Aubergine

haiku stories (blogathon theme day)

Today other 2012 Wordcount Blogathon participants are trying their hand at haiku.  

I have never thought of myself as a poet, but the structure of haiku appeals to me.  I like the way haiku can catch a vivid scene in just a few words - an exercise I've been working on in prose writing, too.  I also like the twist or surprising juxtoposition that really good haiku contains.  

These are not really good haiku and I've taken liberties with the format a bit.  But in the spirit of participation, I offer them to you.

 

In the hardware store
I remember my father
Gifting me freedom

 

Toddler loves outside
Brightly colored plastic house
New garden decor

 

The fruit tree fills in
My room is lit shades of green
Words come faster now

 

Watching my daughter
Sift warm sand through open hands
I learn to let go

 

Grocery check-out line
Down an aisle, a baby cries
The parents all sway

10 minutes at 4pm on a Tuesday

I have put all of the baby's toys back in her toy basket and she is busy unloading them again which should give me 5-10 minutes to write.  I am kneeling at the coffee table where I can see the whole living room, though she likes to crawl around the back of the couch where I can't see her to mail her toys into the boxes there that haven't made it all the way to the garage yet which renders this vantage somewhat wasted.  There's a cat on the couch over my right shoulder, snuggled up next to my camera, and a tea cup with the sticky remains of lemon tea that I drank a while ago by my left hand.  Strewn across the surface of the table around my laptop are the the parent end of the baby monitor, a crumpled tissue, two sippy cups, a plastic toy car, the cover for my iPad which is in the other room on the charger, a DVD from someone's stocking, a travel book for the trip we are planning, a handful of Trader Joe's Sesame Sticks, and my iPhone.  I crave tidy surfaces, full attention to words, clear sinuses.  None of which I have right now.  Instead, I snack on Sesame Sticks and kneel at the coffee table pecking out the best words I can find right now, which I know are not very good.

This is the heavy part of the afternoon when the remaining day feels like forever.  Back when I was working in an office, this was the same part of the day that my energy would flag and I would head for the vending machine.  The baby is bored.  I am bored.  When the weather was good this was when I would head out the door for a walk, but it is cold out there and frankly I don't have the energy. I have made all the silly faces that I have in me today, read all the books (twice), and retrieved her from trying to put toys in the toilet and investigating the litter box more times than I can count.  I despair of what we do between now and bedtime, now that the toy basket is empty and she's here at my side again looking for Grandpa inside my computer screen. 

Mamas, what do you do to get through the draggy part of the afternoon?

At sunset

This afternoon the wind pushed the morning's grey blanket back across half the brilliant blue winter sky until it ran from one horizon to the other in a crumpled pile. Where it met the ocean at one end, as the sun sank, it looked like this.

As one year ends and another one begins, I am choosing to turn into the wide open blue and away the muzzled, muted grey.

What summer means

Last week at dinner, the day after school let out for the summer The Teenager asked me about what summer meant to me now. Now that I'm old, I think he barely stopped himself from saying, but I gave him a graceful out by suggesting our difference was simply that I'm not in school and so I don't get summer vacations. Even though I haven't had a summer vacation since college and haven't had kids in the house until this year, I have a number of teachers in my family and am so tuned to the cycle of the sun that I've always had an awareness of summer's beginning and end. So summer does mean something to me.

Summer means long slow days and long twilit evenings. Going to bed when it is still light outside. Sandals and flip flops and red toenail polish. The smells of hot asphalt and fresh cut grass and the drone of lawnmowers. Strappy cotton sundresses. Garden-gathered bouquets stuck in mason jars in every room.

Summer means popsicles and sticky fingers. Cold watermelon and seed-spitting contests. Fresh corn on the cob and buttery fingers. The season's first peach eaten over the sink with juice running down my chin. Tomatoes straight from the vine and hot from the sun. Fresh pesto made with three kinds of basil. Padding into the backyard barefoot to gather herbs and salad-makings for dinner. Homemade strawberry ice cream out of the old wooden hand-cranked ice cream maker. Burgers off the grill.

Summer means cold beers on lazy hot afternoons. Backyard barbeques with hordes of children running in and out of the house. The sounds of splashing and delight from the neighbor's pool. Sandy feet and salt-licked hair. Skin slick from sunscreen.

Summer means buying sweet bing cherries on the side of a country road and eating them with my bare feet stuck out the window of my best friend's Westie and the wind in my hair. Stargazing snuggled under blankets in the back of my pickup truck. The dusty hot smell of hiking in California's golden hills.

Summer means stretching out and slowing down. Taking time for pleasure and for dreaming. For road trips with loose destinations and time to get lost. Juicy novels and sunbeams to read them in. I remember the excitement of the last day of school, long days of summer stretched ahead of me. But even though I don't have the hard dates of school terms to bracket it, even now that I'm "old," I still think summer is magical.

20 things that happened in 2010

1. Finished my divorce.
2. Was accepted to graduate school.
3. Quit my job at Apple.
4. Lost my boy Riley.
5. Got pregnant.
6. Went to a Gorgeous Genius workshop with Lisa Sonora Beam and made a vision collage about being pregnant before I knew I was.
7. Fell in love (admitted I was in love).
8. Slept the whole month of July.  Not really, but it felt like it.
9. Read about 30 books over the summer.
10. Thought a lot about blogging.
11. Visited my 90-year-old grandparents in Canada and then drove across the desert with my baby sister toward her new home in New Mexico. Luckily I was past the morning sickness by then.
12. Started grad school.
13. Learned to nap.
14. Fired the traditional medical system and hired a home birth midwife.
15. Became an accupuncture convert.
16. Had really bad sciatica in my 5th month of pregnancy.  I couldn't walk for a week and a half and wasn't allowed painkillers.
17. Got whooping cough.  Yes really.  Right on the heels of the back issues. Wasn't allowed cough medicine.
18. Gave an accounting presentation wearing a Steve Jobs costume (while 6 months pregnant).
19. Got a B in Managerial Economics in spite of a math phobia and pregnancy brain.
20. Got rid of a bunch of stuff in my house to make room for my boyfriend and his teenage son to move in with me.

So I hope you will forgive me for my 18-month blogging break - I was a little busy.  I hope to be around here a bit more often (baby sleep permitting).

 

Finding my joy

 

I found these red bracelets in a small shop along the Ganges river in Rishikesh when I was in India in 2007. Though I didn't quite know it at the time, my marriage was crumbling and I was tailspinning into a depression that wouldn't release me for almost 3 years.  

Red, in many Asian cultures, is symbolic of joy and is often used for wedding attire.  Bangles similar to these are traditionally worn by Indian married women in place of a wedding ring.  When I slipped the red glass rounds over my hand and up my arm that day, I vowed to myself that I would wear them until I found my joy again.  I have worn them continuously since then, taking them off only for massage treatments, and leaving them off only for the last few weeks of my pregnancy, when I couldn't get them back on over my swollen hands after a treatment.  Though I had walked through the end of the marriage, out of the depression, and into a new and happier life, they had become part of me.  My close friends know me for the sound of them jingling on my arm, and the weight of them is familiar and comforting.

On my kitchen windowsill right now are three wishbones from the carcasses of recently-consumed chickens.  Washing dishes yesterday, I was looking at them and thinking about what I would wish for with one of those bones.  I couldn't come up with anything.  

This week, for the first time in 4 years, I thought about taking off the bracelets.  For the first time they felt in my way, a hinderance.  They press against my baby girl's shoulder when I hold her to nurse on the left side, and I don't want them to hurt her.  I'm afraid they will pinch her skin or pull her hair.  

I haven't taken them off yet, and haven't yet decided if I am really done with them, but this week I have realized that at this moment in my life all of my wishes have come true.  I have found my joy and I walk in it every day.

 

What-I'm-up-to Wednesday

This post is in response to Jen Osborne's prompt to share what we're up to on Wednesdays every week.  I may not manage every Wednesday, but here's what I'm up to today:

Growing a tiny human (she's 6 weeks old  tomorrow and hungry ALL the time).

Sitting next to a stack of books I'd really like to read, but can only manage a few paragraphs at a time.  The iPad gets a bit more use for bite-sized one-handed reading. Also on the table are my emergency snacks (less needed than in the first few weeks) and my perpetually empty water glass.  No one told me how thirsty breastfeeding would make me! Also the laptop that I cannot operate with one hand.

On the other side, the corn chips I'm eating in lieu of a good lunch today (don't tell my midwife).  But have you tried these chips?  Every fourth or fifth bite you get a hit of tamari which just makes you keep eating to find the next one.  Luckily they come in small bags.

What you can't see in these pictures are the painting I'm planning, and the blog post I'm writing (not this one - a longer one), and the journal pages I've been writing and the knitting that is waiting for me.  Someday I'll have two hands again for somewhat sustained periods, right?

tonight

Matt Hart, the poet, has dark blonde hair that stands straight out from his head, in all directions, shocked, shocking.  A compact, energetic body, and glasses that slide down his nose over and over to rest on his nose ring while he reads, revealing pale eyes fringed with pale lashes, until he slides the frames back into place.  He begins his last poem, book in one hand, holding down the words on the page with a slim finger of the other, but as he gets into the rhythm, he begins to rock forward and back, foot to foot, his voice strong and clear although he's no longer anywhere near the mic.  His hair, I swear, stands up more, his face flushes, a vein bulges in his neck and his glasses threaten to slide right off his face because his free hand has lifted, conducting, sending the back-beat music of his words from the podium out across the room toward us.  He looks up from the page, the last two lines memorized, and delivers them directly, personally, almost brutally, a crescendo of syllables, and then, suddenly, is done.  He steps to the front row, turns, sits, and becomes, except for his wild hair and pale pale eyes, perfectly normal.  Just one of the rest of us.

Later, I step out of the book store into a cold cold night lit by a bright full moon, and I'm not sure if my heart thuds from the thick hot chocolate I had after dinner or the power of the words I have been washed with.

gratitudes

 

   1.    Facing a situation that hurt, gracefully.  Being gentle with myself afterwards.
    2.    Finding my Riley cat curled up just inside the front door waiting for me when I got home so late last night.
    3.    Gorgeous clouds in a blueblue sky as I walked along the edge of the ocean this morning.
    4.    At dinner last night, while I talked about what’s going on with me to one friend, feeling the two friends across the table *holding* me, as clearly as if they were laying their hands on my skin.
    5.    Knowing that I’m good at my job, and I love doing it.
    6.    Driving home over the mountain into a full moon that lit up cloud fragments like little opals scattered across a black sandy beach.
    7.    Looking forward to spending the solstice day with a friend, with no specific plans but lots of options, and knowing the company will be excellent even if we do no more than sit still.
    8.    Getting the registration confirmation for a week-long silent retreat in the fall.  Doing this is something on my 100-things list, but one of the scarier ones.
    9.    My “powerful woman” playlist that brings me back to center no matter how blue I’m feeling.
    10.    Trusting that I know my right way, if only I have the courage to listen.

I like to wear boots

Is There Life After Feminism
(or how to wear boots and still be politically incorrect)
Maude Meehan

I like to wear boots.
I like the noise they make.
I walk real uppity in boots.
I walk strong.
If pressed
I can land a punch, a kick,
demolish a rapist,
and if I want to
I can go to bed in boots.

I cook without Tofu or eggplant
and I hate alfalfa sprouts. Call it heresy.
I hug my husband, my sons,
and send my daughter radical feminist literature.
I hug her too.  I hug my gay friends,
and don't apologize for being straight.
I hug my friends of color
and won't apologize for being white.
How can we stand up together
if we're putting each other down?

I am a senior citizen. 
There are advantages.
I get ten percent off on pancakes at Golden Wist
and a dollar off at the Nickelodeon.
Sometimes I wear lipstick, mascara
and don't ask anyone's pardon.
I wear a dress when I visit my mother.
She's ninety-six, I'm sixty-five.
Spare me your arguments.  Where is it written
that any one of us has all the right answers
for anyone else?

I am a good citizen.
There are disadvantages.
I write to presidents and politicians
and they do what they want anyway.
I go to marches, to meetings, to jail,
and I have a file in Washington in my very own name
which I refuse to send for.
I know who I am.
Even when I do dishes, mind kids or wear high heels
I know who I am.
But what I like about wearing boots is,
there's no confusion.
Everyone knows who I am.  Watch out!

For Kirsten, a fellow boot-wearer, on her birthday.  Happy birthday!