They can teleport, they say. And every imaginary moment is voiced, narrated, more than actually played out. Now this is when I walk in and I get so mad that my eyes are flaming… no, no…first you actually have to tell me which way it’s coming. okay, that way. Start there. I have no idea which way you’re pointing, stop spinning in circles! So we teleport while spinning! It changes as it changes, saving face, winning at making up the rules. They’ll do this the rest of their lives, they just don’t know that they are practicing. They call each other on doing it “wrong” and they decide for the others their moments of demise. The smallest ones are quiet followers. They sit on the front steps of the big old blue house across the street and watch the bigger kids still deciding how things work. This is a dead end street, so […]
I saw in his face what something in me already knew. He was tired from staying up too late and drinking more than he planned to drink. He was tired from thinking and thinking again and thinking about his drinking again. They were both tired, he and his wife, from years of building things and watching them crumble, building them back up again. That’s life, that’s parenting, that’s marriage, that’s work. But there was More, the mysterious illness of a child. And we who are prone to drink, genes broken up and begging for More, we will drink More. That’s what we do. Until we don’t. So there we stood, not going to church but meeting in a church, and we recognized our matching sickness because of a hesitant willingness to see it. He finally said it out loud. All the wonderings of self, the fears and the unknowns that are truly known […]
I did not look at my email even one time yesterday. It was a Monday and a perfectly beautiful day, and I worked at The Middle Fork and you guys should have seen it. All the tables were full and people were waiting in the entry and thank the good Lord that one of the owners was there to man the cash register and make fancy lattes and such. My feet hurt. I love it when that place is busy. Except I say really random things to the people at the tables sometimes because I’m trying to remember so many things at once and move faster than I can. And my weird humor up and jumps right out when I’m overwhelmed, so there you have it. For instance, this one time, some people were trying to get a high chair to fit behind their table, in a corner, lifting it up and over. […]
I didn’t have coffee until after ten o’clock this morning. This is unheard of, really. I am one of those people that pours my first cup of joe with my eyes half open, on the way to the shower. And then I wonder, every time, why I didn’t just wait until after the shower because it gets a little cold on the bathroom counter, waiting for me. The best mornings are when I can pour that first cup with my eyes half open and then sit in my pajamas on the couch. Lately I need slippers. Minnesota is showing us her master plan for winter early. We are nervous about what she has up her sleeve, but we are pretending, and sometimes meaning, that we love the crisp reminder to snuggle in, wrap up, slip on soft things. Lately there is so much to do, more than ever. My body is different because […]
I walked home in the dark, along the sidewalk, past the pond and in the stillness. It was such a beautiful night for a head-clearing walk. Sweatshirt weather. This small town quiet is a good match for sweatshirt weather. Only one car passed by, the whole time I walked, and people had their windows open to their settled-in houses. I could feel the breeze in their rooms, like we were sharing something. My phone rang as I rounded the corner to home. A friend calling to break bad news, to ask for prayers for a family. Just like that, the father and husband was gone. In his sleep. Just like that, a man around my age, gone. No breathing, no heartbeat, as if he were only a breath himself. You just never know, she said. Yes, I’m so sorry. And you don’t. You don’t know. I don’t know. There are far too many […]
There is a kind of tired that feels so good while it also hurts to not be able to move your arms without hating painting. The kind that comes after hard work, together. After finishing something, or working your way (slowly) toward finishing. It’s hard to keep going and everything is screaming that I’m OLD, but it’s worth it. Like childbirth. Only not.that.painful. We are painting and painting at the Cre8tive Escape building, getting ready for our first creator’s retreat in the ginormous room downstairs next weekend. NEXT WEEKEND. We have had helpers, people who care about us and come to roll on paint or scrape the old carpet glue off the cement floor. We pay them with….love. (How nice and generous, huh?) I thought you might want to see what the ginormous room looked like before: Ironically, the words on the wall from the previous renters of the downstairs space say […]
