Thoughts

When I am forty nine years old, I will still fit into my size two jeans. I will look hot in my reading glasses. I will know more about wine, history and Latin than I do now. I will be slow to speak[…]

This book shelf is a crazy mix of random paperback novels and obscure hardcover biographies from the 60’s. No matter how many times I stare at this shelf, I always seem to find a selection I hadn’t seen before, and so I pull it odown and thumb through its crumbly pages. Then little bugs skitter across the letters and I sort of freak out, and that’s the end of that. But there is one bug-free book I come back to again and again, a selection of Thoreau’s writings accompanied by photographs by Eliot Porter.

We gave up a family bed when our youngest was about two and a half years old. By that time we had been sleeping together in one bed as a family since our oldest was first born, four years earlier. We loved our family bed, but each one of us was quite ready for some more sleeping space, our own comfortable area in which to stretch out and rest without being under direct threat of flailing limbs and pinched tresses. I didn’t sleep a wink the first night we slept in our own big girl/boy beds, but both children did. And they woke up with smiles on their faces. ...

Looking at these pictures helps to remind me of the truth I discovered on that trip: that in a life filled with choices, I need to use every minute wisely. I need to choose between broad and narrow, life-bringing and life-taking.

This summer slipped away in a steady trickle of words and deadlines, graphics and proofs.

I know I reeked of cigarette smoke. My second-hand pants were inches too short, my hair was pulled back into a messy ponytail by a 48 year-old father new to single parenthood, and my nails were bitten to the quick. But that Santa pulled me in tight anyways and hugged me close, and he smelled of cinnamon, and butter cookies, and reindeer feed.

Clusters of red and white brittlegills dotted the path through the back woods. Can’t know for sure which species, there are over 750 in the genus. But if there is any poetry in happenstance, then surely my path was strewn with Russula sanguinaria, bloody brittlegill, the deep, rich red of a life poured out at your feet.

I saw your ghost standing at the top of the steps last night. (your dark hair reflected the beams of that hunter’s moon) You looked down, head tilted, smiling. You walked a few slow paces, stopped. I watched you move from the corner of my eye but did not turn to face you. My ears filled with the roar of my own heart’s blood and I heard nothing else. ...