The Vineyard

Nearly Summer

Let the beauty we love be what we do
There are a hundred ways
To kneel and kiss the ground

--Rumi

What Writing Feels like Today

It's as if I've been given eight stars and been asked to map out the universe.

On Metaphor

"I always thought of it like you said, that all the strings inside him broke. But there are a thousand ways to look at it: maybe the strings break, or maybe our ships sink, or maybe we're grass--our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is alive. We don't suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters. If you choose the strings, then you're imagining a world in which you can become irreparably broken. If you choose the grass, you're saying that we are all infinitely interconnected, that we can use these root systems not only to understand one another but to become one another. The metaphors have implications. Do you know what I mean?"

from Paper Towns by John Green

Black-throated Warbler

Identification may be difficult and may be made on the basis of song alone.

The Calender

I keep promising myself I'll write about other things: write about those late days of summer, or the pumpkins, or the wind, or how these last few weeks the sunsets have been so pretty, always a different color. Pink, I say to Eva, or Gold, or, Look, baby, look how the bottoms of the clouds are bright white and the tops are heavy and gray.

Yesterday, we played outside until our fingers were numb, and I could swear I saw my breath. But surely it's too early for that--isn't it?

There's a calender that hangs in our kitchen that I look at when I'm washing apples or heating up a can of soup. So-and-so's birthday, it says, or Dinner with the Who's-It's. But lately I can't stop noticing the scribbles.

On the calender, in the lower right-hand corner of every Friday, I had counted the weeks. 1, 2, 3, all the way to 40, and at 40, I had drawn a big heart. 40 was when the baby would come. It would be the dead of winter but we wouldn't mind because we'd just hole up until the flowers bloomed and then, come spring, we'd emerge.

Now, though, I've scribbled out the numbers. There's nothing but a dark blue mark (scrawled with my favorite pen), and unless you get really close, unless you really try to see it, you'd never know what week it is, never know how much longer to go, or--as fate has it--not go, never know any of it, really. Still, at the end, there is the heart: fat and white, a would-be snowflake hanging onto the edge of the new year, in danger of little more than disappearing with another turn of the calender page.

The Aesthetician

There are people you must tell, people who knew you were pregnant: the lady who wanted to start the book club, your boss, the Russian woman who waxes you.

Today, she has your leg lifted in the air and you remember absently, something in her voice, how she once told you of her brother, back home, how he suffers from schizophrenia. The winters, she had said, are the worst.

Now, she clicks her tongue at you. Exercising? she says. Not when you are with a baby! In my culture, she tells you, it is believed that a pregnant woman carries a bundle of glass. Glass, she repeats. Too fragile. She shakes her head.

The g in her fragile is a hard g, the g of fragments, of figments, of figs. She lifts your other leg, and you think again of broken things. Outside, the sun is warm, maybe the last really warm sun of the year. Don't worry. You'll be back in it soon.