Such Sport

1 and I have gone jogging the past two mornings-- spring fever. I've never been a jogger, never sustained the resolution more than a week or so. We don't go far or fast yet, and tomorrow morning's 6 a.m. temperature will be the real test.

But I know I'll do it, and here's why: On Monday morning as we turned west, the just-full moon hung huge and creamy over the city. It was stunning. This morning, it was perceptibly higher in the sky, full and alabaster. I can't wait to see it tomorrow morning, so I can note its new angle and color and see the curve of its waning side.

M- said tonight, "The moon is beautiful." So I will sleep and let the moon step over me, then I'll wake up and run after it.

East of Town

I love visiting N- and J-, who live east of town, down a long gravel driveway with grass between the wheeltracks. Their small house is calm and simple, heated only by a woodstove and surrounded by semi-tamed meadow and forest.

As I drove down the lane, I slowed so I could hear H-, their dog, galloping alongside the car. Laundry hung on the line and little watercolor drawings lay on the back porch table, where N-, J- and baby C- must have eaten all summer, as they had no usable dining room until recently.

While C-napped upstairs, N- made cups of peppermint tea and served mine in Fiestaware that matched my blouse. Sometimes talking with her is hard, because we have so much to say and I change subjects more slowly than she. Pauses in the conversation--which I need--are rare. But today was slower. The dog nuzzled my legs and we both watched her for a moment. The fire whispered and then it was time for me to drive west, back to the city.

The November afternoon lay down its sun and shadows across the road. If music has geometry, Loreena McKennit's voice on my car's stereo was the same angle as the slanted light. I was late picking up 1 from school, but not so late that it mattered.

Potential and Kinetic

The peonies are opening. Every winter, I forget exactly how they look, retaining only a general impression of innocent frowziness in my mind. Then every spring, they bloom, outrageous, excessive, irregular, and so delicately pink that I remember why I anticipate their opening.

A few days before the peony buds began showing pink at the top, praying mantises hatched. I saw one on the lid of our trashcan and helped it hop over to the faded ivy on our front wall, where another wandered.

Over the past 3 or 4 years, we have for various reasons gotten rid of their old nesting grounds: the persistent privet at the corner, the unfortunate bamboo, the wistful honeysuckle, all dug up. I worried that the mantises would leave. But as we're in no danger of becoming tidy-yard people, it seems there are plenty of good egg case spots left on the morning sun side of the house.

A katydid... now there's an insect I haven't seen for years. I remember watching one on our front door screen as a child on a summer evening. It was so otherworldly: silent and angular and still. Insects other than moths don't usually bother me, but I felt uneasy looking at the katydid.

With a capital S

It's spring and the edges of buildings look crisper, the colors cleaner. 78 degrees. I feel a tickle of pride when the guy on WCLM says "...right here in the capital city." Yes, it is a capital city.

The birds are proud, too. I didn't realize I missed them in the mornings until they began singing again. On S- St., A woodpecker surprised me with enormous sound, but when I watched and watched to catch it in the act of hammering--can it be true that a small bird and an old tree makes such a resounding racket?--it just hopped around the branches looking for insects.

Driving east, toward the sun, I saw a man toss his spit in a silken ribbon on the street. I spent four hours at the coffee shop banging through the April calendar and my car didn't get ticketed. As the sun went down, I played soccer in borrowed shoes. They were wrapped with duct tape around the ball of the foot and a teammate said I looked "bad-ass." Didn't help much, but we had fun.

This is the first day in months that I've felt so at peace with my life... though peace isn't really the word I want. I don't feel pacific. Actually, I feel aroused by life; that's what it is. But to say more would require reflection on the months past.

Letters of E. B. White (a reminder to self to check book out from library)

Library: A few weeks ago I took 1 and a friend to a branch library, one I had not visited for several years. Even though this branch is more convenient to our daily paths than the main library, I avoid it because the children's librarian there brings out the absolute stark raving misanthrope in me.

She calls me "ma'am" and I want to grab her upper arm, dig in my fingertips in the fleshy underpart and hiss inarticulately. (This is a woman who lives in my neighboorhood, not 3 blocks from my house.) There are other reasons, but this is the one I had forgotten: within 10 minutes of my entering, she approaches me with a book and tape case I returned three years ago and asks me if I've found the cassette yet. A little yellow sticky note with my name is affixed to the cover, still. Possibly she hears the repressed fury in my voice--I try to sound reasonable as I explain again that the cassette was in the case when I returned it, admittedly to the wrong branch, three years ago--and she backs away quickly. (The backing away part is not unusual; she's the kind of person who keeps talking, smarmily, as she backs away from one, so as to always have the last word. The quickly part was unusual.)

I wait a few seconds. After all, I don't want to appear petulant. Then I slam my magazine shut and gather up the girls and leave. Quickly.

Subtitles Come In Handy

I forgot
I forgot how much I sleep once the sun starts setting before 7:00.

Things that give parents pause
You're in the bedroom folding laundry or plucking eyebrow hair. You hear your three-year-old in the next room, singing a little made-up song. As her voice gets closer, you hear the words: "It used to be a banana, but now it isn't. It used to be a banana, but now it isn't." You hear her steps enter the bathroom, and you hear a thunk in the trashcan.

Alight
Twelve feet up on scaffodling like hatches of a calligrapher's brush, men lay bricks in the chill morning. Some men squat or kneel; some have worked faster than others and they stand to lay their red rows higher. The white and yellow helmets they wear are dusty but still catch the sunlight like the undersides of the wings of the birds that rise above them, turning as a flock toward an invisible beacon, a future rest.

An art installation of 130 hand-built ceramic cubes, etched with labyrinthine designs on five sides, glazed and arranged on a bed of sand
Is art obsession?
Are artists possessed?
Can one become an artist without being possessed?

The Sound of Yellow Leaves

Autumn is running through its inventory of days. This morning we had mist, the kind that makes colors luminescent, more intense for not having to compete with the sky.

The air was charged with energy. A man walked down the sidewalk so briskly that when he stopped at the street as I drove past, his right leg kept going, flinging itself out over the curb. I could see his whole body stop and lean to bring his leg back.

*

I went to the gathering of protestors outside the George Allen event at which George Bush was to make an appearance. I didn't want to chant anything, yell anything or even hold any signs. I just wanted my body to be there in silent protest. It's hard to be quiet amid noise and feel like one is in league with the noisemakers.

The Clock Strikes Mid-October

Little brown birds and leaves dart through this fall air. The yellow leaves on the sidewalk please me with their randomness. A slug moves in circles over the chilling bricks. When I pick the spent blooms from the petunia, the stickiness coats my fingertips but seems to dissipate before I get up the front steps to our door.

I used to not like fall, never gave a thought to the possibility of liking fall until one day in Kansas. C- walked beside me, visiting from out of state, at some intermediate stage of our confused relationship, and said fall was his favorite season. Was dumbfounded that I disagreed so avidly.

Since then, fall is C-'s season in my mind. The more I like it, the older I feel. Old enough to be looking backward; old enough to want shorter days for a while.

*
Finished "The Other Side of the Bridge" by Mary Lawson. A very autumnal book. Lots of nice bridge metaphors can be made; complaints about a gratuitous death at the end can be lodged--yet I liked it all. I'm a sucker for a good clean sentence. I'd quote one, but I've already loaned the book out.

Sky-Blue and Empty

It was so beautiful outside today that I had a sappy grin on my face as I left the new coffee shop after a latte and some productive work. Then I heard Renee Fleming on the radio and got tears in my eyes, and I'm not even an opera fan. That's when I began feeling that something awful was bound to happen: I would either run over a child darting into the street, my boss would have been killed earlier that very morning, or I would get a call from the daycare with news that 2 was dreadfully ill.

In the office, under the fluorescent lights, shades mostly drawn, the giddy fear of pleasure faded.

My husband called--unusually--to tell me to check CNN for news of a fatal multiple shooting at an Amish school, perhaps not far from my relatives or friends of 1. So callous am I towards bad news that doesn't involve me--the school was not in the right town--that I didn't even think until many hours later that someone in Pennsylvania had her lovely-day premonition come true.

The greens, the blue, the red and the orange

Saw an oriole in the cherry tree this week. I've never seen them around before the chicory goes to seed. But I'm not usually lying in the hammock at 1 in in the afternoon, either, gazing at the perfect sky between layers of leaves.

I had locked myself out of the house, so eventually I got on my bike and ended up at the salon, where I got my hair cut very short again.

The Word is "Okay"

May slips by in innumerable mild days. This blue sky has me by the jowl, like a fish eating a worm on a well-hidden hook. I'm a happy member of the school of okay.

It could be that my life is glorious. I do honestly feel elation when I ride to work (especially when I go to my coffee-shop office) or run errands on my bike and the neighborhood is purring, sun shining, food waiting at a perfect 38 degrees in the fridge: ticktock, this is life, and I shift gears, turn right on C- Street kind of hoping to see handsome D- at work, wondering if I like spring best of all the seasons, trying to remember to read that article on music production studios, thinking I should find out why there aren't any women producers and write an article about it but knowing I won't. Everything's okay, I say to the person who asks me, and it seems the best way to describe how I feel.