My father threw me in a river once and said, this is how you learn to swim. I don’t remember if I was scared. Only gliding through water so clear I could see everything the world might be made of.
The weightlessness thrilled me. And the cold that warmed me the longer I wore it. I glued my legs together with the wish for a fish tail and propelled my mermaid self through uncharted waters and forgot all the things I thought I knew.
This is what happens on a clear night when I cannot sleep, and the moon is full. I prowl through my house in the dark with a camera. No tripod. Just my own unsteady hand.
It’s playtime.
I prop myself against a wall and shoot, trying to capture the lamp-lit windows of my neighbors’ houses. The shutter stays open for an eternity. My camera weighs a ton. I am not steady enough. The lights look like flames. The reflection from the window throws itself across the room to where I am standing; the moon is a big white puddle on my floor.
The den has a pair of windows and an atrium door – a little more shimmering light. A patch of green appears beyond the balcony. Proof of spring. A tiny voice that whispers, I’m here.
In this room a window placed too high; a mistake I regret making now, but too late to change. A cabala of lights beyond the trees seems to agree. What WERE you thinking they ask.
My studio is a room with four windows and no curtains. I used to paint here. Now I write. The room has been overrun by books. And words.
I love this skulking around the house in the dark, while my husband sleeps, completely unaware that I am up. I feel like a child guarding a secret that no one knows but me.
You must promise not to tell.
Right up front, I will tell you that this story is true. I should also warn you that it’s a little bitter-sweet.
When my brother Peter came into our lives my parents already had three girls. They longed for a son.
A couple of interesting points about this story: First, like all good men living in the area of the Adirondack Mountains, my father liked to hunt. Hunting season in those parts was a religion, sacred and holy; the woods, nature’s cathedral. The thing about my father was that he had never bagged a deer. He’d been hunting with plenty of other guys who had, but he’d never actually shot one on his own.
The second thing, is that shortly after the third girl was born, my father started growing a beard. It grew fast and bushy, and with a red hue that didn’t match the hair on his head at all. (Somewhere there’s a photograph of my dad at that time, sitting on my grandmother’s front porch, wearing an army style camouflage cap. He looked exactly like Fidel Castro.) My mother didn’t much like that beard. My father said he would shave when he got a son or a buck. Either one. Whichever came first.
The third point is that my mother is half Mohawk. She was born and spent the first decade or so of her life on the Akwesasne Mohawk reserve, which straddles the border of Canada and the US. We would often make the winding drive to visit aunts and uncles and cousins there. One day after a visit, on the return trip, the car held my parents, my sisters and myself, and a brand new brother, named Peter. He was 18 months old at the time.
The particulars of how it came to be that we brought him home are not important. What matters is that he was ours from that day on. I wasn’t very old then, but I do remember the car ride home — I remember Peter’s little face peaking over my mother’s shoulder, watching us and smiling. Oh, how I remember that smile.
Peter in an old photo taken when he was about 3. Even though the quality of the photo is poor, you can see how his face lit up with the sweet spirit of his smile.My father did not get his buck that season (nor any season, ever). But he got his son, and true to his word, he shaved. Peter grew and thrived, we girls grew and thrived, and my mother went on to eventually have three more babies – all of them boys. And we were a rowdy raucous family of seven kids who were sometimes very close, and sometimes throwing things at one another.
Except for Peter. At least, the way I remember him, and I’m telling the story so you’ll have to take my word for it. If you happen to know or run into one of my siblings, they may tell the story differently. That’s the way families work.
Peter was a quieter kid than the rest of us, he was by nature more even-tempered. And always, he was quick to smile. He loved to hunt and fish, though he mostly used his hands for the latter – he was that patient and that quick. As a teenager he took up wrestling and was pretty good and quick at that. He was no push-over if really provoked. Somewhere in those teen years, people started calling him Puck.
He tried his hand at many things. He joined the Navy, hoping to travel, but that didn’t work out the way he planned. He got married and moved back to the Adirondack town where we grew up. He raised chickens for awhile, and for awhile he worked at the local paper mill. Eventually he and his wife moved to Erie, Pennsylvania where her family lived.
Today is an anniversary of sorts. Twenty-two years ago on a day like today, full of spring and glorious sunshine, I took my then two-year old son to the park, and later for the first ice cream cone of the season. The phone rang as I was leaving the house, but I paid it no mind. If it was important, whoever it was would call back. Turned out it was my sister, and call back she did.
Peter was thirty-four years old on the last night he went to sleep. A hemorrhagic tumor was the reason he didn’t wake up. Twenty-two years is a long time. Also, twenty-two years is no time at all. It’s one of life’s many conundrums.
I believe in stories with happy endings, or at least in which there is the possibility of something honest and good. In this story I once had a brother who possessed the kindest of hearts and a sweet smile. We called him Puck. He is with me still. And that is enough good for now.
Puck holding my son. Still the same smile.I used to be a really picky eater when I was growing up. I liked spinach (which is weird, I know, for a picky eater), mac & cheese (homemade, not a box), pork chops, and pretty much anything that had lots of sugar. That was about it. My tastes broadened as I grew up, but I still leaned heavily toward a fondness for cake and pie and all things chocolate, and when I was feeling especially low – banana splits. Eventually my body reached a point of sugar overload and told me, Quit it, will you?! I decided it was best to listen.
Another thing about me, is that in times of stress and fatigue, I feel like crying.
I’ve been really busy of late. I’m revising a novel that has been a labor of love, but consumes a lot of my time. I’m also co-director of an annual writers’ retreat that is coming up next week. So, in the interest of writing efficiency and mobility, I decided to buy a laptop. And I wanted it to have touch-screen technology. I got online, found the perfect model and ordered it.
When the laptop arrived a few days ago, I unpacked it and went through the process of setting it up. It was zippy and sleek and Windows 8 was actually not bad – BUT <—- (big but) – the display was NOT a touch-screen like I ordered.
Bugger, hell.
It took me two days of phone calls and waiting on hold and emailing and waiting for responses to my email, and then calling and holding again, before I finally had a prepaid UPS label to slap on that sucker and send it back.
It was the last phone call that did me in, though. After establishing (with the third person I talked to) that it was, indeed, the wrong item, the returns rep asked me if I would consider keeping it if they gave me 5% off. I said, “No. It’s not what I ordered!”
And then she asked, “Would you keep it if we give you 10% off?”
I knew I was in trouble. My eyes welled up, and my voice took on that quavery underwater tone. “No! I just want to return it.” I felt like I was begging.
I finally found what I wanted locally and for $170 less, so my misery wasn’t all for naught. But by the time I brought the right laptop home, I was feeling battered and fragile, and I needed, REALLY NEEDED to listen to my mood and tell my body to just shut up for the time being.
And my mood was saying, Give me sugar!
So I did.
Chocolate ice cream, enrobed in fudge, and wrapped in Belgian milk chocolate. Because sometimes you have to have something bad for you, so it might as well be good.
And in the wise words of Robert Frost . . . that has made all the difference.
My friend, Mod Mom Beyond IndieDom, hosts an I Don’t Like Monday Blog Hop. She’s invited me to join the party. The best thing about the invitation is, it’s not necessary to dislike Mondays. Which I don’t. In fact, I rather like Mondays. The way I look at it, Monday is a whole new beginning. A chance to start anew on those pesky things I didn’t finish the week before.
That’s why I’m almost always home on Monday. I try not to schedule appointments or errands for that day. I want my new beginning to be really new. Like having fresh dirt at the starting line in which to dig my heels. . .Get ready. . .Get set. . .Go!
So, because it’s Monday, and I’m busy being all new and getting stuff done, feel free to entertain yourself with this really cool video I stumbled across a few weeks ago. The Scared is scared. A senior project by Bianca Giaever. Music by Alpenglow. It’s a six-year-old’s imagination made manifest – word by wonderful word – in video. Worth every second of it’s 7:52 running time.
Welcome to Monday, people. This is guaranteed to put a smile on your face for the rest of the week. Trust me.
Because Washington Irving was one of my favorite authors when I was a kid (the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow fame scared the bejeezus out of me, which was thrilling, and the notion of sleeping 20 years like Rip Van Winkle was kind of awesome), I wanted to share this fun post via the folks at Interesting Literature. And it is World Book Day in the UK today.
Enjoy!
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Washington Irving. Who was that man? Find out just a handful of reasons why we should all have his name on our lips.
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Take me to where palm trees glow
orange-bright with sunlight,
and warmth.
That is all I ask. . .
for now.
******
I live on the southern coast of Rhode Island, so when we heard that a major snow storm was headed our way, we prepared ourselves. We went to the store two days before Nemo’s arrival, we filled the cars up with gas. We bought plenty of bread and milk. And wine – because this woman does not live on bread and milk alone.
Friday morning my husband went into work early so that he could leave early, before little Nemo grew into a bigger, meaner fish. I made meatloaf with baked potatoes and vegetables, because, if you’re going to be stuck inside for a few days, you want your belly full of comfort food. And chocolate. And wine.
Nemo as seen through the window Friday evening. Looks lovely, almost magical, though you can’t hear the wind roaring, nor the tree branches scratching at the windows.
The wind began to howl. There is something about the ferocity of that sound that fills me with anxiety. The lights flickered. We were prepared to lose power, though we hoped we wouldn’t. (Our electrical line taps into the main line on a grid, so that in the past, when we lose power, we’re generally the first ones to get it back.)
But the power stayed on. Which meant I could watch CSI NY. The second of a two-parter, AND a crossover from the CSI set in Vegas a few nights earlier, I was really looking forward to watching Mac Taylor and D. B. Russell race together to save Mac’s girlfriend. A glass of wine, my love beside me, and a favorite TV show. Blow, Nemo, blow.
Alas. To paraphrase my birthday pal, Robert Burns: the best-laid plans of mice and ardent CSI fans are often thwarted.
Do you know what happens when mega storms hit? Every local TV news station usurps air time with constant blather coverage of the storm (except for insertion of all the usual commercials, naturally). They tell you obvious important stuff like, it’s really nasty out there, don’t go outside, stay off the roads. And to prove how nasty it is, they send news teams out to drive the hazardous roads so they can film the wind and the snow. They point to the banks left by plows. “See if you can get a shot of that,” one reporter says to the camera person, as the snow swirls furiously, making it impossible to see much of anything. “Look at how high the snow is there. I don’t know if you can really tell, but it’s high.” They tell you how many homes are without power. That number increases rapidly.
To be fair, there are probably a lot of people who do want to know – constantly – what’s happening during times like this. It may reassure them that everything is under control. I am not one of them.
We had options, though: DVDs and books, board games, candles, flash lights with extra batteries, heat, and running water. We made it through the night. We did lose power twice for short periods. We were fortunate.
Aftermath – shoveling out. Not so fun.
The snow-shrouded branch pointing at my kitchen window in the morning was actually touching the glass. Made me think of a blink angel getting closer and closer. . . .
My husband has managed, with the help of our kind neighbor and his snow-blower, and an anonymous good Samaritan with a backhoe, to dig us out. We still have lots of comfort food – I’m making a beef with red wine stew next. And chocolate chip cookies. Later, I may go see if I can find the CSI NY episode I missed online. Even if I don’t, it’s all good.
For those of you who were also in the path of Nemo, how did you fare? I’d love to know.
On a gloomy afternoon, there’s a knock at my door. I recognize the sharp two-rap code that announces a package from UPS, followed by the soft thud of a box being set on the porch. It’s so cold outside, I don’t even want to open the door. I briefly entertain the idea of waiting until my husband gets home from work when he will see the package sitting outside and bring it in with him. But I’m not expecting a package, and so I decide to brave the shrill rush of arctic air long enough to sate my curiosity.
It was worth it. This is what the package contained: a cheery basket of spring bulbs. Sent by a couple of friends who live somewhere much warmer than Rhode Island. Buds from buds to their bud.
I’m so blessed!
P.S. Curiosity doesn’t always kill the cat.
P.P.S. Thank you to my generous buds for remembering my birthday in such a delightful way!
It’s my birthday today. Most of my adult life I have been less than thrilled with birthdays (outside the great excuse for eating lots of chocolate cake). On my twenty-first birthday I happened to pick up an issue of Cosmopolitan magazine, which just happened to have an article – swear to God! – about how physically, it’s all downhill after twenty one.
But life is nothing, if not an interesting journey, right? This morning I woke up, and in my still dream-fogged brain, this thought occurred to me: I am not so much getting older, as I am getting more practice at living well and good and happily (most of the time. . .or at least, a proportionately larger percent of the time). I credit my friend Bob Lee as the reason for this new insight. He posted a birthday message to me last night that said, Happy 21st again! You must be so good at having those birthdays now. It must have sunk in while I was sleeping.
So, yeah. Happy Birthday to me! I am the star of my day today.
The ‘Moose hat” picture explained: This was at a fancy dress party (costume party here in the US) at the Fforde Ffiesta June, 2012. I was ‘Moose’ Havisham (a combo of Transient Moose and Miss Havisham who are both characters in Jasper Fforde books. I won first place.
It is also my sister’s birthday today. We are not twins, but we are near twins. Irish twins, some people tell us, as we are one year apart to the day. Sharing a birthday was not always easy for us. Kids do not like sharing birthday gifts, which was something we occasionally had to do. And we have very different personalities and interests. About the only trait we have in common is stubbornness, so you can guess how well we got along.
To add to the illusion of our twin-ness, my mother dressed us alike until we revolted.
But we are grown-ups now, we get along really well and enjoy each other’s company when we can spend time together. And we never, ever have to share birthday gifts anymore. Which is good, because she is getting lobster and tequila for her birthday, neither of which I like and one of those things I’m allergic to. And this is what I got today for my birthday, because I am an avid Dr. Who fan.
Care to guess what I plan on keeping in my Tardis?
So, here’s to me and here’s to my birthday twin. May we live our lives guided by love.
Cheers, y’all!
A Wilderness of Words 