The Finale

Day twenty-one was a spectacular day. I hiked through a truly magical forest with pals (bit of a spat with some ornery raspberry bushes but I won) and then exploration of a marvelous property that included a really-seriously?-yes-damn-straight outhouse and a chair rescued from the shrubbery which is going to look splendid when refinished. Burbling creeks and train trestles and gardens lush with burgeoning treasure.

I climbed up and sat in a tree house built into an apple tree with branches dripping fruit, a wellspring of future piedom. Hidden within the boughs I could hear the wind symphony, a series of waves that washed the worries from the world...I wanted to sleep there.

The humidity has blissfully dropped. Tomorrow I will gesso and mix pigment, and begin. (slowly, I swear) Tonight I sip whiskey held in my right hand. I toast three weeks of challenges and disasters and a dollop of humility...and am so damn grateful to have the medicine we do.

The cicadas are singing. Summer is stunning; she's arrived draped in shades of green and the scent of vitality. I cannot believe 21 days have passed. I've loved meeting you here daily, but a challenge its been...will you miss this? I will.

Typing with two hands and no brace is like flying.

Twenty

It seemed mere minutes between dusk and dark, the light of day extinguished as if there were a switch on heaven's wall. Charcoal clouds scrape across the horizon; lightening slicing them into pieces and I listen to them crash together again, the thunder almost intoxicating. I'm waiting ever so patiently on the back porch, for the sky to fall.

I spent a significant portion of my day emptying the pantry as I've discovered we have a guest. (pest?) My dining room now resembles a third world market, there's not even a seat to sit upon. This diabolical mouse apparently has good taste as his first meal was the gluten free sea-salt crackers I purchase for friends and since then he's moved on to Ghirardelli chocolate and shaved coconut. Appalled at having to share such commodities, I emptied the pantry and discovered a hole that leads to the basement. Bastard.

Now, I do own (room with?) the assassin cat, Frank, but I've actually come think this may be his fault entirely! You see, we've lived in this 100 yr-old house for nearly ten years now, and not a chewy rodent to be had. Then Frank arrives with his penchant for bringing "friends" inside to "play" until he gets bored and abandons them, thus I now own a pair of welding gloves kept in the piano bench referred to as the "vermin gloves" specifically set aside for catch-and-release. Lo and behold, we have a guest. Damn Frank.

I've set a trap. Checked it three times but I'm sure my visitor will wait for midnight's silence to make his appearance. He'll find the chocolates have been moved. I'm taking my wine into the shower with me lest he discover a taste for red. Frank is grounded.

Nineteen...and Counting

The afternoon rains have bathed the fever from the day leaving cool fingers to run across my cheeks as I type. Bird chitter salutations echo through the trees behind our house and I watch the first of the fireflies venture out to seek company. The quiet is nearly a liquid thing. I am anxious tonight, eager. Tomorrow is day twenty and the evening after that I will shower and run the soap through my hair with both hands. How can something so simple make me so happy? I have staked Wednesday out, turned down requests, explained to the boys: I. Will. Paint.

Trust me, I've been reminded to go slowly, rest often, take intervals. I will...I swear. I promise. (who am I talking to? you? me?) Today I made jambalaya with wonky sausage (left handed knife skills are not a thing for me), watched a movie with my husband, and will fall asleep likely thinking of Wednesday - canvases, music, and paint.

Here's to excellent distractions - may the hours fade quickly and your dreams be as thick and savory as mine.

Eighteen

Family. It's an ocean that sweeps into your shore; even advance knowledge still leaves room for unpreparedness. A high tide that consumes the day in a whirlpool of currents - opinions and theories and questions - stones beneath the surface, sea glass that glitters in the sun. My family has mass. A quantum of substance that exceeds the square footage they take up - they fill a space with giant personality and an amplitude of point of view.

It was a day that lingered long into the night. Postulation, thesis, sentiment. Reconnection, reflection...exhaustion. They are indeed the bones of us, family; but the muscle - that which we choose and flex and shape and use...in a room full of family, the individuality of us is as clear as the kinship.

Seventeen

It's 1:38 in the morning and I've just finished washing my hair. First - it's damn humbling this lesson of one-handed everything, including the exponential amount of time it takes me to do...everything. Second - I believe there is a certain point, when midnight has curtseyed and left the stage and dawn is fewer hours away than the evening before, that it seems reasonable to continue on. Friday has arrived.

My sister is coming to visit for the weekend; my parents will join us on Saturday for a while. A strange, mid-summer meeting of the clan, this is. Different states, different lives, different orbits - joining around a table is nearly a feat of aligning planetary trajectories; there are calculations and preparations and intentions involved. Family is not friends, but more. Beneath the skin of casual life the pulse of where we came from echoes, the foundation supporting that which is now. How we parent and friend and love - these seeds were sown before we drew breath, planted by family.

I think of this when I watch my boys jostle and joke, when they pile into a car with pals and disappear into the sunset headed towards a world I exist in only as a touchstone. They always come home. But I know this is fleeting, lovely, fragile. Family is fragile. It is our anchor in the ocean, our path through the woods.

 Family is...are the bones beneath the flesh of us.

Day Sixteen

I have hydrangea envy. I drive the streets of Pittsburgh, passing house after house with majestic globes of petals, gently bobbing in the breeze like a brazen girl tossing her hair in the wind, and my left eye begins to twitch. I linger at stoplights. I've circled a block just to look a second time. I feel the lazy blooms of a hydrangea draped about a yard are summer incarnate; sunshine and picnics and firefly ballets.

My hydrangeas are on some other timeline. It's mid-July and the buds of my lovely limelights are just now forming, tiny clusters of clenched fronds, holding their breath, awaiting some secret sign to unfurl their beauty. I've talked with them, watered them, reasoned and begged and threatened to dance for them. (I did draw the line at chicken sacrifice...to date) Perhaps it's the light they get? Are they drama queen hydrangeas? Waiting to make some kind of grand entrance? Did I get the "high altitude" version by mistake? Have I angered them?

Anticipation makes the heart grown fonder...and leaves me thinking of drive-by-hydrangea-napping after dark.

Day Fifteen

Officially one week to go. The mingling of relief and fury is a palpable thing inside of me. I can almost taste it, rain and ash. Two weeks down seems sincerely amazing. Seven days to go makes me want to throw things. So I choose - isn't this what we do? We determine our focus and thus remain in the "sane" column of life's ledger, however slim the margin. I have a commission; a painting 24" x 48," pine forest with a river and sunrise, due by September that I have been unable to begin. There are three canvases I started the week before my x-rays waiting on easels in the room adjacent to my bedroom. They whisper constantly.

Today, clutching at the dawn of July 18th like a drowning man with a spindly raft, I wandered the isles of an art store, purchased several canvases, gesso, tubes and tubes of paint. I stood and ran my fingers over paintbrushes, drug them up and down the flesh of the inside of my wrist like a lover, testing for flexibility and splay. I am an addict in need, entirely too many dreams crammed into my skull desperately attempting to spill out. When I have unpainted dreams, my sleep becomes a chaotic jumble of them, a randomly spliced reel that makes no sense and contains no rest.

One week.