Egg washed

Sitting here on the floor at the last of our miniature kitchen renovation (purging the cabinets and then painting them from a hard, dark pine with knots to a soft eggy yellow) with a small cardboard box. Feeling sick from all the deep cleaning supplies in my airways, so I decided to sort through this box of mostly outdated allergy medicine.

2011, 2013, 2010.

Medicine we bought our first year of marriage. We used it in the one-bedroom condo in West Ashley, kept the CVS-brand Benedryl all these years and towed it with us from apartment to house to here; the first we bought together.

It is a small little place that needs more monetary love and updates than we can give it. So we do our best with the little time we have and turn a mostly blind eye to the formica countertops in the kitchen and bathroom, the haphazardly painted trimwork or unfinished ceiling paint. We are as proud as we can be of what we have accomplished in our time here; rewiring the electric and installing a new HVAC being our two biggest (and mostly only) accomplishments. But then again, there was this spring when we discovered how beautifully the azaela bushes bloom, or how tall and wide the banana leaves are on the tree outside the sunroom windows in the summer.

I throw away the expired medicine and I keep the notes from old friends I found stashed away in the box. Notes from five or more years ago, simple hellos left for us by a neighbor, or a thank you for dinner. Perhaps a birthday wish. Missing these people makes it difficult to read any of them, but the comfort in knowing they are nearby is enough. I put the stack back in with the oversized container of Vitamin C supplement and stowe the box in its corner under the sink.

Doorframe

So much of a business ushers in a commercial-grade way of life. It's that bit of it that requires a certain amount of trendiness so that young millennials will come in and approachability so a baby boomer feels comfortable, too. I think it's called relavancy, and it demands a lot of attention.

So what a refreshing change today when an elderly woman and her caregiver visited the shop. She seems to have Alzheimer's, seems slightly confused and, although having been before, gazes around at the place with wonder. She exclaimed with glee when I handed her latte off. I felt her tangible excitement at enjoying the drinks alongside her caregiver.

And right after, a young mother with two children under three; a baby with an easy smile. It made me pause again, to look at that small person who has no care for what is popular, what trends, or to find the cutting edge. A person who just is, who reached his chubby arms toward me and smiled.

And for all the numbers demanding my brainspace this week, for all the future planning to ensure we stick around, in those moments I was here. Serving coffee to an elderly woman and a baby's mother who both wordlessly taught me something in our brief exchanges; we all just were.

The mother opened the door and framed in it was Monday's sunset. I admired the colors until she closed the door. And that was it.

That I might be more like the old woman, that I could find amazement in small things like the baby. This is to be content. Carpe diem, they say. But maybe all that means is experiencing the moments.

The inconvenience of a moment

An overwhelming sense of peace that catches your breath in your throat on a random Thursday around noon; that makes you stop and give thanks, give into relief, briefly step away from any heart aches and wondering. For a moment it pivots you toward wonderment, has you closing your eyes around the shining moment that embraces the broken spirit you bring to it.

Live it, inconvenient though it is. Remember it, tucked under the soft pile of sheets somewhere in your mind's eye, because you will need it to remind yourself later. And be thankful.

Darlings

I lived with my friend Caitlin in college. In our room of our Vanderhorst Street apartment against the dark cobalt wall I painted she hung a photo collage from high school that read, "Life is motion".

Life moves. 

It's a noble aspiration to think a written word could send waves of thought and perhaps tranquility or change or humor through a sea of people on the Internet. But I doubt it's realistic to really perpetuate change en masse through a blog, by whatever measure one could hope. For example, the recent "Starbucks red cup" debacle circulating is a sad marketing joke to drive hoards of people to advertisers' sites for the sake of bottom line. And so many people are happy to shamefully spin themselves around in the mud, digging a rut of ridiculous nonsense that means nothing. Time wasted for nothing but the advertisers. So much of what we filter through on the web exists for them. 

What is its point? This - why do I write, and why do I share? I've contemplated that quite a bit recently, asking myself why I would want to share this blog. One consistent reason is because I began to make too much of it, quietly telling myself it could be useful, beautiful, provoking. But - "Murder your darlings," said Arthur Quiller-Couch, said Faulkner, Wilde, Chekov, said them all. And so here I am, sharing, and murdering these darlings so I can move on from them. Another hope would be that it yielded conversations with others about writing; useful, thoughtful exchanges that may or may not talk about the writing within here, but that goes beyond it too. 

At the core of "why", though, I am reminded of this quote - Kurt Vonnegut once said, "Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia."

And so the answer is, I write for myself. I share it to remind myself so many are capable of piecing words together like this, but I write for my own sanity. Because without even this smallest piece of practice, after awhile I begin to feel desperate. I want to practice listening to myself, want to feel the satisfaction of mulling words and phrases around in my head because I like doing that. It means something to me. It waters my spirit. And that matters.

I think influencing - dare I say "changing" - a person's life is a much quieter, much longer, and less anticipated process than one might think or even hope. I believe we affect other's lives each day with or, often, without knowing it. For better and worse. It doesn't come packaged in a blog. 

It's not this blog that will move a person; it's the kindness shown when pouring coffee, it's time spent alone cooking a meal for a new mother, sending a thank you card seen only by its recipient. I believe change is perpetuated not by broadcasting, but by loving. We as humans are otherwise too fickle a species. 

Life is motion in so very many ways. It is also the quiet capture of these moments that are often only me, a cup of coffee, and my dogs. 

Alone, thinking, writing to appease myself.

Pottery class

A friend sent me an email whose author conveyed her thoughts in a much more pragmatic way than this blog, a way that inspired people outside of appeasing herself through her writing. It was beautiful, a short essay in which she laid out intentions of living each day in a way that includes creating, connecting, and consuming.

In other words, my personal words, that would mean writing, spending time outside, and reading. Different for some, the same for others. Create. Connect. Consume.

: the act of carving out time for important things that water the spirit. 

The author's husband had recently died in a freak accident in Australia. The new widow went on a trip to Napa to practice these three tributes, and I presume, to find something about or within herself to help lift her away from the tragedy that encompassed her. Encompasses her. 

Present tense; because one thing I have learned this year is that grief is not a season you walk through. Grief changes a person, meets you when you least expect it and humbles you as you stand naked in a doorway. Grief does not ask, it intrudes upon your life and strips you. And no person is alone in that experience, though it takes on a different sculpture for us all. This year it is the very real possibility that I could remain unable to carry a child. It is letting go of my deep-rooted passion to be pregnant. It is losing any control I thought I had over us starting a family, it is trusting my husband's words that even without kids I am enough for him. It is knowing some days will be good; deep and rich and full of laughter. And some days will have triggers around their corners. 

But I think this thing of doing - of creating, connecting, and consuming - heals us. We can contribute to the world, sit in the world, and embrace it, too. We are not alone.

Our grievances will not isolate us.

We are not alone. 

1888 and 2015

I realized this morning that for years I have given Ralph Emerson credit for William Wordsworth's penned line I often haphazardly quote:

"[Children come into this world] trail[ing] clouds of glory."

This is the, sadly botched, rendition of it but the sentiment is there. Emerson must have been inspired by that too, because I remember writing those words in the margins of the notebook in American Renaissance Lit class. Then again, I remember a lot of skewed truths.

I have a great respect for poets and poetry in general. I find it incredibly beautiful. But I'll also admit that I tend to more easily connect with ideas presented clearly sans similes. Call me a millenial, and isn't that sad. The work of deciphering poetry has led to some deep and hauntingly alluring insights, but it takes mental energy and time. And ideally a teacher to help dig into all of the historical, literary, and socio-economic references.

However, I would like to know Wordsworth's thoughts about this line he wrote sometime in the late 1800's. Although I've miscredited it, incorrectly quoted it, and overall done a disservice to him; despite all that the point is that his words have stayed with me. I agree wholeheartedly with him that children come into this world trailing glory, agree that we forget parts of ourselves as we age, or perhaps miss the opportunities to remember, am inspired by him to believe we can remember a purer form of a self. And not just remember but to live it.

What would he say to that?

From William Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immorality from Recollections of Early Childhood", verse V, lines 1-7:

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come..."

Foggy morning sunshine

Fog on the big picture window in our living room disallows all of the current sunshine through, but it does make for a beautiful suggestion of frost outside. I can almost smell the hard cold air of a winter day if I close my eyes.

: the bright pink chill that creeps across the cheeks and nose the longer one stands outside.

The attempt to warm your face by covering it with a knit scarf and breathing hot breath into the fabric. And then, that warm dewey fabric resting on your nose and skin, making everything damp and soon thereafter cold again. And maybe you repeat the process. Snot runs out of your nose and now the scarf is even wetter, and your nose is still cold and even brighter.

Then, taking the scarf away from the face to just let the brisk air hit it. Laughing, running, screaming through the snow drifts. A steady "crunch, crunch" through the hardened snow, a billowy sinking into the fresh powdery snowfall.

This powdery snowfall is what came down heavily in April around Easter the night before my Grandma Helen's funeral in 1995. It coated the branches ever so lightly, made the whole of Rosholt, SD look like a snowglobe that had lost its music. And indeed, we had.

This picture window here, now. That funeral day.

Coffee, clean, repeat.

Sipping mediocre coffee on a Sunday morning from a mug my cousin unexpectedly gave me for my birthday. The mug reads, "Uff Da!", a favorite phrase among Midwesterners that simultaneously embodies humor and foreboding with its use.

"The cows got out of the pastures again? Uff da! That's the third time this summer."

We watch the dogs wrestle around. And I'll begin cleaning when I finish writing.

These mundane times together are some of my favorites. Perhaps they are not the entire meat of what constitutes a life, but stacked together after years they could be. To this day, every time someone opens a Diet Coke, I think of my mother who poured herself a can over ice every Saturday as she prepared her Rainbow-brand vaccum for cleaning the old wooden floors.

Not so different, she and I.

There is something to be found in these quiet, routine mornings, a peaceful monotony I can draw from when life envelopes me like a rickety wooden roller coaster.