"Season of Mists and Mellow Fruitfulness"

 
Today is 60 degrees and gray but the weekend was lovely.  Full of the warmth and drowsiness and o'er-brimm'd-ness of Keat's autumn, the "later flowers for the bees," the "fume of poppies," the "last oozings." 

The trees are blazed and blazing.  Their colors look violent, pensive, mysterious.  And then there is the pattern of the falling leaves that turns some trees into torches and others into ruined faces, empty bowls. 

You are taking your first tottering steps.  You don't care about walking.  You do it only when you're not thinking about it or when a single step or two seems like the easier route from here to there.  You've started up with consonant sounds, chugging them out in the back seat of the car or sending them lilting around the darkness of your room at 6:30am.  Last night you had a fit because we promised you a bath after dinner, failing to consider that "after" in not a concept you appreciate yet.  You sobbed through most of dinner, pointing to the doorway, until finally I carried you through the squashed bits of spinach pie on the floor and up to the bathroom where you slapped your palm emphatically on the porcelain edge of the tub saying, "ba! ba! ba!"  You've also finally figured out the hand sign for "more" only instead of bringing all your fingertips together, you use only your index fingers so the expression of the word seems more delicate and solemn.

This weekend your father and I went away for a night for the first time in 18 months.  We were supposed to go to a dear friend's wedding in Chicago but then a rather wounded individual lit an air traffic control tower on fire and thousands of flights were cancelled so instead of getting fancy in Chicago we got fancy in Minneapolis instead.  We stayed at a hotel downtown that had recently been remodeled.  This meant that bright red chairs in the lobby were back lit by forty television screens together projecting images from nature.  On each floor, the elevator doors swished open to the same fluorescent pink print of what looked like a virus under a microscope.  Meanwhile, Daddy couldn't look at the hallway carpet for fear of vomiting, such was the nature of the white/navy striped pattern.  Our room flaunted a wall papered with drawings of cassette tapes.  That we did not find all of this cool confirms that we are old.

We pretended not to be old, though!  For lunch we ate fish tacos and chicken salad on Nicollet Mall.  A bee flew into Daddy's beer and he rescued it and then poured water on it to try to resuscitate it.  I sipped chardonnay and grew too hot in the sun.  We spent the afternoon being lazy and then went to dinner wearing our fancy wedding clothes.  We tried steak tartare for the first time, scooping the pink bits onto toasted circles of baguette.  Afterward we went to an underground bar with a purple door (thanks for the rec, uncle John!) and sipped cocktails infused with pine buds and charcoal and chatted with the bearded, plaid-shirted bartender whose name was also Peder but who pronounced it Peter.  The next day we read the paper in bed and shopped for towels at Macy's and had lunch at the Sculpture Garden and I drank a latte infused with honey and lavender.  It was good.  Though I am still sad to have missed my dear friend's wedding.

Every Minnesotan was outside this weekend, I think.  It was the last swelter of opulence.  The oozings and the drowsiness and the hum of bees will soon give way to the cold and the starkness, the swift blanket that mutes perfumes and hardens sap.  Jennifer died at this time a year ago.  I am glad to be especially reminded of her now, in this season where we fill ourselves with food and warmth, with long walks and the claps of color from the trees, when we prepare to give our bodies over to a different way of living in this world.

How to Eat a Taco at Our House

Decide to make turkey tacos.  Set your laptop on top of the microwave, open to the Food Network recipe you've selected.  Smile inside, maybe a little smugly, about how you will be using vegetables from your CSA for these tacos.  Touch lovingly the dirt-smudged skin of the onion, the green hulk of the zucchini.  Set up a Paul Simon Pandora station, begin to saute in rhythm to a song that sounds like something Paul Simon might have written if he had a sore throat or no hands.  There is a tugging at your pants. Look down into the big eyes of the baby who is not really a baby anymore.  Open the doors of the cabinet in which you've stocked only baby-proof items.  Tupperware and packets of tea and Emergen-C.  From the other room there is the sound of the five-year-old flopping onto the leather of the couch.  Keep chopping.  The baby flings the tupperware about the room and then lays on his back, crying for no apparent reason.  Say to the baby: "Can you find the piggy?" and point toward the magnetic farm adhered to the refrigerator that sometimes randomly makes oinking noises when you take out a piece of pre-sliced cheese late at night.  The baby keeps crying and begins to move his legs so it looks like he is back-stroking across the kitchen floor.  Say: "Daughter! Can you find something to do with your brother?" Five-year-old enters with the wooden recorder from who-knows-where that tastes like patchouli when you play it.  Five-year-old is playing it.  Baby stops crying for no reason, brings himself to feet and waves his hands in air.  Sister dances around not giving baby recorder and baby begins to cry for an actual reason.

Peak head into living room.  Husband reading "Entertainment Weekly."  Carry baby into living room and deposit on rug near husband.  Return to kitchen.  Attempt to look sunny and pleased when daughter asks if she can help.  Dump olive oil and salt in a bowl and let her spread mixture on tortillas with a little brush.  Someone who is not Paul Simon is whistling and singing about trains.  Add 2/3 cup broth to the sauted vegetables.  While you wait for sauce to thicken set out plates and sour cream, CSA greens and a bib for the baby.  Ignore the heavy yellow sheen of oil soaking into all the tortillas.  Place them in the oven.  Stir the sauce and notice that it is not thickening.  Announce loudly that dinner will be ready in five minutes.  Cut avocado while five-year-old rocks back and forth on step stool chanting "Mama, mama, mama, mama" and baby, after re-entering kitchen, attempts to use his head to bulldoze your feet.  Note for three seconds the pleasure of scooping out a neat row of avocado pieces with your thumb.

Stir the sauce again.  Note that there is no thickening, that you've created seasoned meat and veggies swimming in broth.  Decide to serve it anyway.  With a slotted spoon.  Ask your husband to prepare the drinks.  Remove the tortillas from the oven and sprinkle two with cheese.  Return to oven.  Buckle baby into chair.  Bark at five-year-old until she sits on bench in breakfast nook where you eat all your meals because it's too much work to carry everything the extra five feet to the dining room.  Say table prayer with baby screaming, five-year-old pushing index finger into piece of avocado and husband tipping box of wine toward coffee cup with the insignia of college where you teach upon it.

Take melted cheese tortillas out of oven.  Sit down.  Cut tortilla into pieces with pizza cutter for baby.  When five-year-old tries taco meat and says in a whiny voice "I don't really like it, Mama," say "thanks for trying it!" in a falsely bright voice.  When baby screams and flings bits of avocado on the floor exchange The Look with your husband, The Look that means my-God-we-are-lucky-to-have-children-and-we-love-them-so-much-but-why-is-each-meal-such-a-shit-show-is-it-too-late-to-live-in-Victorian-times-when-we-would-only-see-our-children-occasionally-after-they-had-been-bathed?  When five-year-old slides from bench onto floor, let your husband tell her to sit on her bottom please.  Ignore the fact that she is not eating but instead deflating each of the air bubbles in the tortilla with her fork.  When she says, "Mama, put your finger in here," say "I'm eating my food right now." 

Remember to take a bite.

When the World Tilts Toward Autumn

Today is that day when the weather turns and the world tilts toward autumn and we know that even if there are days of warmth to follow that in the weather scales those days will be on the lighter end, the side rising higher and higher into the cool gray air as we begin our decent to winter.

This means you wore gray fleece booties and a mustard yellow Columbia fleece to Econo-foods today.  It means I drew your fingers across waxy orange skin saying "pumpkin, pumpkin."  It means we peck at you with Kleenex already and constantly.  It means in the car your sister wept when she couldn't pull her pink fleece pants down to stuff them in her socks.  She's grown and there's a rim of skin below her cuffs.

This means Daddy and I are back in the swing of tic-tacing e-mails to students at all hours.  This means that on Tuesdays and Thursdays we put on slacks and shirts from hangers, stuff tupperware tubs with leftover soup into plastic bags, try to remember the set of car keys that has our office key attached.  That we communicate mostly about who will pick up whom and when and who has the department meeting and who has the student conference.  Who will make sure there is dinner on the table and who will get the oil changed.  Who will go up the stairs and turn Thisbe's pajamas right side out and who will wash the steamed carrots out of your hair.

Today is that day when the weather turns which means our blood is trying to thicken and seems to speak with a slow drawl as it courses through our veins.  It means that the wind is pushing our front door open and I'm setting the crock pot on the counter.  It means the coffee shop is a warm cocoon and on the street drizzle swishes its wings past our faces.

This means on Tuesdays I bring a patchwork bag with ballet slippers and a black leotard with rhinestones stitched to the front to Thisbe so that she can point and bend and make monster faces in front of a wall of mirrors.  It means that we eat dinner at church on Wednesdays.  That on Tuesdays and Thursdays we label string cheese and fruit pouches with your name and leave you crying beside five other babies.  That on Mondays when we go to the farm we come home with the heaviness of squash and onions in our bags, the spinach floating light across the top.

Tomorrow I am teaching Robert Hass's "Images" essay to my students.  The personal images he draws on are from this season, "the submerged melancholy of the end of summer."  And he talks about the way that images, unlike metaphors, "do not say this is that, they say this is."  That in the arrest of the image "what perishes and what lasts forever have been brought into conjunction, and accompanying that sensation is a feeling of release from the self."

Today is that day when the weather turns and the world tilts and you tell the students (so that you can tell yourself) to write it down so that this time stands still even as it is already swept away. 

Metaphoric Failure

It's August 31st which means that behind this window on my computer screen are open word documents sprouting kind-of-finished syllabi.

It's August 31st and 75 degrees, sun and flaking clouds, a mass of black-eyed susans waving at the boulevard in front of our house.

You're sleeping upstairs, curled around Mr. Meow, wearing a red onesie with a train puffing across the front.

The last few weeks have been so busy, such a blur, that I'll share images again:

Thisbe furiously dog paddling from the place where a white water slide dumped her to the edge of the pool, bangs pressed into a razor-straight line across her forehead, fluorescent pink suit creating its own kind of hallucinogenic light below the surface of the water.

Your right index finger, pointing.  To lights, to people, to the peach pieces you want in your mouth, to the stairs, to my nose, to the window when you want outside, outside.  Oftentimes, pointing just for the sake of pointing.  You've still got no consonant sounds, no words, so the pointing seems to be your way of marking the world, naming it through gesture.

A ramp unfolding into a dark lake, heat behind and cold ahead.

Thisbe elbowing you repeatedly as she tries to play Old MacDonald Had a Farm on the toy piano Grandma Gail and Grandpa Michael gave you for your birthday.  Each letter trapped inside a colored bubble.

Items we used to make damp wood burn: pages from Thisbe's art pad, crumpled snippets of an Ely tourist magazine, a welcome brochure from Camp Du Nord, a paper bag from the Co-op.  Fire starter, finally (thanks, Bonnie and Dan!).

The deep-throat sound you make when you push a train back and forth, the "vroom" of a corpse coming back from the dead.

The way, after standing for ten seconds on your own, you fall on your butt and promptly begin applauding yourself.

Scent of children's de-tangler in my hair and the weight of a necklace on my head ("it's a crown with golden leaves!") as I sit at Thisbe's beauty salon.  When asked where she was trained: "at the Northfield Minnesota state fair."

Cheerios filing the the tray of your stroller, Cheerios stuck to the bottom of your pants, Cheerios crushed to dust on the kitchen floor, Cheerios lining the bottom of my back pack.

Thisbe dressed in long underwear on a stage, holding up her hands as claws, roaring with a gaggle of four and five-year-olds, the lake peeled gray behind them.

Cut up canteloupe in tupperware, yogurt mixed with spinach/pear pure in tupperware, string cheese broken into bits in tupperware.  Tupperware labeled "Matteus."  A stack of diapers labeled "MJ."  A white crib with Mr. Bear inside (his ears chewed to wet, dark knobs) beside five other identical white cribs. 

Labor Day weekend feels like the longest bridge in the world.  I'd rather stay on the summer side, marking each morning with writing time, marking each afternoon with walks with you, train time at the library with iced latte in hand.  And I wish that on the far side of the bridge, Thisbe was entering kindergarten.  I thought I would feel OK with her spending another year at daycare, but I don't, not really.  I think she's ready to do the next thing--though I know if she were starting kindergarten I'd also be torn up.  You, Matteus, seem to have made the transition (to part time day care) the most effortlessly.  I'm grateful for that. 

Whether we want to be standing on the side of summer or the side of fall, Labor Day weekend feels like the longest bridge in the world.  May we have the grace to take in the view while we're here. 

I've just realized that the moral of this blog post is also the moral of "Thomas and the Big, Big Bridge." If that's not incentive to NEVER WRITE ANYTHING AGAIN, I don't know what is.  Sigh.

Summer in Segments

Summer seems to be sifting away.  It's July 21st so by the calendar, summer is only halfway gone, but for those of us who have put off doing class prep until August 1st, summer is looking decidedly shorter.

Today is the first hot day we've had in weeks.  Mostly it's been unseasonably cool, rain and clouds and wind washing through.  We've chosen to spend most of our time at home this summer, partly because Holden is closed, partly because, at eleven months, you wouldn't be a particular joy to travel with.  So the summer feels more imagistic than narrative.  When I think of the last weeks I think of...

Your two upper teeth pressing through the guns, the thin open bar of space between them.

Your bare toes, the tops dirty with grime from carpets and hard wood, now that you're beginning to crawl.

The figures of the wooden ark spread out on the carpet (anteater, peacock, the chunky elephant) and you in the midst of them while the World Cup plays on TV.  Men in a line, hands covering groins.  Men rolling on the green grass, miming pain.  The handsome former soccer players who sit behind a clean desk during the halftime break, trying to sound articulate.  The plastic wrapper of a string cheese parted, your mouth upturned for the bits Dada offers you as he watches.

Princess underwear hanging from the shower rod, from the line outside; damp princess underwear stuffed in plastic bags and sent home with your sister.

A dragonfly, briefly lighting in the middle of my chest as I pushed you in the stroller across Plum street.

Tiny cymbals in tiny hands.

A cardboard flat filled with blueberries.  A bit of bark hanging from your lip. Your sister bragging about how her bucket is way more full than mine.

Afternoon walks with you in the Ergo because your napping has been an absolute shit show.  How aware I am, as we walk, of how loud it is here in the summer.  The steady drone of cars passing, the louder gravel-growl of the motorcycles, lawnmowers ebbing and flowing, barks behind screen doors, rocks under my tennis shoes, the tapping cane of a man with Elvis sunglasses, kids yelling orders as they round the bases in Way Park, conversations drifting over porch railings.  I track each sound by the way it prompts your eyelids up again.  We move into another pocket of quiet and down they sink, that subtle shade of lavender behind the pink.  Long lashes.  Your cheek.  Mosquito bite on the bridge of your nose.

Animals in picture books with half-moons of of fake fur and fake scale and fake paw.  The tiny scratch of your fingernail across those surfaces in the dim light of 6:15am.

Your study of the holes on the child's carpenter tool box.  Working screws with primary colored heads into each open hole.  Or fitting the neon plastic shapes (orange circle, green square, pink cross) into the corresponding gaps at the top of the toy pail.

Thisbe, lying perpendicular in her bed, Minnie Mouse nightgown pulled up to reveal bug-bitten thighs and Ariel pull-up asking "Mama, what does it feel like to die?"

A hawk in the grass by the railroad tracks.  Wind ruffling its feathers.  No signs of death besides the flies crawling in its eyes.  A rabbit head on the basketball court in Way Park.  The bloody stem of the neck.

Cherries cut into bits on your white high chair tray.  Bits of banana.  Bit of bread with melted cheese.  Scrambled eggs, pale yellow on a blue plate, cut into segments, strands of steam rising.

We are lucky.  For these days of warmth.  For the time and strength to see them as they pass.

The Silver Whistle in the Throat

It's the beginning of July and unseasonably chilly.  56.  Grey clouds.  Wet patches on the pavement.  It's been a month of rain.  The Cannon River swollen over its banks, caution tape warning us off bridges, men with bows and arrows picking off carp that froth, disorientated, in the tumult.

This morning you woke at 4:15, I nursed you, and then you refused to go back to sleep, choosing to scream from 4:30 to 5:55 instead.  Midway through the scream-fest I went in to check on you, to make sure you didn't have a dirty diaper or a horn sprouting through your skull, and found you sitting up in the kalidescope light of your mobile, a mobile that you can now turn on by yourself.

You have two teeth cutting through your upper gum.  You've perfected the art of land swimming and easily navigate the space from room to room, making little squeaks of glee as you go, toes pressing into the floor and raising you up and forward.  In the last few days you've finally started to get up on your knees; you rock for a bit and then commence land swimming again.  Bananas are your food of choice, always, followed by bits of bread and cheese, other fruits, yogurt, puffs.  You'll tolerate mashed sweet potatoes only if they're spread on a banana or piece of toast first.

Yesterday we received a flyer in the mail from Rice County, the kind that tells you (with exclamation points!) which milestones to look forward to in the next few months, reminds you that you should talk to your child, instructs you not to feed him peanut butter or popcorn, and urges you not to refer to medicine as "candy."  One of the developing milestones was "begin using more words."  Which is a milestone that suggests your child already has a few words in his or her lexicon, that he or she likes to bust out a "hi" or  a "mama" or a "doggie" now and again.

What you like to bust out is a horrific, ear-piercing shriek.  It's awful.  The other day in the check-out line at Cub you shrieked and everyone within a 20-foot radius turned to look.  Your other chosen vocalization is sing-songey vowel sounds in the back of your throat.  It's quite lovely, actually.  Often you'll be sitting on the rug, happily placing plastic rings on a stick, making your little turtle dove sounds and then, all of the sudden EEEEEEEKKKKKKKK.  Daddy and I then look at each other with mild pain and disgust and rub our ears as though rubbing could ease some of the ringing within.

We've tried ignoring the shriek.  We've tried saying, firmly, "no."  We've tried offering you choices when you shriek, pretending to understand the shriek as an expression of a particular desire.  We've tried shrieking back at you.  Nothing seems to work.

And truthfully, I am getting a little tired of the whole "don't compare your children" thing.  We live by comparisons.  We love bestseller lists and super-food rankings.  We're constantly passing around graphs on Facebook that show which country has the longest maternity leave, which state has the fattest children.  We compare car seats and deck varnishes and sneakers.  Before we chose a life partner we (hopefully) put that person in an imaginary line-up with the ones who have come before.  But when it comes to children, everyone acts like comparing them is the work of the devil.  And maybe it is, but we are raised in a culture of comparison and to pretend that we should be able to shut that side of ourselves off as soon as we have a second mewling infant added to the household is total bullshit. 

Comparisons do suck a lot of the time.  They're dangerous.  But all the same, I brought up the videos yesterday of your sister at eleven months.  I watched her walk--then run--all over the house.  Watched her obediently bring me a book when asked, watched her point to pictures within the books, watched her utter a single, breathy "hi" (and then "dicka," repeatedly. No idea.)

It is very hard not to see difference as deficiency.  Not to see it as lacking.  Or slowness.  Not to see you as below the curve.  Even though I rationally know this is not the case.  Even though I know that even if you are slow or below the curve, that my call is to love you in the exact same way.  Maybe it's the strange combination of slow(er) development but the new intensity of your shrieking that has me confused.  After my former post about your lack of desire, you suddenly seem electrocuted with it, sizzling with a hunger you can only articulate with ear piercing shrieks, contained by a body that will not yet do your bidding.

I suppose thwarted desire always has that effect on a person.  As adults, thwarted desire comes out in ways that look like anger or adultery, fear or depression, violence or anxiety.  When there is a part of our inner world we can't offer to the outer world, a part of us gets mangled, injured, destroyed in trying to keep that desire contained.  Maybe your shriek is the purest version of that experience, maybe the world is filled with thousands of muffled variations of that sound.

Death by Logistics

Well, so much for blossoms and butterflies.

Yesterday was gray, rainy, and unseasonably cold.  Thisbe had a playdate in the morning but it was clear (to me, at least) that we needed a game plan for the afternoon, too.  I, for one, did not want to sit inside the house for two hours until the possibility of further diversion (via another playdate) arrived.

"Look," I said to your father, thrusting my laptop in his direction.  "It's an indoor park.  Trish says it's good."
Your father sighed and glanced briefly at the screen; then he returned to reading Redbreast, a disturbingly-named Swedish thriller.
"Should I take Thisbe and you stay home with Matteus or should we all go?"
Your father put the book down on his chest and raised his eyebrows at me. "Well," he said, "I don't really want to go.  And I don't really want to stay with Matteus."
"Do you have a better idea?" I asked, rather archly.
"Well, if we're being honest, I'd rather just have you take both of them."
(Expletives followed)

Two hours later, we were on our way home from the ironically named "Good Times Park."  We'd stopped at Leann Chin's for dinner and let your sister consume only an egg roll and fortune cookie for sustenance.  You are at the lovely stage where you pick up pieces of food and then clench them to bits in your fist before trying to deposit them in your mouth.  There were smashed bits of sweet potato smeared on your face, in your hair, and on the cleaned-only-bi-annually high chair.  The lime green, cherry, and tangerine walls combined with the MSG in the noodles and the still echoing shrieks from the indoor park worked collectively toward inspiring a mild seasickness in my gut.

Our conversation in the car turned to logistics.  Yes, the epic battle of whether it's fair to take the older child away for the weekend leaving the other parent with the baby and the duty of distributing name tags at church on her own.  Thisbe sang made up songs to you and you gurgled contemplatively, your own desire to shriek apparently diminished by your parents' ability to fill in the gaps with similar decibel levels of pissed-off.  We finally reached the Sophie's Choice of logistics in which your father asked, in a raised and steely voice, "Well, what do YOU think is more important, me taking my grandmother to a doctor's appointment or you spending time with your good friend you haven't seen for a year?"  His tone suggested that this was a rhetorical question.  I didn't take it that way.  It was quiet for a long time.

Later we hugged and talked and fell asleep by 9:30.

Today is Pentecost.  The Holy Spirit comes as wind and fire and the disciples are a cacophony of different languages, their incomprehensible uproar enough to make those outside think that they're drunk.

Oddly, our pastor told a story about a congregation he knew that had lost members because the congregation had decided to reach out to a marginalized group that the departing members didn't feel comfortable co-habitating with.  Our Pastor's point was ultimately that congregations filled with conflict and distress were bad and that congregations filled with harmony and trust were good.  And obviously, there is truth to this.

But Carroll Hinderlie, former director of Holden Village, said that the Gospel lives through controversy.  And I believe that too.  It felt strange, on a day when we celebrate the disciples' inability to understand one another, on a day we believe the Holy Spirit is possessed with tongues of fire, that we would think fondly of harmony.

Or maybe I don't want to think fondly of harmony today because sometimes marriage feels like being tiny sailboats on a wide gray sea, on good days anchored and bobbing close and on bad days drifting further apart, visible swells and invisible depths between you.

I don't mean to suggest that your father and I are on rocky ground.  (Really, we're not).  I just mean to say that today I was glad to be reminded that sometimes the Holy Spirit is a whirlwind, a tempest, a deluge, a flood. 

Pentecost is the longest season in the church year.  The other two seasons, Christmas and Easter, are intense.  Glittery and joyful and stricken and bare, filled with babies and death, angels and ghosts.  Maybe Pentecost is the longest season because it's the season of the rest of life, the parts where we have to learn to live together and talk to each other, the parts where we're commissioned with hard work, where we're expected to extend love and grace in the middle of the staid gray sea of the everyday.