100 haiku challenge, 13, 14, 15

What the neighborhood looks like in December
String of Christmas lights
Glows bright in the winter night.
Glitter, flash, twinkle.

What does my dream mean?
I dreamed of a horse
covered--buried in deep snow
surfacing, dancing.

Repetition
Thank you for the tips
is something my husband says
all the goddamn time.

100 haiku challenge, 11 and 12

I've enjoyed just listening and finding haikus--as I listen to NPR, to two people talking in the grocery store, or in the case of #10, to something D. was repeating one evening.

Dante's haiku
This is a red light.
This light is a yellow light.
This is a green light.

Shedding season
The dog hair drifts down
falling like an autumn leaf.
I sweep it again.

100 haiku challenge, 10

The holiday is incidental, part 2
Advent calendar.
We are not even Christian.
We eat the chocolate.

100 haiku challenge, 8 and 9

I composed these while sitting with D in our local pizza place. I had one of those little stubby pencils from IKEA in my purse, and used the back of a deposit slip to write these down. I realize I'm not being very traditional, (or sometimes, very coherent) with these.

Economy versus ecology
The smokestack spews black.
Factory on the river.
Paper, scissors, rock.

Writing haiku at the pizza shop
Number two pencil
scrawls on the back of a check.
Subtotal, nine haikus.

100 haiku challenge, 4, 5, 6, 7

The holiday is incidental
Thanksgiving dinner
is now just a precursor
to Black Friday. Thanks.

Wake up
Sunrise. Coffee cup.
Steaming. Lift the cup. Inhale.
Sip. My eyes open.

What I see from my window in fall
Figs cling to branches.
No leaves for hiding green knots.
A bird's autumn feast.

The challenge of writing 100 haiku
Five, seven, five is
both much too long and too short
to say anything.

100 haiku challenge, #2 and #3

Reading Eckhart Tolle
This moment. Right now.
It's the only thing we have.
Raindrops on rooftops.

Should we trust the results?
Tony's MRI
Showed nothing problematic.
He scratches his head.

100 haiku challenge, #1

I'm taking the 100 haiku challenge. One hundred haikius in 100 days (more or less). Here's my first.

Sleepless
Insomnia. Fuck.
Four AM and I'm awake.
A cat yeowls outside.

What now?

So Friday was cathartic. I left the leadership session feeling cleansed of all my impurities. Clear headed and strong hearted. Saturday was good. But on Sunday, the old anxieties crept back. I felt like the day was not my own. It belonged to D, the house, work that needed to get done before Monday. By 9 am I just wanted to get away. I fled to the shower. Afterward, I sat on the bathroom floor and meditated. Just for like 5 minutes. Did it help? I don't know. Maybe. Or maybe it was getting out of the house and going to the park with D that did it. Either way, I was able to chill out and just take the day as it came.

I'm supposed to do this meditating thing for 30 minutes every day. As I sit there, my mind races. I try to calm it by bringing it back to the now. Tonight, I kept asking, "what now?" and something answered, "go write in your blog." So I did.

If all of this isn't too woo-woo for you, here's something else I've been thinking lately. My house has bad feng shui. It's because of the super tall, skinny house next door. It over-shadows our house and blocks the light. And it's so close (literally about 5 feet away) that it feels oppressive. If my house were a person, it would be unable to turn its head, doomed to look forward forever. Do I need to get over myself, or move?

Perhaps another symptom that I'm on the crazy train (or having a mid-life crisis) is that I ordered two books by Eckhard Tolle.

So glad I have this blog!

I was just scrolling through old entries, laughing at myself, remembering how it felt to be a new mom, and just generally feeling so glad I took the time to write down some of my thoughts and feelings.

Why don't I write here more often? It's so good for me.

Well, so I don't just leave it at that, I'll talk about today. Or maybe I'll start with yesterday, which was like just about every other work day where I run from meeting to meeting, try to keep up with the dozens of emails I get each day in between, run home to spend a little time with D before he crashes, and then work some more. I'm seriously depleted, friends. If you haven't heard from me, this is why.

I know it's not sustainable. For the first time in my life I've found myself questioning whether I am depressed (I kind of think I am) and need drugs. I've been reading Eat, Pray, Love like it is medicine. I crave silence, stillness, peace, solitude. I've been substituting beer, wine, sugar, and coffee.

But today, I didn't go into the office. Instead I went to the first session of a year-long leadership program. My company is paying for me to go. Normally, a business-y "leadership" thing would sound bad. But this wasn't bad at all. It felt a little like therapy. We meditated. We talked about our hearts. I went in feeling all knotted up on my shoulders and left feeling fairly normal.

Tonight I was searching this blog for a poem or photo that defines the essence of me. It's homework for our second session tomorrow. Here's what I've landed on. What do you think? Is this what you think of, when you think of me?

Something new

Julie felt the air change as soon as she drove over the fill—the land bridge that separated the mainland from the island. There were the fisherman, casting off its rocky sides. As if she’d gone away all this time and they’d just stayed here fishing.

She made the familiar turns, off the wider unmarked gravel road on to the dirt road where the pines crowded in. There was just enough traffic here to keep the track from growing over. She remembered plenty of times as a child where her father would have to stop the car and drag a fallen tree limb out of the way before they could make their way through. Finally, she turned the car down the long driveway that ended at the cottage. It appeared before she was quite ready—she remembered it taking so much longer.

As she parked the car and turned off the ignition, she found her heart pounding. She was here again, finally. And though she’d tried to prepare herself during long drive for the way things might have changed, she was unnerved to see it largely the same as ever.

The line of trees that used to separate the cottage from the river had been cleared, but other than that, there was the small wooden stoop where she used to leave peanuts for the chipmunks, the outhouse about 20 paces from the back door where the clearing met the woods. Here was the silty earth that absorbed her step underneath her feet.

Julie smoothed her dirty blond hair with her hand.

“Grandma?” she called through the screen door. She knocked softly, which felt a little odd. As a girl, she would have flung it open and run inside to find her grandparents, no matter whether they were in the bedroom or kitchen.

She saw the woman emerge from around the corner. Her gray hair was still cropped close, she still wore the elegant pendant earrings that most women would wear only on a special occasion.

Julie had to lean down to embrace her. The last time she’d seen her grandmother, she barely reached her shoulder. Now she towered over the woman.

“I move a little slower now, you can see,” her grandmother laughed, her warm voice a little rougher than she recalled.

“It’s been a long time,” Julie said. “But you know, this place looks almost the same.”

Her grandmother showed her around the tiny cottage, pointing out what was new. The floor had been replaced with new, shiny linoleum. There was a new sofa in the sitting room and a different table and chairs, but that was it.

“You can sleep here,” her grandmother said when they entered the bedroom.

“Oh, I wouldn’t feel right about that.”

“No, no.” The woman countered. “Half the time, I just fall asleep on the sofa anyway. It’s pretty comfortable, you know.”

Julie remembered her doing the same for her parents. Her grandma and grandpa would sleep on the pull out couch in the sitting room, which meant that she got to sleep on the floor next to them. She’d often fall asleep to the sound of her grandfather snoring, mixed in with the calling of the frogs outside.

Her grandmother left her alone to unpack. Julie could hear her fixing lunch through the thin curtain that served as a door. She sat on the bed and looked out the window toward the river. As a girl, the first thing she would do was head down to the dock with a crust of bread to feed the seagulls and dip her feet in the water. She’d wait until the second day to swim—like getting reacquainted with river required a slow approach.

She loved that river, and now instead of a vision in her head, it was real and right before her eyes. She realized how many times she’s relied on her memory of it over the years she’d been away. This is the place she’d some in her mind, when she needed to feel calm.

She would often say the names of the places and things here, like a sort of noun therapy. Swimming rock. Puddingstone. Bruce Mines. This was her place, her heritage—the cottage was built by her great grandfather, it was the place where her father had spent his summer boyhood, jumping into the lake, climbing the rocks. It was the place where her parents had honeymooned where they were young and penniless.

It has all been taken from her. She’d spent these past years like an exile from her homeland, thinking of the place, going over the landscape in her memory, daydreaming of the sound of the gulls, the slap of the water against the hull of a boat, the feel of the worn dock underneath her bare feet. In the absence of her parents, this place would have provided a connection, a link.

Julie shook her head. She’d never even been invited. A flicker of anger lept up in her.

As a teenager, her grandmother was prompt with birthday cards and Christmas gifts. She sent the occasional letter. But Julie had learned to stop expecting an invitation to visit here.

Finally, all grown up and out on her own, she stopped waiting and resolved to take matters into her own hands. She smiled to herself, wondering how her grandmother must have reacted to her letter. It was bold, she knew that. But she was tired of waiting for the woman’s permission.

She’d just quit her job—a 70 to 80-hour a week sales job that kept her on the road, away from her fiancé, James. She’d just walked in one day, handed her resignation to her boss, and walked back out, high on the adrenaline she’d needed to be so daring.
That night, she and James cooked a big dinner and opened a bottle of wine to celebrate her new-found freedom. Never mind she was going to be eating away they the money she’d saved for their honeymoon.

“So what are you going to do now?” he asked her.

Before she could even stop herself, the words came falling out.

“What I really want to do is go to Pine Island.” And there it was. So Julie had written her grandmother the next day.

This is now

...Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa's fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods. She looked at Pa sitting on the bench by the hearth, the firelight gleaming on his brown hair and beard and glistening on the honey-brown fiddle. She looked at Ma, gently rocking and knitting.

She thought to herself, "This is now."

She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.

-Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House in the Big Woods

Untitled

In the dark
the pale cherry blossoms
are a ghost.
I hardly know them,
but for their scent.

Bright lights
have made me blind.
I see through
my other senses--
the smell of spring,
the cool rain on my skin,
the rush of rain through the fir trees.

The mailman delivers
a neighbor's package to my door.
I relish the thought
of ringing their doorbell.
Delivering the box--
a chance to say hello.

Nerds!

If you want to start from the beginning, go here.

Or my favorite...

If you want to start from the beginning, go here.

Candy and old women

If you want to start from the beginning, go here.

That's the thing about candy

The beginning

New! New! New!

Wow. It's been ages since I've posted. I'm afraid I've been cheating on my trusty friend blog, with the very intoxicating Facebook. Facebook, combined with Flickr are chewing up most of my online time these days.

Well, I did make my Praxis deadline, and "Thoughts about Candy" came out with its release in December. I'm still trying to figure out how to post the frames here, in a size that's readable. I have been getting all sorts of feedback from people who've read the print version--much more than my other stories have received. Maybe it's the images plus text that generates a strong reaction, but it's also the subject matter. I've been hearing lots of candy memories from people. And candy confessions.

One of my favorite x-mas gifts was a Bamboo tablet (thanks, T!). I plan to use it to do a revision of "Thoughts about Candy" digitally. Yay! I have had lots of thoughts already about little things I want to add. I am also considering self-publishing an extended version of it. I also have been thinking about making my four girls/River/Stand by Me piece into a graphic novel. So that's something I'll be experimenting with this year. I can imagine the Glowy Man part really coming to life in a graphic format. I'm itching to start.

WTF, indeed

This morning, we are ordering breakfast at Autentica. My father-in-law points to something on the menu and asks the waitress, "Can I get this with potatoes instead of eggs?"

"We don't have potatoes," she answers.

"Okay, well just give me this without the eggs."

Maybe she did a double-take, but I didn't notice. Twenty minutes or so later, she is back with our food. She places a plate with a thin slice of ham covered in red sauce in front of my father-in-law and says, "huevos rancheros," amazingly, with a straight face.

"You ordered huevos rancheros without the eggs?" I said. "But huevos means egg."

It was kind of funny, until I realized I was going to pay 12 dollars for his plate of sauce.

It's not his fault. I don't think he knew what he was going to get. But the waitress--she couldn't have asked "Are you sure you want that?" Had I known what he was pointing at, I would have stopped him. I consider it supremely bad service to fill ridiculous orders without at least asking, "You're sure about that?"

I felt really bad that he only had a slice of ham for breakfast, so I made sure we swung into the doughnut shop on the way home.

Morning walk

The day started early because of the time change. So we went for an early morning walk. D is big enough to sit in the Ergo now, which makes walking much more fun for the both of us. D can see more than just tree tops and sky, and we both get some snuggle time.

We got all the way to the park and back, and it was only 9:15. Sigh. It's going to be a long day. We will probably take another stroll before the day is done, as long as it's not pouring rain.

Another thing that makes it a long day--the election is only two days away. (You didn't need me to tell you that.) I can't wait for it to be over. I'm exhausted by waiting. At least there are moments like this that give me that hope:














Of course, this is Oregon, and there are many parts of the country where Republicans are going to vote the party line.

Oh, Oregon. How I love you. I wish the rest of the country were as great as you.