self portrait tuesday (february)

not an official member yet, but . . .



here i am, wrinkles and all. not sure how i feel about prematurely wrinkling so deeply. not overly terrific, i suppose. if only i didn't squint and smile so much.

put on the day, wear it 'til the night comes

breezy saturdays may be my favorite sort of day. after naps the boys ate outside, cold as it still was with the breeze and all. we pretended to picnic and then dug through the yard for something metal down in the ground to tell us something of where our property ends and the neighbors' begins.



i find myself obsessed with the borders of the yard. the trees are tall, a leafy fantastic for spring, summer and fall. come winter they telegraph wooden messages (di di di, di dah dah di, di dah di, di di, dah di, dah dah di) to one another since there are no leaves for gossiping together. there is a possible confusion with the neighbors as to who is responsible for the trees, although they are clearly in our yard, and were i to come home one sunny afternoon and find the neighbors' garage lined with stacks of fresh wood and the trees on the north side of the yard chopped into splinters and kindling i would seriously become violent. something must be done before they tire of raking the leaves that drop down into their grass and purchase red shorts and a chain saw.



henry with a fever is certainly not himself, falling asleep on his own on the couch while watching star wars, incredibles, lady and the tramp. needy and flushed he's a hard day and night job. we're exhausted and look forward to the return of his bounce. jude is fascinated with henry's permanent post on the couch. he climbs up the back and jumps onto henry's head, laughing all the way. he turns off the tv and runs to hide.

february, this short month of long winter is almost over. three cheers for the coming of march!

running on tiptoe

i don't know the family, i didn't know the baby. ernie works with her father, this is all that i know of them. they didn't expect her to live to be older than ten, but dying at three was still unexpected. can a mama ever expect her baby to die? and seven more years of life has to seem like a century compared to the last few minutes of breath.

i tried not to think too much about it, stopping to whisper a prayer for their family here and there throughout the day seemed enough. i didn't want to look at my own three year old and all of is glow and spark and put myself in hannah's mama's funeral shoes. but i thought about them a lot, about the crater of emptiness that would bore through my chest, through the chambers of my heart, were my own child to experience death before i do.



i thought about the quietness of their house, the empty feeling the rooms have when something isn't right, isn't the same. i thought about how weird dead people look, weirdest most to those who knew them best, and how utterly terrible it must feel to see your child looking that way. i thought about how people never know what to say to those who experience this kind of loss, at least how i never know what to say, how i avoid having to say anything at all because i am not brave enough to shoulder some of their pain and grieve with them.

henry snoozes upstairs, a late afternoon nap for a boy who is fighting a cold. jude snores alongside him, one arm over his head, just like ernie sleeps. i stare at them long and hard before i walk downstairs to make a congratulatory "welcome to the world" call to my sister-in-law who has recently given birth to a baby girl.



i take my children for granted, i realize yet again. their liveliness, their tenacity, their persistance, their independance, their dependance. i find myself often annoyed by the very things that make them living people. it's ridiculous to promise against the repetition of being annoyed so, but if it were possible, i'd do it in a flash. it's all too short, these minutes we're given, to be taking them for granted the way that i do.

"like uncut jewels, dull and rough"

jude's gum loving has gone too far. hooray for olive oil! i was anticipating a terrible first haircut (mullet?) but a teaspoon of olive oil made the glob (and the little chunks, too) slide right out of his shiny hair.



one would think we'd stop giving the kid gum but we don't. at least, i don't. i think it helps him keep his mind off of his teeth. he loves every aspect of gum, from wrapper removal, to the gradual biting of it, to the long chew, the long stretching strand, the lumpy swallow. frost knew, and we know!

besides, and after all, we've the surety of olive oil.



"why is it so cold in here?" we sniffed as we muffled our mouths and noses with mufflers. "the house is old, it's windy and frigid outside. it's winter, buck up."

upon further investigation we realized, with much groaning about the impending CIPS bill, that someone (little fingers fidgeting with the thermostat. . .) had set the thing to turn down to 50 degrees at night. we slept with hoodies, thick socks. the house refused to warm up, the water refusing to charge through the pipes.



thanks to a free moment in the midst of the insanity to discover the mischief, it feels nearly too warm this morning.

the sun is now shining as i squint to type. jude has wet hands from playing at dishes in the sink. henry is practicing his olympic somersaulting. the second brew of coffee is about to whistle on the stove. this is a week without regularly scheduled students and we're all feeling it. too bad the week is half over already.

white horses, red hill

grass grass grass
tree tree tree
leafy leafy leaf
one, two, three
birdy birdy bird
fly fly fly
nest nest nest
high high high
cloudy cloudy cloud
wind wind wind
rain rain rain
mud mud mud
doggy doggy dog
run run run
quicky quick quick
home home home
beddy bed bed
sheety sheet sheet
sleepy sleep sleep
dreamy dream dream
dance-y dance dance
sing-y sing sing
grow grow grow
biggy big big -- woody guthrie



how long will this misery last? jude's four molars are nearly through, each one only four corners with gumminess in the in betweens of them, sixteen little islands in his crying mouth. and cry he does. he doesn't care to sleep, doesn't care to eat. and he's really really spastic, tripping over himself all day long, most likely due to the drunken stupor of his sleepless state. when will it end!

must have been a wonderful child

henry is building things across the room. he's serious about his work, stacking, pulling things off, knocking things down. i'm watching him work and he looks up sideways at me and winks.



he smiles his extra-delicious smile at me and gets back to work. i'm smitten and try to imagine him giving love with a wink and a grin to any other girl. it won't be long, they say, so as he slips into sleep tonight i take an extra deep drink of the smell of his hair and squeeze him close, the kind of close that seems to be as close as possible and yet still seems to be not quite close enough. he wiggles away and burrows down under the covers.

invocation

please pray for my friend troy. he's very ill (cancer) and it's really scary for him and his. his wife is my dear friend noel and their three precious babies are sadie, gideon and rivers. no details because i don't know any.

pray to the Healer for healing and peace.

tip of the tongue, the teeth, the lips

does this look like a smile with a cavity? of course it does not!



and yet, just add "three year old with a filling" to the box, the u-haul, the cavern that houses my mothering (among other) failures. if you can manage your way past the racks of too-often-worn fuzzy sweaters and green lounge wear and beyond the drawers of my impetuous and over-zealous haircuts, and if you can make it without tripping over the tangle of unfinished endeavors that clutter the floor to the cobweb dusted shelving, you can stick the cavity (and the check i wrote to fill it) in line next to the box of "didn't hear the baby crying while she was watching something forgettable and probably bad-for-her on the tv." you can place it slightly below the buttered paper bags of "fed children popcorn for breakfast. more than once." and you can cram it in directly above the jar of "shares toothbrush with both offspring and spouse on occasion." you'll have to ignore the too-embarrassing-to-talk-about clinkers marinating with fishy oil inside cans with screw-on lids because i'm not going to talk about those, not today.

henry was a champion dental patient, though. he sat, spat, winced, yawned for the drill, the fill, the super-scary sucker thing. he said, "thanks guys!" to the assistant and the tanned dentist who certainly had to notice my own pearly whites as they chomped on sugar-filled gum, who was most assuredly thinking phrases such as "mothering failure" and "bob dylan t-shirt = trashy mom without dental floss." in the end we came away with a star in henry's tooth, a dinosaur glider, and a resolution to brush jude's teeth all the more vigorously.

the most noteworthy, perhaps, is that the procedure itself took the dentist approximately six minutes to accomplish. the star was sixty one dollars even. so, one can deduce that the dentist makes just over ten bucks a minute, six hundred dollars an hour. at that rate i should have been a dentist, we all should have been orangely tanned dentists. too bad people value their teeth more than their musical educations, that's all i can say.