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.

Day Fourteen

So my youngest son taught my oldest son how to make sushi tonight. From the living room I'm listening to discussions about which side of the nori faces up and the bamboo rolling mat and how thick the avocado slices should be. There was much joviality about the acceptable amount of wasabi and some comical death threats during the slicing of the rolls which left me nearly in tears. However, as Sawyer is exiting the kitchen with his plate, there was this exchange:

Brennan (the 17 year old): "You're going to eat that with your hands??" (furiously waving chopsticks in the air)

Sawyer (19 yrs old): "It's finger food!"

Brennan: "SAVAGE!"

I love being a mum.

Day Thirteen

There is, somewhere, a single drop of rain that begins the monsoon. An avalanche rewound through miraculous time-lapse photography would capture one unnoteworthy snowflake. And then another. Thus are the revelations that eventually alter our souls. Have you ever found yourself discussing albino trapeze artists and stop to trace back exactly how you arrived there when you were just debating the pros and cons of PNC Bank's account options a minute ago? The mind is a magnificent organ, ideas flames in the night, words...kerosene.

The other day, there was a conversation with a friend during which she told me something difficult had happened to her. My immediate, instinctual response was "Oh, I'm so sorry!" to which she replied, "It's ok, it's not your fault."

Drip.

Hours later: Wait...of course it's not my fault - I wasn't even in the area, involved, or know those people! Did she think I was implying I was somehow connected to this circumstance? I was using the phrase "I'm sorry" to communicate empathy, true distress and vexation over her situation as a result of my emotional attachment to her as a friend. I was absolutely in no way responsible for what happened. As the day passed, I became aware, stunningly so, of how often I uttered those words, "I'm sorry." And me, lover of words and collector of constructs - the ideas beneath the words - was dismayed and physically slightly ill at the thought that I have been subconsciously even remotely communicating to my own inner self as well as everyone else - that I could possibly be culpable or liable in any way for the things that befell others. That I could have foreseen or prevented them. Sympathy is not an apology.

I am not sorry. I am upset and distraught over the unfairness of this world, the choices made that reap dreadful consequences, the random acts of God and nature that wreck havoc in our lives - but I owe no apologies, I bear no weight in these things. Why am I picking up such a burden? My internal dialog is often a battle between self-love and self-hate, the winner decided randomly depending on the dispute. I fear I have been undermining any ground gained in the "own your shit and your shit alone" category.

I will commiserate. I will sympathize. I will listen with compassion and love - but I will stop taking on responsibility for things not mine to carry. I have to stop being sorry.

Day Twelve

This evening is quite possibly the most lovely evening of them all. All, of course, being the last week or so which seems to be the extent of my memory capacity these days. The breeze is a caress across my throat and shoulders, the temperature so sublime that you know you could lay naked and not really be able to tell where your flesh ends and the air begins. Yet, as I sit here I cannot help but notice there are...needs. Two of the lights are out on the glowing strands that drape about the pillars. One of the curtains has somehow pulled away from the anchor and is hanging with a tab loose in the wind. My favorite basil has gone utterly to seed in the last four days, I swear.

Maintenance. The truth behind the screen of every performance, all the magic acts, everything that works/functions/continues...maintenance. Beauty and flavor and light come from the sweat and scrapes of someone who is tightening the screws and mowing the grass and doing the dishes. My porch is my retreat. The place I end the day with music, a glass of wine, and a good book; sometimes contemplation, often excellent companions. I've had passers-by admire the porch, wistful a bit, one told me she's using mine for inspiration which is a fantastic compliment, but I want to somehow tell them - it's just effort. There's nothing on this extension of wood and brick that is expensive. Flea markets and thrift stores and stapling things to the ceiling. However, there is a great deal of perspiration involved. Same thing goes for parenthood, relationships, and success in general.

Sweat is a currency, maintenance a prophecy, and effort damn near a crystal ball.

Day Eleven

A perfect day. Birdsong drifting through the lazy summer air, china blue skies that smell faintly of rain and the color green, the drone of a distant lawnmower blends with the bumble bees that loop from flower to flower like tipsy lovers. My heart is sore today. I feel a strange splinter occurs when nature contradicts the heart, an incongruence in the universe. Weddings amidst torrential rain, blizzards on birthdays, funerals when the sun is uninvited but arrives cheerful and brightly dressed.

On certain days, perfection can be hard.

Day Ten

Some days just fall off the calendar, blown away like autumn leaves and scattered into memories.

Day Nine

It was a hard liquor kind of day. There were no bubbles, no fruit, no ‘hint of blackberry with a plum finish.’ This day will not end with Chablis or Merlot. There will be an ice-cube and two fingers poured. I might sip the second one. 

This morning, thanks to the deluge that hovered over Pittsburgh for damn near three hours with thunder roaring as if the earth were breaking apart, the basement flooded. The boys had both already left for work so I was attempting to sop up water with one arm, moving furniture, and pulling out the dehumidifier. Brilliant way to begin the day.

The rest of this day included cracking the top of my head into the corner of a cabinet hard enough to make me almost pass out (and later Brennan parted my hair and said, “aw hell mom”), getting locked out of my own house, one of our vehicles overheating and not even making it home, the strap of my sundress snapping right when I bent over and I gave a full on breast shot to a really nice fellow, and I forgot to eat dinner. 

On the plus side, I spent the majority of the day with that really nice fellow who has found himself confined to a wheelchair and unable to feed himself much sooner than expected. His heart is gold and his mind still sharp and it makes my soul ache at the unfairness of life. His disease renders my arm issues unnotable; there isn’t a comparison in the universe. I am damn lucky and a wench to complain for a single moment.

Thank you, Life, for the lessons we don’t ask for - but desperately need.

Day Eight

The heat has been agonizing. I'm waiting for the ash to settle before venturing out to water the withered sprigs of what used to be the plants in the front yard. Even Frank, the assassin cat, has given up the mole hunt and clawed at the door till I let him in and he collapsed across the tiles, quite the drama queen. The boys have left on their own adventures for the evening and I'm planning on taking in the holiday snap and crackle from the comfort of a porch cushion with a glass of wine.

I found myself mulling over the dirt in life this afternoon. As I massaged the oxyclean paste into the stains on Sawyer's work shirts, I thought of the story they tell. The paint on my dresses, Brennan's ink-spattered pants, the grease on Jason's shorts from last weekend when he changed the breaks. If you unwound the stains, you'd likely know the how and perhaps the why of the day. And so I started working on an idea that I've been considering for over a year now. Here is how it begins....

 The world can be a dirty place. Life is a disheveled attempt at writing a novel; a series of chapters that despite a valiant endeavor to choose wisely, often end up unkempt, the edges stained, corners in disarray. These lives have closets. Darkness behind doors locked tight with chains woven from the expectations of others and the albatross of our own unfulfilled dreams. However, there is a place of absolution. Where the grime of life can be exonerated, the sullied cleansed, the defiled disinfected. Kneeling is often involved and money exchanged in return for untidy forgiveness. Music echoes through metallic speakers and baskets are passed; lives splayed out for the prying eyes of strangers to consume, a foul feast. Welcome to the laundromat.

Day Seven

Have you ever had a day in which you really had this vague feeling that you were not supposed to have gotten out of bed? This day included several hours at the DMV and a 19 minute traffic standstill in 93* heat in a vehicle that doesn't have air conditioning. (the vast amount of time, this doesn't bother me in the least....today I wanted to pull my hair out) My arm itches and aches like hell. Damn difficult day.

Thankfully the world includes friends and good liquor and laughter. Thankfully the sun sets. I watched odd fireworks from the porch and drank whiskey with my dog.

Tomorrow (it's after midnight, so - today?) is the day we celebrate the fact we have a DMV and road crews and whiskey - which is spectacular.

Happy 4th my friends.

Day Six

The rain sluiced over the world and washed the heat from the day as if magic, leaving the scent of bruised leaves and wet grass behind. I spent some time with a good friend tonight, both of us raising teenagers, and talked about responsibility. How you raise a child today with this enigma of an idea that everyone talks about but our headlines are full of the blatant missing of such. There is a vacuum. However, earlier today another friend posted a video which literally caused my heart to pause. It's about the difference between fault and responsibility. I did try valiantly (with my limited chicken pecking skills) but could not isolate it to post a link to it (outside of fb which I know many of my readers do not partake in) but I actually listened to it six times and transcribed it so I could print it out...I kept trying to brush the tears away while I typed. This was what it said:

It doesn’t matter whose fault it is if something is broken – if it’s your responsibility to fix it. It’s not your fault if your father was an abusive alcoholic, but it’s your responsibility to figure out what to do with the trauma and make a life out of it. It’s not your fault if your partner cheated on you – but it’s for damn sure your responsibility to find a way to overcome that pain and build a happy life for yourself. Fault and responsibility do not go together.

It sucks; when something is somebody's fault, we want them to suffer, to pay, we want it to be their responsibility to fix it – but that’s not how it works. Your heart, your life, your happiness is your responsibility and your responsibility alone. As long as you are stuck in pointing the finger and stuck in whose fault something is, you are trapped in victim mode. Power is taking responsibility.  

Your heart, your life, your happiness is your responsibility

 and your responsibility alone.

Wrongs are done. Tragedy comes dished out in this life right alongside breathtaking joy. You will be hurt. I have been hurt. But the result, the end of that chapter, the what-we-do-with-it and how-we-choose and intention above instinct...this is our marrow. 

I am responsible. 


(video credit to Will Smith & NewYou)

Day Five

Do you know that wives tale where you can put a frog in cold water and slowly raise the temperature and he will never jump, just quietly die? Two fold here - first, there was a brief moment this afternoon when I wondered if we were being cooked. But secondly, as I sit here on the front porch, the sun setting with a passionate tangerine and lavender tryst spilling across the sky, having turned off the air in the house and opened the windows to let the smell of summer waft through the rooms again...I'm rather comfortable. The breeze is marvelous but the weather page says it's still 93*.

Hence, I'm left wondering if I'm a frog.

Today wasn't an easy day. The best laid plans and mother nature plus the two percent and things went a bit sideways. They do. It was resolved. But my watch e-mailed me that my 'resting heartrate' rose over 11 points this weekend. Amazing how in the midst of the thing, it can unravel you despite 45 years of it 'working out.' You'd think I'd be better at this by now; not take it so personally. Damn watch.

I worked on 3 Words today. This is a creative endeavor thought up by a mad genius who brought a bunch of clever people together for unexpected fun. We each contributed a list of 'people, places, & things' and every two months three words (one of each) is pulled out of a jar and we are left with 60 days to do something creative. There have been songs posted to youtube, masterpiece paintings and works of 3D awesomeness; poetry, short stories, recipes, letters, a graphic novella, and a brief script. I am truly honored to be part of such a thing - and today spent a while trying to get my characters gracefully out of the cursed basement while the Tree of Life's dead roots thrashed under the Chinese restaurant next door. (it does make sense, you'd just have to read the last three submissions....)

Moral of the story? Create. Every day. Tomorrow, when you get up - ask yourself, what can YOU change or do or make or sing or cook or dance to make the day different than the one before. Do you live next door to a Chinese restaurant?

Day Four

The air is thick. Burnt honey, this sunshine. I have an irrational fear that should I walk outside it would stick to my skin and sear through my flesh. It appears July is arriving in flames, her tresses scorched, her touch an inferno. I suppose I should be grateful as this will assure I stay indoors, all thoughts of yardwork and chores charred away.

This evening my husband and I went to an ax-throwing birthday party. Yes, you read that right. It was awesome. A wildly creative and talented group of people got together and learned how to throw axes at a target. There were scores and a bracket and a tournament winner...axes! Just when you think you have a general idea about the boundaries - the edges that define daily reality with its 'that's to be expected' footnotes - and then someone invites you to a warehouse in Millvale to masquerade as a lumberjack for a night. (of course, I could not actually participate as my person is compromised, but we will go back. Indeed!)

I collect characters in my mind. Even just the tiniest habit or personality quirk I stash away in a vault to be incorporated into someone's neighbor/aunt/professor/murderer. I sometimes wonder if I'm ever collected...my own oddness, ticks...then again, I spent three hours with a hundred people flinging sharp objects for fun - what is normal?

My goodness, isn't life grand?

Day Three

The heat is rolling in. I can almost see the humidity building in the summer air, molecule by molecule. By Sunday we will be at 94* and the world will melt. Thank God for ice and gin.

I've started working on a novel I began two years ago based in Folly Beach, South Carolina. It's October and there's a weathered diner overlooking the ocean with a juke box that plays jazz. There are storms and the sudden appearance of strangers and human nature and sorrow. Joy piled on top of grief alongside wild hope and unforeseen possibility. I find it a bizarre thing sometimes, to write characters, infuse them with life - this corporeality that to be believable must contain tragedy as well as beauty. Frustration and euphoria in equal measure - this is life. It is a vulnerable thing to channel what I've felt, what I've dreamt, what I've mourned into words and place them within a being on a page and let go. A bit like  children; you invest and plant seeds and guide...

But luckily, if they go too astray, in a novel...I can just kill them.

Day Two

Last night ended later than anticipated - but such a good night. This book club was hosted by a woman who made several recipes from my book; had a centerpiece composed of spray paint, whisky & Splenda, and paintbrushes; and had placed quotes from the book throughout the house. She was so lovely and her group of friends wonderfully gracious and welcoming. There was one particular moment, however, when my heart leapt into my throat. It was during a conversation when one of the women said that when she was reading my words, she felt her own emotions and feelings validated. There was a pause and another woman said, "I actually feel like many of my feelings and emotions didn't have words - I didn't have the words to express them...you gave me the words I needed."

There have been many times I have questioned why I write. Why I have this well of passion - both light and dark - that lives vehemently within me and spills over no matter how hard I try to impede the tide. I lay awake long into the early hours of this morning, replaying those words over and over in my mind. Have you ever had that flash of realization, recognition, as if your soul suddenly took a breath and relaxed, whispering, "This is why...."

Day One

Did I mention I have to sleep in this thing?? Sleep and I are not pals. We're like that quasi-hostile co-worker that you exchange a nod across the hallway with when you happen to see them every other Tuesday - unsure of their motives or why you never seem to get along. Sleep just doesn't like me.

So let's add something else to wrestle with at night. Marvelous.

I lay awake for several hours before dawn, eventually deciding coffee was a better option than the mental swimming I was doing. I nearly put an eye out attempting to brush my teeth. There are a vast number of things I've discovered that I am just horrible at left-handed. It's been less than 24 hours and I've sprayed hairspray in my eye and directly inside my ear. I've spilled half a dozen things in the kitchen, scared that crap out of Sawyer when I tried to vacuum left-handed and knocked the entire machine down a flight of stairs. (he arrived breathlessly from the basement convinced I'd fallen to my death) I basically massacred a hard boiled egg attempting to peel it and wore most of my lunch, requiring a full change of clothes before 1pm. It's going to be an interesting three weeks...

I'd realized last night that I had a book club/book signing to do tonight. Like a moth of an idea, it would flit panicked into my brain and then I'd brush it away, attempting to ignore it. The thought of driving in the rain, after dark, in an unfamiliar neighborhood, with one left arm was more than a little unnerving. 9am and a message from a friend volunteering to drive me - and they say angels don't live on earth. Extremely relieved and a little teary, I went upstairs to attempt to do something with my hair.

Left handed usage of hot hair apparatus = burn cream.

On to writing. I pulled out what amounted to 6 separate legal pads full of scribbled ideas for stories or books I've been jotting down ideas for years now. The first person dream when I slowly realized I'd had things harvested from my body to pay my debts. The red willow tree on the plantation linked to a bloody past and things erode when the arborist up north inherits the land. The laundromat where lives overlap and intersect amidst soap and human nature. I will spend a few days sorting and expanding plots until hopefully one grabs me....one will grab me, right?

I'm asked regularly if I'm going to write another book. I find myself wanting to say yes, but the demons of doubt pull at my hair. They slither beneath my thoughts to question the merit of such an endeavor. It's not like I can pull off another like the first - that was a memoir collected over a decade of living. (timeline wise, perhaps I could write another when I'm sixty?) I know we all have our monsters of skepticism. Life is full of people that value money over dreams and experience over possibility. I've been given 21 days to be quiet. Can quiet overcome monsters?

Challenge Accepted....Reluctantly

I've had pain in my wrist for over six months. Sometimes just an ache that lingered long into the night, sometimes a knife that sliced through the day and left me gasping. I had a show to paint for, it was spring and there was planting, activities and the boys and...how many reasons could I come up with to avoid a doctor?  

X-rays revealed that I have a "positive ulnar variance" which means that my ulna (the thinner bone on the pinkie side of your wrist) is unfortunately longer than my radius. This abnormality leaves a tiny gap where there is supposed to be a cushion and things have gone awry. With an ultrasound guide, they slipped a needle into that tiny gap, filled it with magic goo, and then wrapped my arm in hot plastic to mold me a prison. 

I fought tears the entire way home, driving with my left hand, furious and grateful - a remarkable combination of emotions to cram into one skull at the same time. It's only three weeks, however, I am quite honestly almost incapable of the art of rest. Immobility is impossible. I hardly ever watch tv and crank out my days full of yardwork and boys and cooking and painting....and now I cannot chop an onion or lift a paintbrush. 

I've lain awake long into the night, alone as Jase is in New York for the week, and considered my options. (I had quite the sulk the entire afternoon, I assure you) And I've decided that while typing is challenging and I have to hold my hand weird and half of my time is spent correcting typos that even spellcheck doesn't know what the hell are...but this I can do. 

I will write. I will not go crazy. I will write.