Sedona wasn't really a dog who had much interest in letting us near her. She was vigilant, keeping an eye on the goats and slinking around with the grace of a little fox. I never got a good portrait of her, the get down in the dirt, look a dog in the eye kind. It takes a certain kind of dog to make that kind of portrait. Sedona was too elusive. 

Emmylou is just the opposite, and I missed her for that and plenty of other reasons. When I came home from 5 days at farm camp, it was with a digging fork and four-tined hoe for the mini-farm and a stuffed bunny for Emmy. At dinner, she came and put her head in my lap and wagged her tail, looking up at me.    

The day after I got home was heaven, waking up on my own land, with what felt like a day stolen from work. In the afternoon, Tom came home and we took a long walk in the tall grass at the duck fields, Tom and I picking our way through the mud, using the tiny islands of grass to make our way through the marshy landscape there, Emmy just trotting along through it all, legs and belly dark with mud. It was too late in the afternoon for sunburn, but bright the whole way, small green frogs hopping out of the grass leaves and everywhere the calls of birds I don't yet know by sound.

A Small Act of Faith

Rooms Where Writers Sleep

This is a dream about road conditions, this is a dream of

the library. Other people love cowboys, love liberals, love

men who say “I want you to feel safe with me.”

The next morning in the dream, she was wearing

a bathing suit the color of goldfish, saying “He wouldn’t

want to hear something like this”, heading into the basement.

Someone else was there. I can see you leaning back

in your chair, black and white postcards in hand.

If the Denver Art Museum is so upside-down, why

isn’t it closed on Saturdays, open on Mondays?

I wanted bewildering Modern Art, I wanted the way

the mind string words together, writes the poetry for me

like it should in an industrialized nation. Out comes a pun

and we love it for the automated nature of it’s creation.

I love to linger and confess. We spend time together,

someone loves the word “swarm”, someone loves

shimmering, someone loves Sunday, someone loves

the terms of taxidermy. When we go home, we take with us

the overstuffed bodies of the poems we’ve hollowed out

and filled again with what we all love.

Progress

Writer's studio at Icicle Creek Writer's Retreat

The whole neighborhood seemed to smell like lilacs when I got to the Ballard house tonight. Kate and Jason had the front door open, and it felt like time to look at the garden, so Kate and I wandered out into the back yard to look at her little bed of shallots and greens and climbing pea vines. I thought about our new peony plant at home, a gift from Peggy's lush garden, and how tomorrow I would be home in Bow and could check on it, the first thing I've planted there myself. I want it to live forever and ever, and I don't care what color the flowers turn out to be.

Our writing retreat was good, ultimately. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it. I have a notebook nearly full of scribbles from my new Montblanc pen - thank god for that pen, I'm not sure I would have kept going if it hadn't been such a pleasure to write with. There wasn't much in there that I was tempted to go back and edit or fiddle with, not typically a good sign, but being in those little writing studios was so pleasant, and reading was so pleasant, and the conversations with the other writers there were so worth having. A little writing habit was built up, just somewhere to start from, as though I had taken a long walk every day for a week, on my way to building up to a run. More words, every day, that's all there is to it.

Better

So much. Yesterday at writing camp was hard. There were no good sentences and I was missing home, wishing I was home with my dirt. That turned out to be the key, ultimately. I had been hoping for fiction this trip, or maybe a few little prose poems, and those things were just not in me. When I gave in to that longing for home, my notebook filled itself up and I didn't mind at all that the writing had nothing to do with anything but me. 

Longhand

All the words until now have been longhand, computer left behind in my cabin with the cell phone, and no photos to write from. The eight of us retreat participants plus Ryan met the first day, at a table in the middle of a recital hall, all wood paneling and one whole wall of windows, a piano on a dais in front of the windows, and I kept thinking things like "naps!" and "manicure!", thoughts of leisure and vacation. But after we left the recital hall, I sat down with my notebook anyway, and just started to use ink. I made a manicure appointment and then cancelled it, and was sorry when I slept in until 9:40 the first day. No naps yet. 

My writing so far has been constant but scattered, concerned more with the problem of writing than with any story in particular. This second full day has been tainted with migraine, and at lunch I felt that odd migraine-related grief draining the words out of me. I sat and looked out the window at the shaded picnic tables, the practice rooms converted to writing studios for us for these five days, the small birds in the trees. When at a loss, I do come back to the birds, the house finch with it's rosy crown, the white-headed woodpecker pecking out a lacy pattern in the bark of the evergreen it mines for bugs. It's the simplicity of it that I love, the pleasure in naming something, in noticing it. White head, black body, white arm band, the tree-clinging shape. 

Clearing out

 The night before, I kept saying "I'm on vacation!" and Tom and I stayed up later than we should have, and I lingered in bed longer than I meant to and then there was coffee for me, made by Tom, and the walk around the property, and new blossoms on the apple tree and more weeding to be done in the circle of the middle of the driveway, and it was hard to leave. I wanted to stay and eat the good salad from dinner, with leaves from the garden and I wanted to open the watermelon I had brought home from the co-op, and suddenly it seemed like clearing out the spare room upstairs would be possible if I actually had a work day off, and I would have been happy to just move gravel around, for that matter, any of the things that would mean the mini-farm could be a still better version of itself.

But I got in the car anyway, headed off to a five day writing retreat near Leavenworth, with a box of books and a bag of knitting and two camera bags and enough clothes for three times as many days as I'll actually have away. It started before I even got out of Skagit county - little fragments of writing, nothing special, just throat-clearing sorts of things, a few words strung together to articulate the most obvious things. But a certain kind of writing, my mind starting to write itself, is how I tend to think of it. 

Where to

 Can't wait to go to the co-op, then home for the last few minutes of daylight. Two days at home, then two days of work, then off to Icicle Creek for a 5 day writing retreat, where who knows what things will happen or show up here!

Some of what's going on.

Sunday Stop

 Samish Bay Cheese was everything I hoped it would be. One small room with a stool and a cash register, a few chalkboards telling you which cheeses were available that day. Ask about something special and the woman working there will open that little white door inside to search the racks and racks of aging cheese for just the thing you are looking for - 4-year aged Gouda or something with nettles in it, or something spicy. There was a little dog sitting outside   waiting for a little cheese snack, patrolling in the most friendly way. I bought fresh Ladysmith and the cheese crackers that Breadfarm makes for them, and some sweet italian sausage for a Bolognese sauce I'd make later. When I got home, Tom and I took a break from the yard renovations currently underway and sat at our little table eating salami and apple slices and the crackers and all our cheeses. 

Going Home

Wednesday felt like a tease this week. One little night at home, dinner with James and Tom as though it were the weekend and movie night. Jessica was missing, off on a field trip to Portland, and so was the day off that I so wished would follow that night. 

After James left, Tom and I went outside, the way we do, a single dim flashlight illuminating the parts of the yard that he had worked on since I was home last, the parts of the yard not illuminated by the big floodlight from the back porch. Sweeping it along the fence line, the beam of the flashlight caught something glimmering, like a fishing lure in water, then a quick beat of wings as something dropped off a fencepost, then lifted up to perch on the next post. A little owl, I think, and the reason that the frogs were singing so loudly in the front part of the yard, and not at all in the back. He flew off eventually and the frog song flooded the property entirely. 

My life is so much more populated by the feathered and furred creatures of the world these days. I love that about the mini-farm. People always ask me if we have animals there, and I know what they mean so I say, just a dog, though she is so much more than just a dog, and the rest of the creatures we share the land with are so much more as well. I should say yes, harriers and moles and eagles and frogs and there will be swallows again this summer. Herons fly over and so many other birds that I have yet to name, and hopefully more than I will ever be able to.

Sleet

Technically, there isn't any sleet around here at the moment. But for some part of nearly every day, the cold, rain-slanting wind makes it feel as though there is. Coming home from dinner tonight, Tom and I sat in the car in the driveway for minutes, engine off, just looking at the cold rainy fields, still pond-like with flooding. Yesterday was different, though, the evening around sunset was lovely, warmish and made musical by the frogs, the spring bird songs, and when you stood in the back field, the quiet trickling of the groundwater sinking back into the earth. 

Home, Kind of

we are staying in New York this weekend. It feels like a rare, special thing to be home on Friday night with no particular plans for tomorrow beyond brunch and maybe the playground.

During the winter we are almost always bound for the house in Vermont and every Friday night involves simultaneously packing the laundry, cooking dinner for and feeding the kids, packing groceries, toys, books, movies, etc. etc. forever and ever.

But a night like tonight I get to spend cooking an experimental dinner, watching some crap television, catching up on the FB addiction and generally relaxing. While the twins are sleeping, of course.

We have a lot going on here. Birthdays. Potty training - oh, god the potty training... work and whatnot.

I went to my first ballet class in 25 years today. I spent the entire time trying to not fall over because I was laughing so hard.

Anyways. There's a lot going on. There is also nothing going on. The boys are healthy, cheerful, surprising and delightful. When they aren't being challenging, contrary, pissy and whingey. Ahem.

Next weekend we'll be back to Vermont for our last week of skiing and snowboarding. I can't wait until next Winter, when I am teaching. But I won't wish my time away.

Love you, miss you.
A

Better Late Than Never

A little peek into the boys third birthday...

How To Have Your Picture Taken, part E

First, write a book. Write the kind of book that someone unrelated to you, who is not your friend, will want to read more than once. This book could be the kind of book that a perfect stranger will want to peddle and push and champion, and that other strangers will want to bind together, box up and send out into the world and that more people you don't even know will see and touch and carry around, and linger over. Maybe. Time will tell. At that point where you are not sure, but have hopes, hopes that have started to seem concrete and tangible, with details and tasks and dates, then, call someone who has several significant cameras and a love of literature and a fondness for you as well. 

Next, think about what you love. Think about your favorite shoes, and what you like about the way you look. Brush your hair, which is gorgeous, and put on lipstick if you feel like it. While you are looking in the mirror to put on your favorite lipstick, notice that your eyelashes really are kinda long and you have that to be glad about. The things on your face that you like are the things that will make it easy to smile. Not a big forced grin, but the right kind of smile for a close-up, just a small thing, just a hint at contentedness. If you are dark brunette, with fair skin and deep brown eyes, it will not hurt to wear green. Or pink, or both together, or really, anything you know is good.

Now, think about outside. Think about the places where you once sat thinking about things you loved, or wearing that small smile, accidentally, without even really noticing it until you realized that someone you might have been in love with was seeing that smile on your face. Think about secret places, places that lend themselves to the extremes of human emotion, places where if you are not wearing the smile of the deeply content, you might be licking your wounds, having a safe cry. These are the places where you are likely to find a great blue heron, trees that have surrendered themselves to the water's edge, plenty of undisturbed moss, and probably teenagers smoking pot. All of that is fine. Pick your place, then stand there. 

You do not have to think about smiling, or not smiling. Realize that no one is trying to make you look like anything other than yourself. Think about the things that made you write that book, good and bad, no doubt funny, maybe a little heartbreaking. Let a hint of it all show on your face. That's all anyone will be looking at.

Small things, named.

When I left for the Seattle week on Monday morning, I brought with me, among other things, my new sturdy glass travel mug, a small baggie of dried mango, a Cara Cara orange from the co-op, half a sandwich that Tom made me for my travels on Sunday, an overnight bag full of socks and underwear, and two rolls of film from the portrait session I had done with Elissa, who just got an agent and needed author photos. Naming things, making lists is comforting these days. At Kate's house and in the spare room at the mini-farm, I am working my way through old boxes, slowly, using little tubs of sugar scrub and travel-size shampoos, making inventories of yarn, dreaming up uses for boxes and boxes of stationary. 

On the internet today, I found a video of Pam  reading at the Rumpus Room in SF, probably the reading where Kristin's photo was taken for the NY Times, and we texted back and forth with her giving me updates about the reading that I so wished I could be there for. Texts that said things like "Indian Springs" or "Fenton the human and Fenton the dog"or "mini-skirt!!!"  A quote that I love from that section is exactly how I'm feeling today, and a lot of days recently.

"I'm thinking about Bob’s reading, thinking about how the older we get the more we’re inclined to simply name the things of the world. A whole valley that smells of grapes fermenting in barrels; the taste of donut holes dipped in cafe anglais; a great blue heron standing on one foot at the rippling edge of a pond."   

- Pam Houston, from her forthcoming book "Contents May Have Shifted"

The other way

 Another one from the walk I took with Jessica a few weeks ago. The sky in the water and the rounded shape of the water's edge seems right for a time when we're hearing that the axis of the world has been shifted by the trauma of the recent earthquake in Japan. My own world seems a bit wobbly on its axis these days, not traumatically so, just a lot of change happening, organizations re-organizing, groups re-grouping. At the center of the circles I run in, the mini-farm is there, a piece of ground that we move the furniture around on, little patches of dirt we scrape at, that we gift with seeds and dream over. That's what I wanted, a place to come back to, something mostly still. Still, as in still there, still as in Eliot's still point of the turning world.  I'm grateful. 

Things stay the same, even while they change

The world is too big to save, too small to treat carelessly. I'm not sure what to say beyond that, but I realize I have to get back to saying it, eventually.

Across the field

I can't wait to go home for the weekend. It's been a long three days in Seattle, nice and productive but the days are always so long when I've got meetings after work and errands to run. Luckily there are always my two sweet (plus one furry) roommates at the Ballard house to greet me, with pie and chatting and clean towels and tea and movies. It's pretty good for a double life. 

Back at the mini-farm, the lap blanket I'm knitting is almost done, and tomorrow I might spend the whole day in my pajamas. I can always pull my boots and parka on over it all for the ritual fence walk. Even the Friday grocery trip sounds fine, knowing that there are still a lot of staples left over from last week, and chocolate and coffee eclairs waiting in a little box from Honore. We just need some veggies and maybe a steak or two, though no one ever turned down a new pint of ice cream in my house. 

Last weekend Lindsey and Kate braved the blizzardy conditions to come up for Kate's pie reading at the Winter Commission in Bellingham, and afterwards Kate told me that the farmhouse inspired her to make a few changes in the little Ballard bungalow. I guess that energy just perpetuates itself because I feel the same way right back at her. Ready to tackle a little more, to be nice to my space and keep sprucing it up a bit at a time. Every week feels like progress.

Adrift

After the reading was over and Katherine and Peggy and Patricia had all gone, I went to the Honey Bear Bakery at Third Place books and ordered a chicken pot pie. Looking at their menu, I had the same feeling I have when we go to Adrift in Anacortes, that anything I could get would be good and comforting and contain no danger. I don't know whether that's true of Honey Bear or not, but it felt that way. 

I suppose it was inevitable that the migraines would eventually lead me to some food-related phobia, and now I'm here and only looking at that fact glancingly, dealing with it through avoidance and a certain care that I've tried to make rote so as not to have to think too much about what has happened. $144 spent at the co-op will ward off a lot. Lunches from home, dinner somewhere expensive and ingredient-proud, dried mango (no sulfites), a lip-numbing love of kumquats, too many pistachios on the drive home, those habits  will all ward off a lot. 

The reading was Summer Wood, who came to Creede the summers I went there for writing group. She read to us from Wrecker, which was just in progress then, and now is bound and sold and sitting on the table in front of me. I haven't read the whole thing, and while I have heard enough to know that it's a beautifully written thing, I can't really pretend, even to myself, that it was just her reading that choked me up as I listened tonight, or made me blush when she looked up from signing my book and inquired, "Your writing?"

I know that I miss writing even when I don't feel it. It's like the food thing, something I don't really check on the status of, there is just a warding off of that knowledge. There is photography and work and one acre and a farmhouse and long drives and so much else. It's funny, though, how many Seattle things I avoid doing in order to get home to Bow every night I can, and yet I wasn't tempted at all to skip the reading tonight, and seeing my old writing group friends. Summer's voice, the way she read, her particular way with language - it was like seeing a wolfhound on the street. I know a few of you will know just what I mean by that. Something rare and familiar and so deeply evocative of the things and people and animals I want close to me.

Not So Bad

The ferry photos didn't turn out so bad after all. Neither did the predicted snow storms this week. Even when it was bad, so bad that you couldn't see lane markers on 405, so bad that sitting at a stop light meant that the side windows on my car, which a co-worker had JUST cleared off for me, were covered in snow by the time the light turned green again, even then it wasn't that bad. I rolled the windows down and back up again to try to shake some of it loose, and that worked but resulted in snow in the back seat. Oh well! I made it home fine and Kate had a slice of pie saved for me, cherry cranberry, which I recommend, and I've been remembering to bring my gloves everywhere more so even my hands were warm when I got there.