The Random Order of Things

The evening is humid – in times like this air conditioners come in handy – but our only air conditioner sleeps silent and dusty up in the attic after being lugged from Ohio in haste last summer.

However there are perks to open window life. Waking in the early morning, the cool air drifts in from the window right beside my bed and I am revived. The cool of the morning is a beautiful thing.

I haven’t blogged in some time – long enough that I feel warped and jumbled inside – too many things have gone in, too few have come out. I’ve been busy with photography projects and a yard sale.

The yard sale: a black woman in a sun yellow dress leaves money for a lamp she will pick up tomorrow. She returns two days later and chats it up, leaving sunshine all around and leaving with a lamp. A Hispanic man laughs at us as we speak broken Spanish, we give him a homemade chocolate chip cookie on the house and he buys lots of things including our SaladShooter which works great but takes up too much space in our kitchen. A lonely white man buys a Monopoly game and stays around to chat – we talk about camping and board games that we like to play. Lyric sells lemonade and makes up songs about selling her ware. She greets people with “Customers!” and they smile. A single mom picks through baby clothes and Olivia decides that yard sales are a form of charity that most people are willing to accept. Regardless, we are filled with happiness to see things from our attic in the hands of people who look happy to have them and capable of putting them to good use. I am also exhausted from two days of carrying stuff in and out as well as 5 days of undiagnosed strep throat.

Thanks to Darren’s generosity, I am blessed by the thoughts of Ben Fountain today:

“To leave the place where you grew up, and that you love very much – I expect there’s some sort of avoidance strategy working there, ambivalence expressed as a compulsion, but along the way a strange inversion occurred: although I didn’t stay home, home stayed with me, and in many respects that’s the only place it still exists.”

There’s so much to say about finding Place in this world. I hope I find the words soon.

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Olivia's Porch Garden

our place for now

Favorite Photographs: February

hint: I am not 10

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spices
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best friends
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uncertain ride
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Mag's curl
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yes, I am beautiful
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yes, I am loved
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aw, shucks

Take Pleasure in the Flowering of Truth

I stumbled upon this phrase while glancing at a photocopied songbook and balancing Maggie on my knee, all slobbery and full of joy. Phrases like this catch my eye in the exact same way that photographs do – I want to collect as many of them as I can in my Easter basket and store them up for the winter like nuts. I tell Olivia that after she has died melodramatically while lying out in the woods above a steep rocky drop-off that overlooks a cemetery (Iron & Wine playing in the background), I will spend my time in the rest home reading all the books that I refused to get rid of, even though I didn’t have the time to read them during our marriage. She suggests that “maybe by that time, these books won’t mean anything to you.” I give her a look of startled disdain and reply, “what do you mean? They’ll be the only things that will matter then.”

This phrase wiggled off the page with pleasure because it neatly sums up so much in the last phase of life: waiting. Sometime last fall, Lyric and Mommy put a caterpillar inside a jar, stuffing it with grass and twigs. The timing was perfect – in only a few days, the wiggle worm had sewn itself up into its winter home; a miniature mummy neatly tacked onto a delicate twig in two places. Mommy stuck the twig into the pot of parsley which nestled on the kitchen sink window ledge until the parsley dried up and died. The empty pot with the pupa-twig was placed at the window in the laundry/bathroom nook where it sat all winter long. Although it became a commonplace object, the sight of it never failed to draw my thoughts into a gentle pause – would it actually survive the winter? I did not really believe that it would.

We are almost eight years into marriage. In the early years I thought we could figure it all out right away. With enough communication, grunt-work, compromise and sacrifice, no problem was insurmountable. As it turns out, although we humans are gifted with free-will and conscious awareness of ourselves – there are limitations placed on our lives, forces at work outside our control, and mysteries that will always remain mysteries. We may even know what needs to be changed, want to change it, and try to change it – but are forced to wait. We go out in the world to seek our fortunes, but sometimes our fortunes seek us just as ardently.

If we try to pry out the sleeping worm before its time – it will not live. Sometimes there is a truth that you see which others do not. There is a sense of urgency on your part to tell them, to make things happen, to bring it to pass. But sometimes waiting is our only weapon – sometimes it is the only thing powerful enough to remove obstacles and reveal the path. If we wait long enough, truth has a way of revealing itself and making itself known. This is one of the reasons it is so necessary to spend time in nature. Nature teaches us about waiting, about seasons and forces outside our control – forces that can at the same time be cruelly objective and ludicrously beautiful. Sometimes our waiting must be for years, but we never know what beautiful wings are being formed. (see result of our caterpillar above) Can we survive the winter?

Painful Motherhood

- posted by Olivia -

There are many painful things about being a mother. Icing cupcakes is the hardest for me.

I think it was the cutting of the M&M’s when the hurting started. Lyric has a birthday mid-summer. As one whose birthday always fell on a vacation day, I missed the chance to lead the line wearing the birthday button in elementary school. Plus, there is nothing better than seeing dreams course through a kid’s head as they look at a magazine with pictures of cupcakes. Those of you who love children understand—the only reason we give things to children is so we can borrow a bit of their joy. So, it is with this secret in mind that I sat down with Lyric to browse the latest Wilson cupcake catalog a few nights ago.

Lyric chose the “pizza cupcakes,” much to my relief. Wilson excels at marketing cakes that look as though they are cartoons come to life…catered to the dreams of every mother and little girl. There are BBQ grill cupcakes, pirate cupcakes, and octopus cupcakes with the necessary supplies ready-to-order in the back catalog pages. Knowing my tendency to over-commit, I was rehearsing my “I’m sorry, but we’ll have to choose something that won’t require the purchase of $200 worth of fondant and twenty hours of your mother’s time” speech, when Lyric’s finger decisively marked the pizza cupcake picture. A simple icing for crust and sauce, shredded coconut for cheese, M&M’s for peppers, and chocolate chips for sausage bits.

Matthew baked the cupcakes, and I struck out to CVS to gather the necessary embellishments. It was late into the evening, after the girls were tucked in bed, when I embarked upon the task of cutting chocolate chips into “sausage bits.” This morning, I iced the cupcakes. (Does anyone know how they get the icing to look flat enough to skate on?) I then began to cut the M&M’s in half to make pepper pieces. The M&M halves skittered across the counter. Inevitably, projects like these remind me of my mortality.

Usually, it starts with something taking longer than I think it should. Then I try to take a shortcut and mess up a crucial ingredient. My entire identity swings upon getting these cupcakes to look like the picture. If I don’t get these cupcakes right, I’m a dud as a mother, wife and doctor, too. Thankfully, my philosophical husband is rarely shocked by my rantings—even the silent ones. I say nothing and keep cutting. I apply my husband’s rule of living, trying to calm down and “enjoy the process.” It is an act of God that I did not marry the no-nonsense blue collar type.

The cupcakes and my identity survived.

The saddest part, though, was when I couldn’t take them into my daughter’s class.
“I can’t give you an exact time to drop them off. As long as they are in the office between 1:30 and 2:00 today, we’ll get them,” my daughter’s well meaning teacher said.

She was stealing my piece of the joy. My heart rose up in defense.
“I would like to be here to help give them out,” was the best I could say to explain it.
“Well, I can’t give you an exact time. Usually our snack time is just a rushed thing,” she said with urgent eyes.

I went home to finish the cupcakes. I thought about school shootings, blood, pink icing and childless teachers with two dogs. I packed up the cupcakes in their perfect Tupperware containers.

I stood outside the elementary school doors—locked, double doors with video surveillance and a call-in system. I pressed the buzzer. There was a click and release and I pushed through the doors. I set the Tupperware on the secretary’s desk.

“These are birthday cupcakes for Ms. E’s kindergarten class,” I said, and I left. My daughter’s birthday. The five year old. The one with braids who has to grow up in a locked up school so bad people from the world won’t come get her.

There are clear plastic thorns installed under the eaves of the school porch that look like icicles gone haywire—to keep the sparrows out, I suppose. But the sparrows were there--twirring and rustling anyway.

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