Sunday evening

On Sundays, there's some time in the early evening I have the house to myself for a change. Tom is off setting up for the singer/songwriter night he books at the Longhorn every Sunday, and Emmy usually curls up for a nap in her little nest of blankets. I used to just make tea and watch TV (Downton Abbey night!) but lately I've been using the time to get things done, prep for the week, be productive in whatever way pleases me instead of whatever way it seems the house needs most. Conveniently, these things sometimes coincide, maybe because giving yourself permission to do whichever piece of work you'd like first, makes the whole thing easier. I turn my New Yorker short story podcast, or an episode of Fresh Air or This American Life, up loud enough to be heard over the dishes, and slowly and sloppily make my way through them, wiping the counters at the end, gathering up all the dishtowels for a load of laundry to be finished later. Sometimes I'll roast a cauliflower, or some baby broccoli, or cook a little pot of rice to pack up for lunch for the week. It's just nice, that's all.

Four is the new...

I can't believe that the twins are four.

I mean, I can, and every day they have some funny new behavior or expression that confirms that they are evolving. Last night, for instance, when they were opening their gifts, Thomas kept saying 'Oh my!!!' or 'Oh my goodness!!!' with such frequency and enthusiasm that Eugene and I were looking at each other wondering - where did that come from? Max, meanwhile, displays a lot of the tendencies that I had at that age. Singing, dancing around, making up elaborate stories. I wouldn't be surprised if he announced his desire to be a singing dentist soon.

We've had them in nursery school/ski school this winter, while I am teaching snowboarding at Mount Snow, and they have been such little troopers about it. I feel some mom guilt that not only am I working during the week, but on weekends as well, but for the most part the time at the mountain is great for us as a family.

I see the boys learning how to socialize and behave in a school setting. I get to do something that I love, whether it is teaching, taking a clinic or just free riding. Eugene gets to get out and see friends, have some fun and even hang out with me, sans twins. And then there are the sunny days, when we pick the boys up early from Cub Camp and take them over to the learning area.

I will sit at the bottom with one of the boys, a container of popcorn and some juice, and we cheer Euge and the other twin on as they take the chair lift and ski down together. It is such a perfect moment of happiness for me, I find myself thinking - here we are, this is the point of everything else that I do.

Thankfully, it is not the only moment that I feel that way. In fact, the twins inspire a lot of that thinking.

Pulling onto Mactaggart after Quiet is the New Loud at the Longhorn, I caught a couple in my headlights, leaned up against a car, someone persuading someone else, and I'm not saying who. At the bar, Harley and Susan and I had talked about winter electricity bills, insulation, farm interns, what kind of savory sauce you can make with blueberries. Tom and James were talking about the berry farm down the street from us, how they were dealing with this late cold snap we've got, and on the way to work the next day I drove past blueberry bushes with their roots stuck in frozen puddles, both cold and flood was the misfortune this week. 

I've switched to tea in the morning, try to get most of the dishes done at night, make notes on what to do next, and put off the ironing. 

Wet Feet

The snow is long gone, but it's still work keeping feet warm around here. My acupuncturist told me my last bad migraine came in with the wind, that I must wear a hat whenever I go outside on windy days. Sure enough, the wind came back today, and a migraine with it. They aren't as frequent these days, we've got something worked out with the yin energy, a good night's sleep, and winter warmth. 

The fields are filling up with puddles today, and the drainage ditches run like rivers. Tonight is Bingo at the elementary school, the annual fundraiser that keeps the lights on in our town. Last time, everyone won, and we all filed into the hall to eat little sandwiches the Ladies Club brought, potluck-style. Peanut butter and banana on white bread, tuna fish on wheat, egg salad. Lemonade made from powder. We sat on the folding tables and benches in the gym and a real auctioneer called out the bingo numbers.  This year Lisa is coming up, and I'll put on a dress, but tights too since it's cold, and of course, a hat. 

I keep getting rid of things. I need to keep doing that. How many sweaters do you think a girl needs? Can I keep twenty? I'm determined this weekend to drag them out, toss them all on my bed, and weed ruthlessly.

Fun on the Twirly Slide

Fun and games and elbows and knees. Its all fun until someone gets hurt, right?

Our nanny called out sick yesterday, so I had the rare opportunity to hang out in the city with the twins. It was so fun to see the crazy little people that they are becoming.

In the morning Euge and I went on our first tour of a school, to look at a possible preschool program... It was funny with all the little kids, little chairs, little tables... even their own little toilets!

It reminded me of mom's stories about me singing in the bathroom at our preschool. I'm not sure it was the school for the boys, but the tiling in the bathroom looked promising for good acoustics.

It was lucky for me that one of the other families in our building has a son that is good buddies with the boys - they had a playdate while we were on the school tour. Childcare co-op! So Capitol Hill of us!

After I picked them up, we went to the big neighborhood playgroup at one of the local churches and, for the first time in at least a couple of years, I got to hear the supremely talented Mr. Troy perform for the kids. He's an amazing local parent who performs for all of the kidlets every week, singing and playing his guitar. Its the sort of thing that I can imagine the boys talking about with their friends from the 'hood when they are all growed up.

'Hey, remember Mr. Troy at the church playgroup?'

"Yeah, he was awesome. I always wanted to learn to play the guitar because of him.'

He's like Mr. Rogers. Only younger. And more energetic. And he wasn't wearing a cardigan. At least not this week.

We wandered into the church proper after the playgroup ended and were treated to his rendition of 'Boy Named Sue' while he tested the church's new sound system. Sweet!

I was perhaps overly proud that, as we were leaving, a Mom at the group (with her non-walking singleton baby) commented on how well I seemed to handle the boys and how impressed she was with how I talked to and managed them. Hah! Fooled her!

Afterwards, the boys' friends and their nannies came back to the apartment for a pizza partay. Woohoo!

There were five toddlers, three babies, three nannies, and me. I was a little self-conscious that they might not think I was as capable as the mom at the playgroup did. I think I disappointed them when I suggested (after 2 hours of toddler wound-up mayhem) that we settle down a bit and watch a show about how trucks are built.

TV!!! Bad Mommy!

Egh, whatever.

After everyone left, the boys and I took a little more time in front of the boob toob, played a rousing game of both Chutes & Ladders AND High-Ho Cherry-O, before I decided that it was time for a trip to the playground.

And then the twirly slide child dogpile commenced. The kids (around twenty of them) loaded themselves over and over again into the slide, bundled in so tight that noone could move. Except to laugh. Hysterically.

Then we went home, there was a bath, some food... maybe a little more TV... and sweet sweet bedtime.

No one was harmed in the making of this photo. Proof that the twins aren't total animals?

Word of the Year, 2012

I never did get on a ferry over winter break. There were a LOT of things I didn't do - paint the kitchen, for example. I didn't read reviews, and while I'm glad I didn't, I also paid for that in terms of the scramble and chaos of the last few weeks at work. Today we approved 12 promotions and all of our merit increases. We are the Lake Wobegon of workplaces - all employees are above average. Monday will be spreadsheets and merged letters, four different versions, multiple spreadsheets and 56 envelopes at least. Then I'm good. Until the hiring for the year gets approved, at least.

I've been making things. Food things. Potato latkes and little meatballs and gougeres and apple sharlotka and cabbage with ham and chocolate chip cookies from scratch and cranberry apple crisp or crumble or whatever it is and fresh wild mushroom toasts and really a lot of lacinato kale. Beyond this, I'm not making much progress, but this IS progress, I keep telling myself. Even though tonight dinner was lasagna from the co-op deli (which I don't feel bad about buying because really, lasagna is a royal pain to make) and I bought beet salad for lunch tomorrow, which I do feel bad about buying, because I suspect it's easy enough even for me, and I forgot to even get the chevre I was going to add to it. 

It's alright. This is what I tell myself nightly, in the little journal I've been keeping about the house. I just want to make that white bolognese sauce some time this month, and learn how to write letters again. Progress. That's the word.

Light Again

Ages ago, I said that all the holiday gifts this year would be handmade, but not many of them are after all. Driving home tonight I started to consider, for the first time this season, breaking down and doing that kind of holiday shopping where you just go, and walk around, looking at every thing there is to look at, trying to figure out if any of it could be something someone I feel I owe a present to would want. I wasn't quite to the mall stage, it would have been walking around the second smallest town nearby, but in the end I think I've decided against even that. 

I just want to hang out with my family, and then spend days in my pajamas.

Friday, 2011

There were things that needed to be made up for but we didn't talk about that. Part of what could have been bad was made into a story, and laughed at. I hoped for the ice to hold. Frog came to the table and showed us all how to make his kind of snowflake. We cut and bent paper, drew the edges together with little ribbons of tape, and all made something together. Jessica was wearing the hat I made for her last year. Two and a half years ago isn't far away, but so much has changed for so many of us. 

Last Penpal

She wasn't the easiest person to get a photo of. I like this one, just candid, taken during dinner out, with the twins sitting at the end of the table she seems to be looking at. 

When our other grandmother passed away, suddenly there were all this photos. Black and white, little square prints, people in bathing suits and with dogs I never knew, wearing hats and heels, lanky and younger than I'd ever known them. It was this reveal that never happened in any of the visits or letters that had come in the years she was Grandma. It felt like another way to know her, and I've been glad for it. She's tacked up on the bulletin board in my office, wearing overalls, fishing from a rock. Always.

I hope for some of that with Grandma Ellen, too, now that she's gone. I used to write to her sometimes with questions, things that probably seemed maybe a little rude, about when she was younger. What things were like, what was she interested in, back then? She was never very interested in answering those. But she did always write anyway, just about other things, whatever was recent. 

I miss owing her a letter. Last year was the last year of Belle Fourche calendars for Christmas. Glad we were there not too long ago, wish she could have been here more. She was always good to us.

Blue

The frost on the fields the other day was so thick it looked like snow from a distance. Someone at work was talking about Colorado the other day, how the high had been zero degrees somewhere there, balmy! and I remembered that and missed it. Coming home at night, the back porch hear is all glitter and treachery. Sunday morning was bad news, but later in town, David kept Tweets open late to feed us roast chicken and homemade noodles. It's what my dad would have made, if he were making my favorite thing, and even though he was the one who deserved comforting, it was the right thing.

Dark Enough

five years ago

I wasn't in a good mood from the start. Not a bad mood, exactly, a little crabby, less generous than I aspire to be, and no good at faking it. I skated by on wordsmithing and filling out forms and a little filing. Dinner was dried tortellini boiled up and covered in leftover sauce, even though I knew it would have made the night so much better to just go pick up Thai food. I was torn between that and just wanting to be home. We left the TV off, and it started to rain, and the wind sounded like rain too, and I couldn't decide what to knit. I had gotten to the part of the book about a character's depression and that seemed too apt no matter how well written it was. There is a night at home tomorrow, then the rest of the week a marathon, two trips to Seattle, and then a weekend that doesn't feel like the bullseye in the center of the target that they sometimes do. I've learned that there might as well be some cleaning that gets done, might as well get to the sleeping part of the day early, and start again tomorrow.

Let's Start Keeping Track Again

There were a lot of things I didn't manage to get done. This is what I think about on Sundays, it's inevitable. Even if the kitchen is pretty clean, and all the dry laundry is folded, and we've hosted thirteen people for Thanksgiving, had lunch out with Tom's parents the next day, gone to The Daffodils CD release party the next night and the show at the Longhorn tonight. Put like that, it doesn't sound like the week was all that lazy. I'm starting to like the house. Not that I didn't always love it, but liking it has more to do with feeling good about the way I deal with the house on a day to day basis. The spare room is starting to vaguely resemble some sort of order, and it is actually possible to clean up my bedroom in about fifteen minutes, generally. 

I still don't know what to get anyone for Christmas, though. Any hints? 

Eventually

Two months is long enough away. Driving home on Farm to Market at night, even with your high beams on, sometimes the speed limit is too fast. Too fast for the coyote flicking through your headlight, the owl exposing the underside of his wings, and worst of all, the skunk ambling his way so much more slowly than you would think possible. The coyote and the owl make it, the skunk, not always. 

Summer left quickly, and all of a sudden, it's frost in the morning and heavy coats, no shoulder season at all. Driving home one night, the wind blew the rain so far sideways that it looked like snow coming down in the headlights. In the garage, a small flood seeps into the boxes of files that were there for shredding, but is gone the next day. You can start to see where the puddles will form in the driveway again. 

The last year has been so long. This time last year I was just getting the new light fixtures in at the house, an ordeal that involved uncertainty and disagreements and one broken shade that I felt terrible about. The fixtures go unnoticed now, peaceful finally. Things in the house still change little by little, not quickly enough for anyone but Emmy, who just wants to know where the water, food and her people are. Beds she can make anywhere. No matter that I spend the night here every night, it still seems part-time somehow but I've learned at least to make my own coffee, and every day I do.

25a. There Aren't Enough Words For Home

On the way home from Quiet is the New Loud at the Longhorn tonight, I took what I think of as the back way. East to Chuckanut, then Thomas Road to Allen West. A small dark thing ran across Chuckanut, and then an owl flew from the top of one of the street signs on Thomas Road, out into the fields away from my headlights, wings all sepia the way everything looks in the dark out of the corner of your eye. I wanted to go back and see it again, not miss the moment when it had been sitting there, just before flight. I thought about all the photos I'd like to have but can't, and how I don't have enough, or the right, words for the way a bird flies, and for what those big wings do to you when you see them so close.

5. A Dream

I don't know where we were. She was visiting, a surprise. When I put my hand on her arm, it was so thin. Anyone could see that, but there was the feel too, warm and dry, the bones right there, unapologetic. I thought I might wake up to hear that she had gone, but that call hadn't come yet.

Cantaloupe always reminds me of her. Small dogs with underbites, and those snake-looking things that are used to clean swimming pools. Kidney shaped swimming pools. Orca whales, Shamu in particular, and those little sailor hats, like the one Gilligan wore on the island that bore his name. Matching skirts with extra twirl, corduroy vests. The desert. Small lizards. Tijuana and its brightest, cleanest souvenirs. Big tissue paper flowers, papier mache marionettes. White hair, fresh curls from the beauty parlor, baby blue slacks. The scar on the heel of my palm. A disdain for what she'd call "nasty neat". Pet rocks.  The phrase "Well, that's true," said in a certain tone. My own mother. The Lawrence Welk show, over football. Football too. The Arizona Cardinals and Matt Leinart. The black puffy vest I bought myself at the Gap from her one year, that I still wear at least a decade on. I can't think of her without thinking of her husband. I don't know how to know who is at peace with what, and what will surprise us later. I wonder if there's anything to apologize for, or if it's all okay. The town of Malmo in Sweden. Needles wrapped in a grosgrain pouch, tiny double-pointed sets for socks, single pointed in sizes for baby sweaters. I don't know why that's the thing I am most thankful for, I only know it is.

Blingin'

My Sparkly Golden Robot Nails

So, this summer I am spending time away from the twins for the first time since they were born. Well, actually, since I got pregnant. Four years of them virtually every day and night. That's a long time time to have two little people dependent on you for their comfort, care and feeding.

And then there's the part where they syphon off the majority of my patience and emotional energy. Though we are not physically tethered, I am convinced that there is an invisible vortex between us, sucking all of the vital emotional components out of me, to them.

I've had my trepidations about leaving them. Will they get fed? Put down for naps on time? Will the potty training continue? Who will wake up with them at 2 AM? Will the sunscreen be applied regularly? Will their teeth get brushed?

The long weekend in Southern California has come and gone and it was well worth the effort. The boys were fed, cared for, entertained and maintained. At least not broken or damaged in any permanent way — though they have now discovered the meaning of spanking.

That might be to my advantage, just as a threat of course.

For me, it was so fun to have a weekend where the only person I needed to be concerned about caring for, feeding and putting to sleep was me. When other wedding guests asked what I planned for the non-wedding activity time, my answer was simple: sleep, sleep, sleep.

And I did.

I also got a manicure, got a pedicure, got my hair done, drank some (a lot of) champagne, wore some new dresses, wore some new shoes, read some seriously trashy novels, perused some super trashy magazines and TOOK A BUBBLE BATH!

Now I have the weekend in Seattle coming up and I am really excited to get to visit without the constant planning around nap schedules (though the Reunion Schedule must be respected), at least not the twins nap schedules.

I may make a nap schedule for myself.

Maybe this time I will get to go to Larry's joint, or this restaurant, where our plans were thwarted by snow and scheduling snafus on the last trip. Maybe I'll get some Tracy Pucci eyebrows, or a glass of wine and some paté at Campagné.

Don't get me wrong, I will miss the boys every little minute.

But for the first time in a long time, I am getting to enjoy being by myself. With you, of course.

1. A Day

At work, I have a bias for candidates who tell me about what it was like to love a job. In friends, I have a bias for people who make me mix tapes, CD's, whatever. We've talked about this before. There's something else to say about it though, the way it signifies, to me, someone's ability to think about, oh, say, you driving your car to work in the morning, or, even better, about the more unpleasant drive home, that time of day when everything gets all gummed up and NPR drones and the Cedar Grove composting site in Everett goes all foul-smelling in the sun and you are so ready to be home and over it all. If there is a mix CD, or the first draft of the Daffodils new album, none of that is so bad. It's just what lies between you and avocado crab enchiladas from the co-op, and the blooming potato fields that surround the house, and everything the evening holds.

The accident on the way home today was two cars all the way over the guard rail, both right side up, surprisingly, one facing south instead of north. These things happen, maybe an accident this bad about once every three months, and they stick with me. Traumatic to me in some small, corner of the eye way, traumatic to someone else on a much bigger scale. I've been thinking about trauma a lot these days, both the big sudden kind, and the long sustained conditioning that tends to resonate through the years, surprising you with your own reactions to things. Surprising me with my own reaction to things.

Most days, I notice what happens when I walk in the door in one of the places where I am supposed to belong. At work there are two ways to go in, and I alternate depending on my mood. Walk past the exec offices, or stop in the lunchroom for hot water for tea? Those choices start the world in two different ways. In Bow, Emmy predictably barks, but sometimes she also gently nips at my hand as I reach down to pet her on the walk back to the front gate to close it for the night. Sometimes Tom is in the house, doing dishes, but most often he's out in the back these days, watering or piling dirt up around the potato mounds, and sometimes he leaves what he's doing to say hello, and sometimes he doesn't, sometimes he just waves. At the Ballard house, it was the same way, sometimes Kate and Jason on the couch, watching a movie, Kate knitting or playing words with friends or something like that on her iPhone. Sometimes they would stop the movie to talk, sometimes not. Sometimes I was Special Guest Star, and sometimes it was Tuesday. Sometimes it was a house full of guys with beards and stringed instruments, apologizing for being in the way of the door up to my space. Yesterday Jason saw me coming from where he sat on the couch, and got up to open the door and let me in. That was the first time he had ever done that, and probably the last. Moving day is any week night for the next few weeks, and then it's mini-farm forever after. 

THE EELS, Showbox, August 9, 2011

Some of the sounds were like a 6th grader, working on learning the flute. The horns section, two guys in what looked  like bellhop suits, turned towards the curtain behind the stage when they weren't working, kids in the naughty corner, only more dignified. There was La Marseillaise gone wrong, and something muppet-like about E's singing, and that potent pause right in the middle of one song, then the start-up again, loosely choreographed and bad-ass, that thing they did with the necks of their guitars, and there were other weird little bits of choreography, all of them getting up close to the drummer as though they were paying homage, and when E turned around to face his band instead of the audience it was like the center of gravity of the whole room had been lifted up and set down amongst the seven of them, and later there was another still part, just the drum going, rattling something so deep in my chest that my collarbone felt like a tuning fork. E didn't let a song end before he had the next guitar on, and in between  he'd call out things like "I LIKE HOW THIS IS GOING" and the whole show seemed wild and capable, precise and brutish and tender all at once, and made me almost wish I was a man.

Bare Bones

It's rare that I make my commute with nothing on the radio, no book on CD playing. For the first half of my commute this morning, I listened to Louise Erdrich read Lorrie Moore's story, Dance In America via the New Yorker fiction podcast and afterwards my mind was too blown to take in anything else. I flipped off the car stereo and drove the rest of the way in silence. I paid attention to the fire truck racing along the frontage road, an ambulance solemnly following. I thought about the difference between He leaves the room and He walks out of the room. I thought about secrets, and the way a story can be told by isolating pieces of information, leaving things out, like in a photograph where what makes it beautiful is the lack of extraneous details.