need a Christmas gift idea?

Have you—or your friend—always wanted to tackle the classics, but their sheer size is just too intimidating?

Check out this edition of Les Miserables—published in five separate volumes. Each is between 200-300 pages—much easier to carry around than a 1,200-page monster.

You can get each volume on Amazon:

Volume One: Fantine

Volume Two: Cosette

Volume Three: Marius

Volume Four: Saint-Denis

Volume Five: Jean Valjean

olfactory assocations

Five years ago I spent some time at a stone cottage in Brittany, France. One of my English flatmates and his parents spent vacations there and we arranged that I would take a train on Easter morning from Paris to Paimpol to meet up with his small family to have a holiday of my own. Every morning, his dad went into town and returned with fresh baguettes. Every evening, his mom gave me a hot water bottle to keep my bed warm through the night. Joe and I hiked the serene Brittany coast and visited the Paimpol market. It was there that I bought a slender bottle of lotion that smelled deliciously of apricot. I smoothed it on my legs, my elbows, my hands and wrists every morning. I lay in the backyard at midnight, next to the garden, with an achingly lucid sky overhead, the fruity scent sharp and tangy against the smell of dewy grass, dusty blanket, dark roses. I made it last as long as possible, well into my summer back in the States and the fall semester of my senior year back at college. When I finally had to toss the empty bottle, I tried to find the company online but didn’t have much luck.

A few weeks ago, my mom and sisters spent a few hours in Galena, Illinois, marveling at the sudden warmth in the October air. Conversation was comfortable and easy and my glass of zinfandel was satisfyingly sweet. I scanned the shelves of a Provencal shop and there they were—familiar slender ivory bottles. With one innocent sniff of the apricot, a blur of snapshots assaulted me, along with a peculiar feeling of who I was five years ago.

The memories and specific emotions were so strong. And so good. But unsettling, because five years seems like a lifetime in some ways, and I don’t want to live in that life every time I smooth the fragrance onto my skin. I purchased another scent, sweet almond; it’s a sweet blank slate, but not for long. As I use it through the winter, I’m sure it will become significant; it will become a redolence I may stumble upon in five years, an encounter that bowls me over with associations of my lovely boy not yet one year old, my complicated anxieties as a new mother, my fumbled attempts at embracing love and mystery.

family pics

I don’t think I ever blogged about this…have I? My sister did a photo shoot for us back in June, when E was 5 months old.

http://kelseysphotographs.blogspot.com/2009/06/barker-family-shoot.html

This one is more recent and not quite as flattering. :) (You just can’t beat natural light and Kelsey’s artistic eye!)

the backyard

My favorite tree. It nearly stretches to our back stoop, and its bottom-most leaves are shoulder-level.

As E and I like to sit under it occasionally, I have been praying its root system is much stronger than that of its neighbor’s.

The path, late May.

The path, early September.

Last night, when I was picking up some fixins for jambalaya, Marshall spotted a red-tailed hawk flying past our windows. He approached the back room slowly with the camera, and sure enough, it was perched on the railing. It looked straight at him through the back door.

But didn’t seem to care much.

three years today

We’ve lived in four places. We’ve had five different jobs. We’ve been to fourteen weddings (at least). We’ve made one baby.

We are giving, creative people, and going on three years, those abilities are put to the test. We are constantly needed by our child, so we adjust and readjust how we communicate with each other in creative ways, so that we still have something to give to each other at the end of the day. Some nights, as Everett plays on the floor, Marshall relaxes on one couch and I on the other. I can’t help but see slender ribbons stretching from my body to Everett’s, from M’s body to Everett’s…

I fell in love with Jane Eyre in early high school, the sweeping, unexpected romance. I remember my heart swelling when Mr. Rochester tells Jane that if she leaves, his heartstrings will be stretched until they are broken. Someone in college once told me they thought Jane Eyre was cheesy—something they would’ve liked as a teen, but not now, as they’re reading it for class. I shrugged and reconsidered my emotions and decided that they were valid. Especially now as I see our boy between us, the slender heartstrings stretched between the three of us. I am still in disbelief that we created a human. I’m still amazed that my heartstrings laced to Marshall are able to expand and be linked to another person, so tiny, in another relationship of a completely different kind.

Speaking of giving and creativity, or creative giving, if you will, I wanted to share the HOOPS story. Late December last year, when Everett was with us but hidden in my enormous uterus, we went out on a big date. I wore my wedding earrings, pretty little sparkly things, but M thought my hoops would look better with my outfit. So I went to the bathroom and slid the five-dollar slender pair from Claire’s in and off we went. In the middle of dinner, M tossed a jewelry box on the table and said, “Happy pushing gift!” I openedup the box, thrilled that I had gotten the white gold hoops I had hinted about, and then he pointed to my ears. “You’ve already been wearing your gift for awhile now, actually,” he said. He had swapped my cheapo earrings with the nice ones back at home and I hadn’t even noticed.

I wore them through the entire 17-hour labor. I wanted to rip everything off me by the end—the IV, the epidural stuff, the monitors and the itchy tube top that held them in place, the cuff, the gown—but the hoops didn’t bother me one bit.

(I’ve posted these elsewhere before…but they’re HOOPS proof!)

Here’s to many more years of creativity, of hard work, of giving, of pushing through to the end.

our charming kid

ol’ blue eyes

arriving August 1, 2009

I designed the interior for this book. I haven’t read it yet, except for snippets here and there while typesetting. The bits I’ve read are funny and wise. The cream paper is soft under your fingertips and the hardcover binding is secure in your palms. So set down your Kindle and get this collection of stories from Augsburg Fortress or Amazon.
Even if you’re not Lutheran, I think you will like it.

5 months old!

Has it really been five months already?

………………………………….

update

Hmmm…I’m not keeping up with the blogging-every-Monday thing. Sorry. Life is happening…

I read this today: At about 4 to 5 months, your baby can tell that two shades of blue are more alike than a blue and a green, even without knowing their names.

Cool, huh?

E is 4.5 months old. Here’s a belated update on his stats:

weight: 17 lbs. 4 oz. (90%)
length: 26 in. (91%)
head size: 42.5 cm (60%)

And although he loves to stand up on our lap, all the time, he is not really walking. Marshall’s just really good at snapping his hands out of the frame and back in again before E falls over.