Every Day I Write The Book

Last week during lunch with my friend Heather I was complaining–as I always complain– that I never have time to think about this book I am trying to write.

“Maybe I should stop writing my blog,”  I said flippantly.

“I think you should stop writing your blog,” she said, not at all flippantly.

I am going to stop writing this blog.  I can’t write this blog and write a book.  And for a while I could be the sort of writer who writes a blog and also tries to write a book but I can’t be her anymore.  Now I need to be the sort of writer who writes a book.  I have every intention of opening up shop here again in the near-ish future, although I don’t honestly know what sort of shop it will be.  I hope you will stay tuned.

I don’t know how to begin to thank all of you for coming here to read what I have to say.  Thank you.  Thank you for giving up on any hope that I would post on a regular basis, thank you for reading long posts when I had too much to say and for looking at pictures of flowers when I had nothing to say at all.  Thank you.

I know who some of you are, and I am grateful to you for letting me know you through your comments.  The vast majority of you are strangers to me.  Thank you for knowing me through my words.

I think this is the part where I am supposed to tell you to friend me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter if you want to keep up with my coming and goings, but I’m not on Facebook or Twitter. What I can tell you is that I will post here whenever I have big news to share.  And now I am going to get all Secrety on you and tell you that someday I will finish a book and I will sell it, and then I will travel across the country and read from that book and when I do, will you please come and introduce yourself so I can give you a hug and you can show me pictures of your kids?

Until then, I send my love.

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*photo by Reboo

I Have Loved the Beauty of Thy House

At 5:00 on Sunday morning I pulled a crying June from her crib and tucked her into bed next to me.  I have not done this– she has not asked me to do this— since the night before her first birthday.  I lay down with her and rubbed her back and prayed for her to go back to sleep.  She did, but I stayed awake.  And although I didn’t know it at the time, just a few miles down the road the church that I have loved for nearly 10 years was burning to the ground.  By 6 a.m. the church, in the words of our minister, belonged to fire.

The church was built 170 years ago by people who knew many things that I do not know.  They knew how to thresh wheat, and how to butcher an animal.  They knew how to mix a salve that would heal an infection and how to steep a tea that would end a pregnancy.  They knew how to sew bandages and how to ferment cider.  They knew how to build a church so that the morning sun would enter the windows in every season.  The people who built our church were the children of Revolutionary War veterans and the grandparents of boys who died in the Civil War.  They were people who loved their children and feared their God; people who spent their few precious hours of rest each week listening to sermons about serpents and demons, and fire.

Can I describe the church?  Can I conjure it for you?  I can’t.  And what would I say, really?  Beadboard walls, iron sconces, a wooden pulpit.  No cross.  I can tell you that you would have loved it, that you would have walked through the door and believed that this was what a church was meant to look like.  I can tell you that during the long and lonely years when I was waiting for my roots to take hold in the rocky soil of these hills that church was my salvation.  In that little room my life was made holy:  in May the flowers on the tiny altar were the same as the ones that bloomed by my mailbox; in March the congregants’ muddy bootprints covered the painted wood floor no matter how carefully they wiped their feet at the door.  These were people with whom I shared the same late  harvest and early frost, the same relief at the sight of steam rising from the maple sugar shacks in February, the same joy in swimming in cool lakes that we had skated across six months before.

On Sunday afternoon we gathered at the Parish House.  I parked on Main Street and walked toward the church.  There was bright yellow tape strung across the road leading up the hill, but I could still see what was left.  I cried loud tears at the sight of it, and kept walking.  During the service we prayed and sang and laughed; we clapped and we cried.  We collected an offering for Haiti.  I cried for all my Sundays there, and especially for our girls’ baptisms, and I tried to remember that they were baptized with water from a creek that still runs and by minister whose heart still beats strong in his chest.  So much remains.

There will be a new church.   And as a consolation prize, it might even have a bathroom.  But I hope it doesn’t have much more than that.  I hope it is one small and simple room nestled against that ancient rocky ledge.  We are a wild and creative, a holy and raucous, congregation.  We love big, we dream loud.  We stomp our feet and we laugh; we hold each other’s hands and each other’s babies and each other’s fragile hearts.  We are, dare I say, a bit undisciplined.  That church, that 170 year old building, held us.  It held us down and it held us up and it held us together.  It kept us quiet (sometimes) and it kept us humble.  That 170 year old building was built by people who loved these hills and who knew so many things we do not know. When it comes time to rebuild it I hope we bow to their wisdom which was, of course, born of necessity but also must have been born of grace, and of the prescient knowledge that nearly 200 years later we would need nothing more than a room filled with pews on which to rest our  bodies; nothing more than a dozen windows so that we might see each other’s faces in the morning light.

Twenty Four Hours Later

I didn’t know about the earthquake in Haiti until more than 24 hours after it happened.  Twenty-four hours in which I made dinner for my children and put them to bed myself because Chris was away on business; got up twice in the night to soothe said children back to sleep; made breakfast; dressed the girls in warm clothes; scraped the car windows; dropped June off at her babysitter; saw my therapist; picked Grace up from school; filled the entire trunk of my car with groceries packed in cloth bags; put said children to bed again; sat at my kitchen counter with a friend and drank a bottle of wine.

It was only after my friend went home that I sat down at the computer and called up the New York Times homepage and saw what had really happened in Haiti.

I looked at a photograph of a child with a bandaged and bloodied face holding a piece of bread in one hand and I could not keep my mind from turning that child into June.  But that child isn’t June.  I am not sure there is a child is this world that is further away from the earthquake in Port-au-Price than June is.  I do not have words for my gratitude for this fact, or for my shame.

I read Tracy Kidder’s book on Haiti a few years ago, and occasionally I check in with Partners in Health to see what new and amazing work they are doing there.  And today I will send them money.  But the truth is I don’t remember much about Kidder’s book, other than its guarded hopefulness and the bleak picture it painted of a country terrorized by war and destroyed by deforestation, corruption, and illness.  I read that book and for a few days, or maybe weeks, I though about Haiti.  And then I let it go.  I let it go the same way that I let the Lost Boys of the Sudan go a few weeks after I finished Dave Eggers’ What is the What, and the way I let the Hurricane Katrina refugees go once the waters had receded and the Super Dome had emptied.

I live a life in which terror and destruction, poverty and violence are all things that happen to other people in other places.  I do not respond as generously as I should to requests for aid.  I do not hold broken people in my heart and mind for as long as they deserve to be held, which is forever.  Instead I occupy that space with my children and my partner, with my work and with dinner plans and vacation plans, with music class registration and permission slips and the twice-yearly clearance sale at Hanna Andersson.

The child is the photograph is not June.  But this fact does not keep me from worrying about June and wanting even more for her than she already has.  What I realize now–on this very day when I woke to a gray sky and a warm bed and a five-year old who had climbed in next to me because she wanted to hear a chapter of a new book before breakfast–is that I only neglect that Haitian child more by conflating her with my own daughter.  That hurt and homeless child who lives an ocean away is not my daughter.  She belongs to someone else.  She belongs to another world.  Today I am going to try to hold her next to my own children, and not because I feel guilty that such a thing has not happened to my girls or scared because such a thing might someday.  I am going to try to hold her because she is a wounded child, and she deserves to be held.

Patron Saint

Winter, 1990something

My boyfriend’s cousin is having brunch. Maybe it’s New Year’s day, or someone’s birthday.  I have met this cousin and his wife and their two young girls before, although I don’t know them well.  The husband and wife are writers.  Maybe he writes mysteries novels or screenplays.  I can’t remember.  No one seems to know what she (I’ll call her Carol) writes; she has been working on a book for as long as anyone can remember, but makes little progress. Everyone talks about the book the same way.   She’s writing a book, they say, and then there is a little shrug or an eye roll, and a knowing smile.  I get the idea that no one is expecting her to finish.

I don’t remember what my boyfriend’s cousin looked like, but I remember Carol.   She looked happy, and tired.  She looked older than me.  She looked like a mother.  She looked the way I look now.

On the way to the bathroom from the kitchen I walk past a pantry with floor to ceiling shelves filled with books and notebooks and a desk no wider than an ironing board covered with papers.  Carol’s office.  Carol’s desk.

When I come back from the bathroom everyone is in the living room, and little girls are dancing.  Carol is laughing, and dancing with them, and then she grabs the video camera off the dining room table and starts to film them.  I remember her smile from behind that camera, and the way that she was still dancing with them while she was filming.

I don’t remember anything else from that weekend in the city, or how many months it was until our last weekend in the city together, or exactly how many years it was before I saw Carol’s book on the front cover of the New York Times book review.

What I do remember is Carol’s face, and the way she talked about her daughters, and the way she didn’t talk about her book.  I remember her pantry office, and the stack of dishes in her sink.

I do not expect to write a book that makes the cover of the NYT book review or wins a Pulitzer (Carol’s book did), but I do expect to finish a book.   I don’t know how, or when.  I am tired; my desk is messy; my daughters are dancing in the living room and I am dancing with them.

I think of Carol all the time.  I can’t even begin to know what it really took for her to finish her book, what and who she had to sacrifice.  But what I can know is that she held her book and her daughters in her heart and her mind, and that gave them each what she had, when she could.  For now I make her the woman I need her to be, the woman who, like me, stoked the fire for her children while managing to keep an ember of work alive because she believed that someday both could throw their own heat.  For now I make her my Patron Saint of Writing Mothers, and I sanctify her pantry office and her narrow desk, her video camera and her bare feet, moving fast to keep up with her dancing children.

Advent

There are so many things I want to write about our trip to Chicago, and about Advent, about preparing for Christmas in this novel phase of my life when I am not waiting for the arrival of anyone or anything.  It is divine, and I am enormously grateful and wildly busy.  So I offer you two things this holiday season:  a favorite poem by Jane Kenyon, and a bit of advice:  Go forth and buy a canister of Martha Stewart craft glitter and decorate something–anything–with it.  It is pure and glimmering magic.

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Mosaic of the Nativity

Serbia, Winter 1993

On the domed ceiling God is thinking:

I made them my joy, and everything else I made to bless them.

But see what they do!

I know their hearts

and arguments:

“We’re descended from

 Cain.  Evil is nothing new,

so what does it matter now

if we shell the infirmary, and the well where the fearful

and rash alike must come for water?”

God thinks Mary into being.

Suspended at the apogee

of the golden dome,

she curls in a brown pod,

and inside her the mind

of Christ, cloaked in blood,

lodges and begins to grow.

                               –Jane Kenyon

Away

The girls and I spent last week in Chicago with my parents and sister.  We are home now, enjoying our first snow day of the year.

I will write soon.

The Hen House

I am happy to announce that my first monthly column is up at Literary Mama.  I’ll be writing stories about my so-called rural life for the next year or so.  Thank you in advance, dear readers, for following me there.

From the Archives: Thanksgiving 2007

Here is a post I wrote on this day two years ago.  Today I am thankful for so many things, chief among them all of you who return to this humble little site again and again to read what I have written.  Thank you. 

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While I have had to buy nine tubes of chapstick in the last nine days because I can never remember where mine is, the one thing that never seems to leave my mind is lines from books or poems I haven’t read in years. Lately, it’s this haiku: While in Kyoto listening to the cuckoo birds/I am longing for Kyoto. I even remember the day that I heard Robert Haas recite it, how he explained that the poem is about how as humans, we are more comfortable in a state of wanting than we are in a state of being. “We are constantly,” he explained to the perennially dense Teri Gross, “trying to rehabilitate our longing.”

This would be my version of the haiku: I am 27 weeks pregnant, longing to be 27 weeks pregnant. While this might seem like an odd sentiment for someone who has done a fair bit of complaining about her physical state, I seem to have reached that elusive moment of gestational equilibrium when the baby needs just as much from my body as my body can (fairly) happily offer. I’m not terribly uncomfortable or tired or Tums-dependent. And because this is most likely the last time I will be 27 weeks pregnant, I feel myself wishing that this time was still be on the horizon, waiting for me.

When I was pregnant with Grace, I loved feeling her move. Loved her kicks and squirms. I loved how eventually I could tell the different between her feet and her butt and her head as they pushed against my skin as though it were a tent whose door she couldn’t find in the darkness. Every kick was an occasion for “feel, feel! It’s moving!” and with every kick the reminder: you’re having a baby. You are going to be someone’s mother.

But this time I don’t need to wrap my head around the idea that I am indeed having a baby (that is going to come out of my vagina) and I am already someone’s mother. And this time, the kicks don’t surprise me and they don’t get much of a mention. What they do is remove me–for an instant–from whatever I am thinking or saying or doing and bring me to that planet where only the baby and I live, that closed system of heating blood and evaporating hormones, of the baby’s elongating limbs and sprouting eyelashes, my shiny hair and darkening nipples. The planet where each of our psyches occupies an opposite pole: the baby’s, which knows me but does not yet love me; and mine, which loves the baby and does not yet know it. The kick holds me there for just an instant, and then sends me back to unloading the dishwasher or folding laundry or unwrapping fruit leather with my teeth while I drive. But it sends me back altered, ever so slightly altered. And it is the alteration I will miss. It is the alteration I would rather look forward to than look back on, would rather anticipate than experience.

It is the alteration that I am trying, really trying, to just be grateful for today, this cold and snowy day before Thanksgiving when I am nearly 27 weeks pregnant with my second child.

Nine Days Down, Twelve to Go

Twelve days from now will mark the three-week anniversary of the night we discovered that Grace had pinworms.  Pinworms.  Pinworms!  Pin.  Worms.  How did we know, you ask?  Oh, you really don’t want to know how we knew.

I am so tired.  I wash so many things these days.  I wash hands and I wash sheets and I wash car seat covers and legos and pacifiers and plastic animals and slings and dish towels and wool hats and anything I can’t wash I put in garbage bags in the attic.  I use diluted Clorox and full-strength Lysol and I don’t use any Seventh Generation.  I don’t even use Method.   Method is for sissies.

Did I mention how tired I am?  People whose children are grown tell me that their kids had pinworms and they didn’t clean as much as I am cleaning.  I am comforted by this, but I have not stopped cleaning.  And I don’t entirely believe them.  I don’t know if it would be possible to see what I saw coming out of my precious child’s tush and not want to spray the entire house with a fine mist of full-strength bleach.

If I didn’t know it before, I know it now:  I hate cleaning.  It is exhausting, demoralizing, boring, and endless.  Didn’t someone once say that cleaning when you have young children is like shoveling in a snowstorm?  I think it is more like blow drying your hair in the shower.

Nearly all the girls’ toys are in the attic because they are too soft to be washed.  I’ve left them with wooden blocks, a wooden doll house, a wooden play kitchen, and a few puzzles.  It is very Waldorf around here.  Which means that the girls are spending most of their time looking at the most recent American Girl catalog and playing with loose change.  June calls her stash “my moneys”, and she screams when you try to take it away from her.  She likes to count it:  “Two, two, two, mine!”

On Monday we will all take our second dose of pinworm medicine and the next Monday all the pinworms and their spawn will be dead.  We can stop cleaning, the dolls can come down from the attic, and I can go back to changing June’s crib sheet every other never.  That Monday cannot come soon enough.

The Numbers

During the first trimester of my first pregnancy I braced myself for blood every time I pulled down my pants to pee.  Day after day, week after week, I held my breath, told myself I would be fine no matter what, and looked down to see nothing.   And then finally one day I was thirteen weeks and suddenly feeling better, feeling well enough to cook a chicken and consider eating it, feeling well enough for a boisterous long-distance phone call that I didn’t want to end even though I had to pee and so I cradled the phone between my shoulder and ear and pulled down my pants and did not, even for an instant, think of blood.  And there it was.

For several hours I could only assume that I was miscarrying.  But then the ob flipped on the ultrasound machine, swiped the wand across my belly, and found a flipping fetus with a smooth and fast heart, completely oblivious to a blood clot seeping out from the spot where the placenta was trying to knit itself into my body.

Subchoronic hematoma is the clinical name for what was happening then, and its common name is One Fresh Hell.  I was so frightened that I couldn’t even bear to look it up on the Internet.  I asked a friend to do it for me, and to give me an honest report.   “According to the numbers,” she said, “it could go either way.”

The way it went, of course, was the way of Gracie.  When she was an infant I used to think of that blot clot and cry loud tears into her curly hair at the thought of what I nearly lost.  Now when I think of the blot clot I think:  of course.  Of course she was not deterred, of course that bleeding did not stop her from getting to where she was going.  Who among us was meant for life more than this girl?

Grace and June had the flu last week.  They were careful to stagger their infections so as to insure the longest possible window of time we could spend together, as a family, without any contact with the outside world.  (If you are looking for a chance to really get to know your loved ones in the confined space of your own home, then I highly recommend contracting H1N1.  No one else will want to see any of you, from any distance, for a very very long time.)

I spent several nights sitting up holding the girls while they tried to sleep.  When Grace was sick, I propped myself up in bed and she slept with her head on my chest the way she used to when she was an infant.  When it was June’s turn, I sat up in the rocking chair.  They were both in some kind of terrible and unfamiliar pain with bodies so hot I tried to keep a thin blanket between my skin and theirs because the heat of their skin made it hard for me to believe that they were not destined to become one of those numbers I had been looking up when I shouldn’t have been: the number in hospitals, the number on ventilators, the number dead.

But the heat of their skin was nothing more than their smart and able bodies burning away what would harm them.  And they did, they burned for days and then the heat broke and they slept and ate popsicles and watched profound amounts of television.  Because they are healthy and lucky children.  Because they are not, and never have been, one of the numbers.