March 18th, 2008
Dear Self, February 2009 –
How’s February treating you? Is that thing where you cannot put your finger on exactly anything that’s wrong, but nothing exactly feels right either, the days are too short to get anything really done and you’re having a hard time remembering exactly what the point is in all you’re supposed to be getting done? I come to you as somebody who has recently survived February begging you to just hang on a little. It’s over soon! And even though this year I wouldn’t have blamed the sort of apathy I was feeling on the weather, especially since February was surprisingly gentle and mild and full of nice days that surprised most native Portlanders, standing now on the verge of the spring equinox, the week when the switch got flipped and all of the trees decided together “Ok, riotous blooms now!” I am distracted by my own optimism, happy on the saturation of the light, the abundance of color, was made dizzyingly content driving the kids to school this morning by the reflection of light on wet pavement, on passing bus stop after bus stop where people had their noses pressed to books, wanted to press and keep the sense of well-being and life rushing back in full force.
I am intoxicated on the smell of damp earth, on smelling again after weeks of allergy sniffles and sinus pressure and never really succumbing to a cold but never really feeling well. These allergies come with all of this itchiness until I feel like a reptile trying to shed old skin and it is so hard in the discomfort to keep any sort of perspective about how it isn’t going to last forever, to remember that a morning like this morning is coming.
One of my realizations this year has been that everyone around me is a grown-up if by grown-up you mean “able to sustain long conversations about recipes and gardening” like I remember my mother doing with the neighbor, and I feel like I’ve been focussing on other things for long that I still feel outside of those conversations as I did when I was eleven and could understand what they were saying but also couldn’t, but maybe I am slowly picking up by the most passive osmosis some of the interest in these things or at least understanding of why they are useful, and here is what I have learned I should do with my Oregon yard: cut everything way, way back. Not the tentative shrub pruning I did in Texas, shaping the green things in front of my living room windows so that I could continue seeing out the window, but really, when it’s done growing, chopping all sorts of things back to the ground or trunk or what have you. Not sure what the exceptions are in my yard, but the things I did take on faith and cut back on because they were looking bedraggled and pathetic have rewarded me by growing beautifully, budding happily and lots of live-looking parts. And I won’t overwhelm you with the technical vocabulary I don’t have but trust maybe you’ll have learned more names of plants in the yard and the appropriate timing and degree of trimming, because really what I am trying to do is once again bludgeon you with obvious metaphor.
So, dear February self, it’s a sunny day and you’re saying to yourself “So that’s not the problem…” or if it’s one of those days when you haven’t seen the sun in six weeks and are muttering “The sun’s not that great, it just makes you hot and sweaty and sticky and the bright light just makes headaches worse, we moved to Portland because we LIKE a rainy day” I beg you to glance once again at the pictures I took in the yard this morning, and trust me that there will be a morning within a month that is spectacularly delicious. And while you should trim back the dead and unuseful things in your life making room for new things to grow, please don’t trim back the writing too much because every now and again you surprise yourself and write the thing you most need to read.
All my love and affection,
your March 2008 self
March 13th, 2008
I’m not going to poll my friends to confirm this, but I suspect if they were all in a room together they would start grumbling about how bad I am at keeping up my end of the telephone relationship. It starts with a bad week when small people and their various activities demand all of my attention from the time they wake until the time they go to sleep. And at 10 at night in Oregon when they’re all settled in, the kitchen’s cleaned, the laundry’s sorted, and I’ve caught my breath and I am thinking “A minute to myself? What should I do?” I am not fool enough to try calling Texas, where it is midnight. But that’s not a good enough explanation because I will happily drop almost anything I am doing to answer the phone. No, I have a secret conviction that they are all (both of them!) busy doing important things and my phone call will be an interruption, slightly annoying. And then there’s the issue where time starts going by and I am embarrassed at having not called and that makes it that much harder to pick up the phone.
What’s worse is starting to feel that embarrassment at not keeping up with the blog. I’ve got this list of excuses. Because when I absolutely cannot write I can always make a list!
1) Feeling like if I cannot say something nice I shouldn’t say anything else at all, and thus ending up out raking the yard instead.
2) Unabashed use of the text box in scrabulous to carry on conversations sustained over weeks that are getting all of the thoughtfulness left in me after long dialogues where I am corrected in everything I think I know about dinosaurs (Rainer knows no greater thrill at the moment than correcting us, so I try to get my details off now and then just to make his day). And many of those scrabulous conversations are on blog-worthy subjects, but it would be wrong, it feels, to just re-cycle them into blog entries, even changing names and incriminating details…
3) The fact that our days are right now filled with a sort of sameness that makes it hard for me to believe anyone would want the details — surely everyone is tired of hearing about my kids’ music lessons and how I think one of the things that made me most proud this week was listening at Aodán’s lesson when several attempts to control a particular bow stroke had to be a little a frustrating he was able to laugh at himself while staying focussed and solving the problem — prouder even than I felt when he got to sit first chair in his concert at the fancy schmancy concert hall concert Friday night. And I still am startled to look at his forearms and hands and they don’t look like a child’s hands any more and that shouldn’t startle me but I still feel compelled to remind him that at one point he was completely unable to get around by himself and only got from one place to another strapped to my chest and his legs were these ridiculously useless appendages and his feet weren’t even shaped like people feet, stubby little things almost as thick as they were long.
4) I am fasting and too lazy to find a quick link to the reasons why Bahá’is fast, but I’m in the middle of 19 days of not eating or drinking between sunrise and sunset and it’s a way of spiritually recharging before our new year which starts on March 21 with the spring equinox, and for many of the last twelve days just getting through the day with everyone intact has felt like accomplishment enough without having to write about it.
5) Even in my daily journal writing I’ve felt a little blocked and frustrated and bored with myself. I have this suspicion that one of my answers to feeling blocked is constraints. It’s like this: if you’re playing scrabble you have all these word possibilities you think, if you could just get this one letter next draw, or if your opponent just hadn’t used that space there. But if you have all the letters and the board and can make any word you want? Really, really boring, and you cannot think of a single word. So it seems like my options are to invent arbitrary rules to myself, entries not using the letter E or starting every sentence with M until I am bursting with what I could write without arbitrary rulage, or else adopt a completely different metaphor, and realize that I’ve been writing like a small and timid animal that likes to scurry along the walls, the constraints about what I can and cannot say, what voice I can use, whether or not I am at all funny and whether or not it’s intentional, and figure out whether I am frightened of leaving the wall and getting hopelessly lost or if I am more nervous about raptor’s eyes on high spying me swooping down with outstretched talons.
Or something. I’m not going to promise to start blogging a lot more regularly, but if you were wondering if I was alive because I haven’t, um, called you in a while, and the blog had a week’s worth of newspapers on the front lawn and the grass hasn’t been cut in apparently months, well, here I am! I’ve missed you!
