a few highlights of 2010

—-My “birthday chair” from Pier 1, picked out while wandering through the store with my mom. It’s usually draped with various items of clothing—which was the purpose of having it in the first place, to elevate piles on the floor to piles on the chair. But when the lovely pattern peeks through the mess…and then when it’s completely clear….ahhh. A bit of beauty in my corner of the house.

—-I have been wanting this print for 2-3 years now, and my man got it for me for Christmas.

—-We began the year with a joint self-employed venture, which had its ups and downs. Marshall’s still plugging away on some ideas for our company, but my daytime energy since October is spent at an office job, one that enjoy (most of the time). I’d say one of the best things about 2010 is that Marshall was totally on board with the idea that he would be the stay-at-home parent. The even better best thing about 2010 is that 95% of the time, he really enjoys the role.

—-How my job “happened.” I had ripped out a few yellow pages with listing of printers & publishers in the area. I was literally heading out the door to a coffeeshop to do a little research, when the temp agency I had signed up with a few weeks prior called. A local screen printing company was looking for a graphic artist. They would love to have me come in that morning. Was I interested? HELL YEAH!!!

—-The variety of “work” in 2010. Whether mothering or typesetting or house-cleaning or learning Adobe Illustrator better, something I’ve been wanting to do for almost 4 years.

—-The irony of what I get paid to do. A couple of months ago, a bowling league needed a logo to represent their name, Dog’s Bollocks. This is what I came up with:

Literally the night before that art request, I had been freelancing some cover mechs for Augsburg Fortress:

Love that I get paid to make testicle-art. That I get paid to embellish a sophisticated textbook.

—-I’ve scrubbed our icky drippans till my hands give out and they were still icky.

So I replaced them with shiny black ones. Hides the grime much better!

—-Stumbling across this ring for cheap at a resale shop, months and months after lusting after it in InStyle, cutting it out, and pasting it into my Lovely Things scrapbook.

—-Enjoying the summer with an 18-month-old. His corn silk hair bleached white by the sun. As the season turned muggy and laden with insect-music at night, I enjoyed the steady, authentic growth of certainty in my heart that I was ready to create another life.

—-As winter settled in and my pregnant self was still adjusting to the routine of a full-time job, one evening I felt depleted of energy and yearned for my own quiet time, a time of peace and stillness. Even if just for an hour. So Marshall told me to come home from work the next afternoon and he and E would zip to the library so I could have some QT. What I was not expecting was this set-up:

Classical music, hot peppermint tea, chocolate-amaretto almonds, yogurt with chocolate chips, and clementine slices. A blanket and my latest InStyle. After getting a bit emotional, I settled in for an hour before my boys came home. And I swear…that filled my battery for an unbelievably long time!

—-One of my favorite Marshall-treats to come out of the kitchen this year:

—A few of my favorite things that live in the kitchen:

A few favorite books:
Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
The Help
Introvert Power
The Shipping News
If There Is Something To Desire

but to see you

It’s As If Someone Else Is With Me (#8)

The dawn comes. Leaves feel it’s time
To say something, and I feel myself drawn
To You. I know this is wrong.

To be drawn to You can cause trouble;
I do so against all advice, from that one
In me who saved me by keeping me alone.

I’ve lived in so many houses, where
You were not. If You became a dock
I became a boat and pushed away.

Those who are drawn to You become land
If You are land, or water if You are water.
I want nothing from You but to see You.

—Robert Bly

shi

I recently got a tattoo, something that M and I have been talking about doing together for 3+ years. The idea of what I wanted to get done has been with me for twice that long. Copper Canyon Press uses the Chinese character for poetry (shi) for its trademark. It’s comprised of two parts: “word” on the left, “temple” on the right. Jack, the tattoo artist, called the line surrounding the character a cartouche. I just today looked up what a cartouche is: in Egyptian hieroglyphics, it’s an oblong enclosure with a horizontal line at one end, indicating that the text enclosed is a royal name. My cartouche lacks the horizontal emphasis, but I love this added royal dimension to the permanent mark on my skin.

Dimensions, meanings, symbols—whatever I want to call them, there are several. I’ve always been enamored with poems, and this tattoo symbolizes that love. Poems often feel sacred, even if the subject is ordinary; so the literal meaning of temple of words rings true to me. My body is fearfully and wonderfully made, and with all of its flaws—or perhaps because of them—it is a temple. Despite the frustrations and doubts I have when I consider my faith, Christ still is impossibly, paradoxically, the Word to me, and so this tattoo is a nod to that mystery as well.

I don’t write much poetry these days, but I try to read as much as I can. It is like a friend I can still have intimate conversations with, but who no longer lives next door, and I miss its presence. I miss this friend, and so having its beauty on my skin lets me carry it around with me at all times.

When people ask, I usually tell them the truncated version: it means poetry, literally temple of words. Sometimes I don’t even want to say the word poetry, because many people have bad experiences with the genre. (Where was it that I read someone felt like their brother was holding them to the bottom of a pool whenever they tried to read poetry?) To me, it’s not even a genre, it is life; my child is a poem, that movie is a poem, this floor scattered with crumbs is a poem, that dumpy bar in northern Wisconsin is a poem, this silence in the house is a poem, the way the grocery bagger packs your Chilean grapes and cage-free eggs is a poem.

Looking at the tattoo straight on, it is perfectly centered and perfectly straight; when I raise my hand to wave, or when I twist my wrist ever so slightly to type or stir the soup or pick my kid up, the upper left corner of the cartouche slightly tugs itself up, and the bottom right corner tugs down in the opposite direction, so that it almost resembles a parallelogram. I watch this malleability in the mirror, as I raise my arm to and fro, and marvel at my skin, how it glides across the tissues and ligaments so freely. I remember sitting next to my grandma when I was little, when she would smooth her soft fingers up and down my forearm. I’ve unconsciously repeated this soothing gesture with Marshall, and he always stops me because it’s too ticklish. I’m looking forward to soothe my grandchildren that way. My tattoo will be 40% blurred by then; even something as permanent as ink in my skin can’t escape the breakdown of age.

I didn’t intend to talk about my grandma, or even include the following poem. But writing about my forearm and my skin there makes me think of her. A lot of things have been reminding me of her lately. I miss her. I wish she lived next door.

Why We Don’t Die

In late September many voices
Tell you you will die.
That leaf says it. That coolness.
All of them are right.

Our many souls—what
Can they do about it?
Nothing. They’re already
Part of the invisible.

Our souls have been
Longing to go home
Anyway. “It’s late,” they say.
“Lock the door, let’s go.”

The body doesn’t agree. It says,
“We buried a little iron
Ball under that tree.
Let’s go get it.”

—Robert Bly

vera pavlova

I’ve written a couple of posts that include poems by Vera Pavlova, so I think it’s obvious that I like what she has to say. I’m going to keep sharing them.

I first read her work in my email inbox from Knopf Poetry’s Poem-a-Day, and placed her book on hold through the library. If There is Something to Desire consists of 100 poems, translated from Russian by her husband. As she’s said in interviews, there are many poets married to poets, but rare is the poet-translator marriage. This is how she describes a good translation: ” the same dream seen by two different sleepers.” This woman’s mind is amazing!

8

A beast in winter,
a plant in spring,
an insect in summer,
a bird in autumn.
The rest of the time I am a woman.

17

Why is the word yes so brief?
It should be
the longest,
the hardest,
so that you could not decide in an instant to say it,
so that upon reflection you could stop
in the middle of saying it.

exposure

Marshall and I have a company. If you haven’t checked it out yet, do so!

Look at our library:

http://www.crickethousebooks.com/

Visit our new blog!:

http://crickethousebooks.blogspot.com/

“Like” us on Facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/crickethousebooks?ref=ts

What are your favorite classics?

I’d like to…I want to.

I’d really like to start a regular exercise routine. But I haven’t. And I think I’m in the company of millions of people. I’ve been thinking a lot about what deters me, what holds me back.

First of all, I’m a creature of comfort. When Marshall proposed to me, he told me I had 7 great loves, and they are what made him love me so much. One of those loves was comfort. He likes when I’m in a sweatshirt or wrapped in a blanket. Last Christmas, InStyle had an 8-page article on gift ideas, categorized by general personality types. The page I was attracted to instantly was the one that oozed comfort: ear muffs, tea kettle, flannel button-up, bathrobe, checker set, etc. etc. I like to be cozy. My favorite part of Everett’s favorite sign language video is when the host talks about sleep, pajamas, and then turns off the light in a bedroom, where two little kids softly snore and crickets sing quietly. I love rest and regeneration.

So the idea of moving my body so much I sweat through my shirt (eww) goes against my grain, you could say. But I long to be stronger, healthier. I know it doesn’t take much. I know little steps will lead to bigger strides. And a couple times a week, I do go on walks, pushing a few dozen pounds in front of me. I discovered that new tennies, a visor, and non-denim pants or shorts make the experience easier. I discovered that plugging my iPod into a cheap tiny speaker, dropped into a pocket in the back of the stroller, helps me from getting bored.

But I want to be more consistent. I want to get up at 7 and walk in the early morning hours, all by myself. Marshall and I run our own company, which means we make our own schedule. Which is great. But it means we have to work a lot to get our business off the ground. So time taken away from work can sometimes make me feel guilty, even though both of us have agreed multiple times that it is totally okay to spend a small part of our day exercising. It is showing respect to our bodies. We try to not refer to it as working out or exercising anymore, as those words connote boredom to me—we’ve dubbed it physically heightening experience, or phe (pronounced phay). (“How can we incorporate more pheing in our day-to-day life?” we ask each other.)

If I wake up before my boys are up, I’d rather have some tea and read. (Gosh. Reading. I love reading. When E naps, there is nothing I’d rather do than read. If I go a few days without reading, I physically feel the lack.) I recently read a fitness expert’s findings that some people get more tired from working out than energized, so they should work out in the evening (while other people are the opposite—they become energized, so working out for them is better suited for the morning). This makes total sense to me. However, when my mind thinks about pheing after supper, my body thinks about reading on the couch. And my body almost always wins.

I know that my preferred form of working out is a dance or some other low-impact cardio class, walking (sometimes boring even with music or a friend, though—I don’t know why), or biking (my bike sorely needs a tune-up, and I get nervous about biking in Madison, even on the paths). I know these are things that I can do. The problem is seeing them as a priority. How can I change my perspective, to view exercising as a must-do? As important as putting food in my body and getting rest? What do you do? Keep in mind that your answer will be more relevant to me if you have at least one child in your household. :) (Eating, resting, working out, showering, connecting, thinking, and all other necessary life-giving activities are always complicated by the presence of a kid in your life.)

talk about what means the most

My grandma died last Friday, on my birthday, 3 weeks after the cancer diagnosis. I was told the window in her room was open, a perfect June breeze gently blowing on her as her breathing eventually stopped. I was told my grandpa, when informed of her last breath, cried, and cried, and cried.

All afternoon, all evening, I marveled at the expanse of the summer sky. I have never seen it so wide, so open…it looked like it had just been created and separated from the earth. A newborn sky.

We are rich: we have nothing to lose.
We are old: we have nowhere to rush.
We shall fluff the pillows of the past,
poke the embers of the days to come,
talk about what means the most
as the indolent daylight fades;
we shall lay to rest our undying dead:
I shall bury you, you will bury me.

—Vera Pavlova

as if it were enough

A girl sleeps as if
she were in someone’s dream;
a woman sleeps as if tomorrow a war will begin;
an old woman sleeps as if
it were enough to feign being dead
and death might pass her by
on the far outskirts of sleep.

—Vera Pavlova

Death and sleep have been occupying my mind a lot lately. My grandma is swiftly dying of cancer, but unlike the nonspecific old woman in Pavlova’s poem, she’s ready to go. When I visited my grandma, she was as chatty as ever, but rather abruptly she became tired, and her eyes closed, and she warned me that she was about to drift off on me. It was the way my baby used to sleep, in his early months—the swift change from awake to not awake—his limbs active, then stretching, then still; his cooing suddenly stopping, replaced by sweet, even breathing.

My baby is 17 months now and this week we decided to start teaching him to fall back asleep on his own after partial night wakings. The thing is, he hasn’t cried at all in the middle of the night for the last 2 nights. Go figure. He must be sleeping as if he were in someone’s dream. As for me, a woman, almost 27 years, I snooze just fine, a deep and restorative sleep. But bedtime is the tricky thing, the thing when I feel a kind of war approach me. Grief overthrows me like a coup d’etat.

oldies but goodies

snow bunny

I’ve found the solution. Winter hats just don’t work for me unless I keep them on all day. Hat hair isn’t great for straighties, but for curlies it’s just—well, bad bad bad.

I thought the calorimetry hat would work, but it still is too much coverage.
And so…I figured earmuffs may be an option. After trying on many a pair, I spotted these super soft ones at TJ Maxx, stared in the mirror for a long time, taking them off and on, off and on, wondering if I could wear something so…large. The opposite of demure. I like fashion but don’t take many fashion risks.

Turns out, I LOVE them. I feel like a koala bear (only I smell much better) with a touch of glam.

And my ears stay freaking warm. And the top of my hair warms the rest of my head. And it does not get squashed.

Hurrah!

Even Everett approves.