Tuesday

My hands smell like clementines right now, and it's strange because I would hope the scent would send me to some beach somewhere--all blue sky and warm water--where, some day not so long ago between sunrise and sunset, I ate citrus by the bucketful. Instead, I think about the sticky Bath & Body lotions of seventh grade, of strolling the mall, of the perpetual longing to know who might be smoking a cigarette at the food court, of dousing my hands in peachy lotion, chewing another stick of gum.

I've been trying to remember how I felt last Christmas. I must have been sad, at least a little. I mean, after all, in ways my body was still "expecting" a baby in January, a baby that had miscarried so late just a few months before, and yet, when I look at last year's pictures, they're not so different from this year's. Cody and I sit in the same seats at my mother's house for Christmas Eve dinner, our plates are piled high: ham, turkey, mashed potatoes, asparagus for good measure. We are smiling.

Eva is next to the tree. Santa has been there--of course, Santa has been there, with his pink piano or his dress-up box. He has eaten the cookies we left out for him and drunk the milk, and, in Eva's stocking, are wind-up toys and bubbles, and in mine are the panties and the Starbucks card I've come to expect after creeping down my mother's stairs to see, as I say over and over to Eva, if "Santa came."

There are other pictures too. From childhood. Joe with a robot, me and my ballerina doll, Dave, fat-cheeked, Kenny and a reindeer. They all seem so incomplete. And even though I know that, in ways, they're all I have, that without them, I might not even remember I had ever owned a ballerina doll, might not even be able to recall how when I pressed down on her crown she'd spin and spin until I was dizzy with laughter, sometimes it still feels so partial.

Maybe that's why I bother with this blog at all: to try to remember in a richer, fuller way than the Facebook world allows. To say: Today, two days after Christmas, in a house where everyone but me is still sleeping, I am nostalgic for what has passed and what has not passed; I am grateful and anxious; my heart is spinning and spinning, and the air is thick with the scent of clementines. That's all. Not much more than this: Tuesday. December 27, 2011. I am ready for coffee (my in-law's sugar shaker forever charming) and hoping that, before I make it to the bottom of the cup, the people I love will wake and join me in the bright gray light of the breakfast nook.

Reminder

"Within you there is a stillness and a sanctuary

to which you can retreat at anytime and be yourself."

--Herman Hesse

Nearly winter

This is my cup of peppermint tea: 

and this is top of my pretty Christmas tree: 

and then this:

(say it!)

a baby growing inside me. 

 (A girl. An already sweet as taffy kicking girl.)

Yes, it's true: I'm six months pregnant, and I feel as big and as happy
as a Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon.
(I float down city streets; I laugh; I sup on sugary cereals.)

Happy almost winter, everyone!

Day 1095

O Evabird, today you are three. 1095 days since you came flying into the world, and every hour I fall a little bit more in love with you.

This is what you like to play: waitress and violin and sit-n-spin and school. You twirl in circles and take all of our orders and when you get tired of that, you make us gather on the floor in a circle and you play your ukulele and sing little ditties.

These are the words you like to say: ice cream and love and play dough and poems. And these are the words you like to type: mom, dad, love, nana, papa, hayley, anna, and then over and over: eva, eva, eva.

(Your very own mantra, my very own mantra.)

Mornings, you wake up long before the sun comes up, and we walk to the bakery for a coffee and a muffin. You hold my hand, and we talk about the weather, and you ask me if it's still November. And for so many days now you've asked, Is it my birthday yet? Is it today?

And finally, this morning, I say, Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Happy birthday my little love, my dreamer, my whole world changer. Only 3 years in, and already, you are the wisest, sweetest, most loving person I've ever known.

Xoxo.

Mom

Cedric's Gondola

Me: Oh Eva, this is beautiful. What is it?

Eva: It's Cedric's Gondola.

Me: Cedric's Gondola?

Her: See the water?

(And yes, I do. Right there under the gondola.

And under the sky.

Under sweet yellow Cedric himself.)

Bowl of Sky

There was not time nor world enough but there were blueberries, and there was my daughter, and there was a bowl filled with, what seemed at first, to be only milk. I keep wondering how we become who we become, who we carry with us, which sky it is that we keep sitting under. Last night, walking home under a starless sky, it occurred to me that I've never told Eva about the Big Dipper. We're usually inside before dark, or there are clouds or dinner to be made, so I've never pointed to that shape in the sky, never said, See!, never held her small shoulders in my hands, spun her around and said, And look, there's a little one too. Z. says when she moved to South Africa it took her months to get used to the sky. Everything was upside down. Now, the kitchen is empty save for a damp sponge with souring milk and dishes to be cleaned.

Confession #534

I can hardly imagine life without string cheese and Words with Friends.

Doors

I don't remember there being earthquakes when I was little. Or maybe there were, but they were in California which was a million miles away, the place where oranges grew on trees and everybody had swimming pools. It only seemed right that some of them might have to fall into the earth; I mean, you can only have so much luck.

Here in Brooklyn, Eva sits on the floor painting a picture of a door. A door to where? I keep asking. Just a door, she says. On the phone, my mom's voice is wiry. She says that back in Oklahoma the earth shook so hard her husband turned on all the lights in the house. It's like he thought the world wouldn't end if you could see it.

Gender Lessons

Eva: Look, mom. I'm pretending to be a boy.

Me: What do you mean? How are boys different than girls?

Eva: Boys eat celery and play horns.

Me: Oh, do they?

Eva: Yep. And girls play guitars.

Guest Blogger

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Sick Day

Evabird's home sick so we're still in our pajamas, reading poems and drinking Sprite and watching the slow, steady drizzle outside. I used to worry so much when she was sick. My heart would seize, and, measuring out eyedroppers full of medicine, I'd imagine all the ways I might lose her. This, though, is one of those popsicle-cured illnesses, so it just feels good to be lazy and warm and dry and have nothing to do but lick the sweet off our lips and wonder what we'll do next.

Lake Echo, Dear

By C. D. Wright

Is the woman in the pool of light   

really reading or just staring   

at what is written

Is the man walking in the soft rain   

naked or is it the rain   

that makes his shirt transparent

The boy in the iron cot   

is he asleep or still

fingering the springs underneath

Did you honestly believe   

three lives could be complete

The bottle of green liquid   

on the sill is it real

The bottle on the peeling sill   

is it filled with green

Or is the liquid an illusion   

of fullness

How summer’s children turn   

into fish and rain softens men

How the elements of summer

nights bid us to get down with each other   

on the unplaned floor

And this feels painfully beautiful   

whether or not

it will change the world one drop

C. D. Wright, “Lake Echo, Dear” from Steal Away: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 2002 by C. D. Wright.

(;)

In the classroom in my mind, I stand up on desks and throw erasers and spout out poems that I learned by heart when I was twelve, but really I think, I sit a lot more and fumble with the A/V equipment and, only occasionally, shout out things like, can't you see how beautiful the semi-colon is? Look! It lets you put cake and towers and love in the same sentence; it lets you keep going; it lets you stop; it lets you want to do both at the same time even while also wanting cake; and LOVE!; and beautiful, I say again, only half-realizing that for many of them the semicolon will never be more than a winking emoticon, and maybe I don't mind, and maybe I do, but maybe I believe anyway: in syntax and love and cake, oh glorious cake!

Grown-Up

(hours late...because--yes--I went to bed early...)

Grown-up

 Was it for this I uttered prayers,
  And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs,
  That now, domestic as a plate,
  I should retire at half-past eight?

-- Edna St Vincent Millay

Bourgeois Pig

Okay. So it's not a poem. It's fondue. And it's going to be available at the new Bourgeois Pig opening up right down the street. Not that I really believe cheese is a poem (really, I promise!), but, I mean, come on, in the world of words and food, I'm not sure you can get much closer.