Backyard Bloom

The Day that Finally Came

So, today, come 1:50, I'll be sitting (in between two very dear girlfriends) at a little Manhattan theater with a sneaked-in bottle of Caffeine Free Diet Coke and a bucket of popcorn the size of the Empire State Building, watching the long awaited Sex and the City movie. Yes, it's true: I'm a total (moved to New York 'cause I wanna be a writer) cliché, but I sweat this stuff.

I've watched every single episode--have watched on Christmas, my birthday; when I'm sad, happy, need to be writing, grading, working out; was watching, obliviously, on the morning of September 11; want, right now actually, not to be posting but instead to be sitting eating a Fudgsicle and watching some more.

Anyway, even though I already know the ending, I couldn't be happier. The thing is: Carrie has to marry Big. The entire show (if dissected from Episode 1 to infinitum for, say, "writing research") is a narrative arc of their love story. I'm glad I have pregnancy to blame, because I have a feeling it's going to be one of those weddings where I ball uncontrollably.

Okay, that's it. I'll try to spare you the popculture references from here on out...though I did hear that Jamie Lynn and Casey are expecting a girl. I bet when she grows up she'll wanna watch Sex and the City too!

Week 13

Your baby is now the size of a ripe peach:

You have much to look forward to:

This One

There are some mornings when I want nothing more than a Mary Oliver poem...

Reckless Poem
by Mary Oliver

Today again I am hardly myself.
It happens over and over.
It is heaven-sent.

It flows through me
like the blue wave.
Green leaves – you may believe this or not –
have once or twice
emerged from the tips of my fingers

somewhere
deep in the woods,
in the reckless seizure of spring.

Though, of course, I also know that other song,
the sweet passion of one-ness.

Just yesterday I watched an ant crossing a path, through the
tumbled pine needles she toiled.
And I thought: she will never live another life but this one.
And I thought: if she lives her life with all her strength
is she not wonderful and wise?
And I continued this up the miraculous pyramid of everything
until I came to myself.

And still, even in these northern woods, on these hills of sand,
I have flown from the other window of myself
to become white heron, blue whale,
red fox, hedgehog.
Oh, sometimes already my body has felt like the body of a flower!
Sometimes already my heart is a red parrot, perched
among strange, dark trees, flapping and screaming.

To Be Read after 'A Loon in June'

And then she realized it was still May...

And the rhymes seemed even sillier...

and the heart more ridiculous...

and the balloon, oh the balloon,

it was more of a laughing bobbing head

yuk-yuk-yoing its way

across the pretty blue sky.

A Loon in June

My spoon as big as a springtime moon, I sit at this old table, my cereal so cold and able, and I think, oh, if only the sink were empty, the dishes done, oh then, I think, there would be sun. In the background, some singer croons, love will come, she tells me, soon. Outside, I look, it's far from noon(!!!), but there on the horizon--at its very start--what first appears to be a stray balloon is, in fact, a big fat heart!

Note to Self

An ice cream sandwich does not a meal make;

neither do three ice cream sandwiches.

(This is what I write about when I don't want to write about

the dream and how the doctor told me she was worried

that the baby would be born blind.)