the night that my cow, Patience, gave me a kick in the head and knocked me over and made me cry. I've been wanting to write about my daughter's new ambition to be an animal right's activist.

But I think when it's this cold, I get all caught up in simply breathing. I drink hot water with lemon because when I drink the well water my innards shake with cold. The thirty yards from the house to the car and then from the car to work are intense ventures. I'm just waiting for the mercury to get above zero so I can go buy those new cross country boots and get the fuck outside. My house is full of furballs because I don't dare leave my mangy old farm dogs out in this weather for any length of time. B and I have been dreaming of islands and surfboards and sunshine...planning our vacation this summer. Crafting the tunnel through which we'll navigate our way past winter.

And yet it's so beautiful. So quiet.
Everything is white and sparkles.
The stillness beats all.

More Highway Lines

Heading back to the hometown this afternoon after I pick Ella up from school. The car is packed, the christmas presents are wrapped, and the cell phone is charged. It takes seven hours to get there, maybe a bit more with the two or so stops we make along the way. For some reason, Ella is particularly drawn to a specific rest stop on the New York Thru-Way. It's one of those gargantuan stops that only sell Mobile gas. I'm not a big fan or advocate of anything big and conglomerate but if I am going to drink a cup of coffee on the drive, I'm as guilty as the next one for being a patron of Starbucks. And this gargantuan stop has a Starbucks. It also has an Elby's Big Boy, TCBY, Wendy's and a great sunglass stand. I don't know why she prefers this stop to others. There's a great little deli we used to go to in Saratoga and a little breakfast joint in Glenns Falls but she prefers the box store rest stop. The corporate toilet. Life's little pleasures.

It will be a quick trip to the parent's house. My mom is turning sixty on Sunday. My dad will follow suit soon in March. They've known eachother since elementary school, dated in fourth grade (whatever that means when you're nine years old....) and grew up in relatively the same neighborhood. Their lives are so very intertwined at this stage of the game that it's nearly impossible to imagine one without the other. That's not to say it's all roses. I think I've mentioned in prior posts how the dynamic goes. It's not easy. My mom is fairly high strung, hyper-senstive and controlling. If my dad's blood pressure were any lower than it is now, he'd probably slip into a coma. He doesn't say much, has a cute little chuckle, a mustache and levels at 5'2". I'm an inch taller than the both of them.

My mom is a Capricorn redhead who grew enormous boobs by fifth grade and used to beat up Gracey, the neighboorhood girl who used to taunt her younger brother and sister. My dad used to cyphon gasoline out of cars with his buddies and steal returnables to cash in for beer in junior high. He got sent home in the second grade with a note from his teacher, asking if he had a bladder problem because he was asking to go to the bathroom so often. He was smoking cigarettes. (which may explain the lack of height?)

My mom and her mother (now 87 years old) are not speaking to eachother right now. My mom is the only sibling who still lives in the hometown with her mother and I know the lack of distance has made it hard for them. They're such different people. My grandmother is active and independent. When my pop went off to WWII in 1939, my nan got bored without him and enlisted. She's just like that. She does what she wants to, when she wants to and that tendency has only been exacerbated with old age. My mom has always acted out of obligation, family priority and guilt. She has a golden heart but in making so many sacrifices (most of them unnecessary) she's acquired a steely kind of resentment for my grandmother. Their issues are decades old and won't likely be resolved within my nan's lifetime.

It's always a ride for me to go back home. To walk back through the tunnel of family history, to look back on my own tunnel and see where the grass has grown over the cement walkways and then where the cement is still drying. Every time I go home, it's like I lean over that wet cement and leave my handprint. The little girl elongates, expands her vocabulary, shifts her perspective. I find I'm becoming the adult in conflicts, the peace-keeper. The only one in the family who understands what an "I-statement" is. By leaving, I'm able to look at my mother as a woman. A human. Not the mother who still desperately holds onto that role. By coming home, I'm able to put it all into practice. The more handprints I leave in the cement, the better the practice gets.

I grew up thinking one thing about my grandmother and now, as an adult, I see otherwise. When I have conflict with my own mom, I don't share it with Ella. Her relationship with my mom is not my relationship. My mom is not the same person to her that she is to me and for that, I'm grateful. It's allowed to me step back and see the value in not tainting another's perspective. I'm sure I will, at some point throughout the weekend, play mediator. I hope I can do it gracefully.

Family waters are thick. Kind of like cement. I think I'll wear my mudboots.

Fair Trade

I used to spend an exorbitant amount of time writing in diners and coffee shops. This was back before motherhood, before I kept jobs longer than the average three-month stretch. This was before barn chores and a mortgage and before I went grocery shopping weekly at the same grocery store and even went so far as to write lists so as not to forget basic household favorites. This was before the household.

At that time, the bottomless cup of coffee still existed. Maybe it was because the kind of places I frequented didn't sell organic, fair-trade coffees. Maybe it was because my favorite place was a silver diner called Palooka Joe's and it's patrons were mostly the down and outs in the dowtown area. I would sit at the bar sometimes learning sign language from Michael, my favorite down and out. He had big aluminum baskets on both ends of his bicycle, worked odd jobs for money and had no sense of hearing. For a long time, our exchanges consisted of words cluttered on paper placemats but I had had a deaf boyfriend in high school and so had learned the ESL alphabet. It was slow communication but I had time and was open and he was homeless and weathered. He loved the opportunity to sit with a young pretty girl and I.... I just needed substance. I was desperately searching for anything other than the hum-drum, mundane reality of middle class white America and all that came with that.

In the closet in the guest room of our 150 year old, crooked farmhouse is a black and purple bag, stuffed to the top with fat, little CVS spiral-bound notebooks. None of them are dated, there are likely more than a dozen, and in order to put them in any kind of sequence I would have to sit down and force myself to read through them. Force myself back into that time in my life. I always tell myself that someday I will put myself to the task. But it's been more than a decade since those fat, little spiral bound notebooks and more than a decade of healing old wounds. My new journals are formatted differently. I've begun to think in full sentences, starting combing my hair, stopped taking so many drugs and gave birth to new muse.

But I do miss my homeless friends. I miss Benjamin, who, instead of introducing himself right off, walked up to my table at a little downtown deli and asked me if I was writing love letters in those notebooks. I told him that I didn't write love letters and conceded that I was writing poetry (something I rarely admitted at that time in my life). He took a deep breath, grinned, and proceeded to recite the Raven line by line. A few minutes into his performance, he held up one finger, turned around and ordered a cup of coffee and came back to my table and asked if he might join me. The friendship was sealed already but he gave me more of the Raven, his life story and there would be days to come where we would meet up on the square and I would play harmonica while he would play a borrowed guitar. Oftentimes, the other old buddies would be nearby playing cards or checkers on the stone benches.

Back then, I was dodging the ghosts of a love gone bad and a given up pregnancy. I was medicating myself with lots of weed, a little speed, alot of booze and music and sex and dancing. I've always thought of those years as the golden years, as the Great Distraction. I was dancing out there on the very thin limbs of my own branches. Dreaming of houses with no windows, no roofs, and many rooms. Dreaming of little girls that might have been my own. I was writing the story of my life in scattered sentences over drip coffee, good company and fried eggs. And late at night, after the bands had packed up, I'd walk barefoot into the dark alleys to find my old buddies on some abandoned porch and they'd scold me for wearing no shoes as I'd sit there on the broken step pulling a sliver of glass out of the heel of my foot. I'd loan them smokes. They'd loan me their stories. It seemed a very fair trade.

I'm sitting here now in a coffee shop in a prime tourist New England town, a couple of blocks from where I work. In the place of a fat, little notebook or a placemat, I have my old, slow laptop. I've graduated from see-through coffee to a chai latte and I'm not stoned. There are no homeless people reciting poetry to me, this is not a silver diner and I am no longer in an old blue-collar mining town. Just some nice tables and chairs and the constant drone of the espresso machine.

My fingers move much faster on a keyboard than they do with a pen and paper and I think now in full sentences. My attempts at making sense of my life come easier and my ghosts are so much more transparent. I shake their hands now, pull up a chair and offer to buy them all a cup of coffee.