Look who's back....

I meant to post in February, or March, and especially in April, but OK, May it is.

A quick catchup. Winter was cold and long and tiresome. Life marched on. I drank a lot of wine, certainly too much wine, and made lots of soup and dog biscuits and spent quality time with my family. I turtled mostly. I gained some weight, so I purged my closets of all the things that don't fit.

My husband and I turned 55,  and to my utter amazement, our baby girl turned 18. We celebrated at a volleyball court, of course!

Travel. Lots and lots of travel. I flew to Delaware with my son to visit family and then Florida with my daughter for a volleyball tournament. I put my daughter on airplanes to California, Florida twice, and Texas for volleyball tournaments. My husband traveled all over for business and he and our son went to Augusta, Georgia for the Masters - a bucket list dream trip for both of them. I bought tickets for my mother and sister to come out for my daughter's graduation. I have three more trips pending this spring all over for volleyball and three more trips to plan after that. That last one will be a doozy, taking daughter to school so far away. I'm going to miss her tremendously.

It has been, and will continue to be a time of comings and goings.

I watched and listened in amazement as Spring happened right before my eyes, the same as every year.

I bought a new camera which I am barely beginning to learn how to use.

I cleaned my windows and am reveling in morning and afternoon sunshine.

I read all your blogs, wrote dozens of comments I never sent, and thought of you all often.

I read a book again, finally and a good one too. Thank you Elizabeth for A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. It was a revelation.

I'm still here, glad you are too.

Now, for the pretties. Look who's back again this year:

Don't the colors just burn your eyes? It's almost too much.

I'm paying attention as hard as I can and holding on tight.

Hope you are too.

xo

Going Outside Again

Another walk outside, the fresh air did me good. More to see. Lots more than I was expecting to find. Here are my unedited pics. No time to crop and edit, but they are ok on their own, mostly.

Shapes. Shades of brown. Leathery.

Texture.  Creeper vine on Cherry bark. I love the symmetry of the embrace.

A dead cherry branch against a living tree. A reminder.

Hints of green. Ice crystals hidden from the wind.

Oh and these. Dancing leaves, the only two left on the branches of this little tree. So lovely.

Gooseberry thorns growing through the dormant ferns. Defiant and fierce.

Blossom bones. Reaching. 

Burning bush bark with deep ridges, a volunteer at home in the woods.

Lone berry on contorted twigs. It looks like it has arms outstretched, or fell askew.

And then tonight, this. My night sky, lit up like a carnival all the time now, thanks to the train station and terminal at the end of the Metra line, a mile or so from where I live. I guess you can't have everything, not if you want progress, and I sure do like the train, just not the night lights.

 No milky way star views for us, just the appearance of a UFO visit on cloudy nights. Lovely, sometimes, but it's no northern lights. Just man made glow low in the sky. I remember when the nights were dark here among the fields and little neighborhoods with no street lamps. Days past.  I did see a bit of the milky way in the mountains of North Carolina, it was overwhelming, and there were so many stars I had to hunt for the obvious constellations, like the big dipper.  It was lovely, and I'm glad there's still somewhere I can see them. According to this video at the Atlantic that came up on my facebook feed, that would be about 1% of the USA. Apparently we are afraid of the dark and need to be all lit up every night, at great expense. I lived in in the edges of the light pollution from Chicago before the new train terminal lights. Sigh.

It's crazy, isn't it? Can you see where you live? Can you see the stars at night? The Milky Way?

Just imagine what there really is to see at night without all that man made light.

Hope you saw something interesting, something lovely to contemplate too, near or far, up or down. Hope you can see the stars.

xo

Going Outside

The first day of the new year, T. wrote a post called How to Go Outside and it was lovely, the pictures were fantastic and I made a note to do the same.

It only took me two weeks of wishing for warmer weather, but I did it.

It was cold, 1 degree, but no wind. We had a light rime frost on every surface so I grabbed the camera.  It was marvelous, the walk and the playdate with a bored, housebound dog.

It was frustrating, though, trying to just see. I have the worst eyesight, progressive bifocal lenses that sometimes make things worse, and permanent blurring in one eye from a cataract which will need repair one day. My camera wouldn't zoom on autofocus, so I fought with it, and messed with the functions and fretted that the pictures would suck. They looked pretty blurry to me. Turns out they didn't suck, once I got them on screen so I could see them better. Some were pretty magical.

Here's what Tucker and I saw on our romp around the yard.

So much gray and white, but peeks of sun too.

Bet you can't guess what this is....

 It's salt runoff from slush that fell off my car in the garage. Looks like a lunar landscape to me.

It was one of those frosts that followed a light fluffy snowfall where everything reflected light like diamonds. So hard to capture, but etched permanently in my memory.

I couldn't see these crystals on the closeups until I downloaded the picture, and these were the ones that looked out of focus on my display. What a surprise. 

 The leaf portraits were also a surprise - impaled with ninja starflakes.

This one is my favorite. I was happy thinking about the buds, dormant under the frost, knowing that they would be next years flowers and leaves, not knowing they were balancing such a delicate bouquet of snow crystals on their tip.

Another surprise, big enough to see with my own eyes - a bird nest I did not know was hiding there.

And my little girl with basket statue, she looks frozen to death, but so peaceful.

Also a surprise were the snowflakes on the end of every seed on the coneflowers. Magical.

Tucker had the best time. We haven't played in the yard in weeks.

Eating snow is a favorite activity. Or he's pretending to be an ostrich.

Cleanup was not a breeze -this was the clumping snow. Those snowballs on the towel were between his food pads. Must have hurt to walk on.

It was a three dog towel day, but a good one.

Stay warm...

Today's Word

Yes, I have words today, and a new, really good one. I subscribe to A Word A Day at wordsmith.org and every now and then I get one I really am happy to learn and hope I can remember. Here's today's I didn't know there was a word for that, and one near to my heart. I must be part cat, because my earliest, fondest memories involve apricating, curled up on the floor wherever the sun shone through the doors or windows. I looked but couldn't find the word aprication, which I like even more - a day of aprication is good for the soul. I may use it anyway, who would actually know if I was wrong ?

apricate

PRONUNCIATION:

(AP-ri-kayt) 

MEANING:

verb intr.: To bask in the sun.
verb tr.: To expose to the sun.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Latin apricari (to bask in the sun). Earliest documented use: 1691. Despite a similar spelling, the word apricot has a different origin. It’s from Latin praecox (early-ripening).

USAGE:

“I was also biting into that part of his body that must have been fairer than the rest because it never apricated.”
André Aciman; Call Me by Your Name; Picador; 2007.

It is cold and snow covered outside, but it's sunny and I shall apricate every chance I get.

If I have trouble keeping this word in my brain, I will just picture a lovely apricot sunning on the floor, and hopefully that will get me there. :)

Since I'm talking sunshine, here are pics that don't begin to do justice to the sundogs we had last week when the temperature was about 1 degree F. The next two days were so cold they cancelled school. Any windchill greater than -20 and school is cancelled, and we had two days at -30 to -35 F. Brrr, to say the least.   But last Monday, my daughter texted me from school and said look outside!

Through the trees I saw a pillar of rainbow, so Tucker and I hopped in the car and drove to the edge of the trees down the street for a full view. Wow. It was something.

I apricated in that for a few minutes before I drove back home.

xo

I have no words, really

And yet I write.  This from December, still unfinished.



It grows increasingly harder to post anything as words continue to fail me.

There is so much tenderness and heartache and love and spirit alive here, wherever this is, this place that is as real to me as anything I know to be real.

I cried a lot of slow tears today, feeling raw. Sharing some personal woes with my kids, missing my husband, who's travelling for work, glad to have my kids, my dog, here with me in front of the fireplace, music streaming from the 70's, the kids napping, me reading, reading, reading, until my heart aches.

Christmas alone is its own misery, but this gray and foggy December is breaking my heart.

I talked to my kids tonight, quizzed them about what's going on in the world.

We are killing our selves in the streets. Over color, or a coat, or nothing at all.

Hundreds of children gunned down in their school today in Pakistan, over reasons centuries old, men killing children and themselves wantonly. Sorrow upon sorrow, eye for an eye, forever and ever amen.

The Russian economy is collapsing. I just read somewhere that the root cause of all wars is hunger and I think of this, add it to my worry list, the messes of the world.

Congress inserted unimaginable special interest bullshit into the budget right under our dumb ass noses. I can't even express my disgust and disillusionment with this perversion of democracy.

Too much again, December. At least no tsunamis, no massive tragedies, just a million small ones.

It was too much.

We got take out pizza and cranked up the music and hung out, and it was perfect and I noticed.  They napped, one on the couch, one at my feet in front of the fire with the dog and I read. There are these small moments of grace, and in Kurt Vonnegut's honor, I wish I could remember to say during them - if this isn't nice, I don't know what is.

I read dear Mary Moon's blog about cooking for Katherine, sitting and visiting with her and Bug, with Katherine growing weaker but ever more radiant. Katherine wrote about these past few days in her post too, about the pleasure of being read to by Mary,  her thoughts so warm and loving and accepting. I immediately wanted to read the same stories and went through the shelves and found three anthologies of  American essays. On my way to the author Kathleen requested, my book fell open to an excerpt from Joan Didion's Slouching toward Bethlehem, which cracked me wide open in my college years. I read that first. She wrote with such love about her daughter, in a time when she could barely conceive surviving her loss, or her husband's, which she wrote so honestly about in Magical Thinking.

It made me sadder than I can say.

“The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.” 
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Presentiment of loss. And oh, she had no idea what she had left to endure, did she? That line broke me.

I sat in my chair, a book in my lap, looking at my two sleeping children, as scared for them now as they are about to try and make their way alone in this world as I ever was when they were little babies in their cribs, likely more so. But I felt comforted by our being together, for now, protected by a fierce, fluffy dog who wants to play. In the now, we are ok, and that should be enough, for now. I wish it was, because if I let my mind go it races to a dark place to worry about what lies ahead for them, for all our babies in a crazy crowded world.  Breathe, Mel. Breathe. 

I thought about loss and love and grace, and thought to get back to that essay that Mary read to Kathleen, because I knew it would be good.

But first, I needed to read the post I wouldn't read a few hours ago, on Kathleen's page. I knew whatever it was, it wasn't good news, but I wasn't ready to think of a world without her in it just yet.

Mary wrote a beautiful post about Kathleen's last day, a fitting eulogy to a fine person. This ain't her first rodeo, losing a dear friend, but she does it with grace and love. I'm so glad to have met and know all these kind souls I've found online. Words can't convey.

When my husband got home, I told him we lost a blogger friend today, and he understood why I was a little sad beneath my smile.




So it's been three weeks since I started this post I didn't finish. No time like the present.

I've survived Christmas, New Years, the world is still spinning and I'm still trying to find the words.

I've written several posts and a ton of comments in my head.  I've cried more slow tears, and smiled a lot too. My husband says I'm hormonal, and yes, among other things.

We rode all over the middle and southeastern US of A and lived to tell the tale. 3334 miles. I still don't want to get back in the car. Hopefully, if technology stops biting my ass, I can post some pictures from that adventure. It was mostly lovely. If you facebook me, you got the highlights.

Thinking kindly of my internet friends, both here and gone now, and hoping for a year that has many more moments of grace than heartache for us all.

xo