l'actualité

I wake at Anne-Laure's, whom I have never met. It is her home, or at least it is when she is not renting it to strangers, and one pieces together an idea of her from both the family snapshots that line the walls of the WC and the general atmosphere of the place. The walls and wooden floors are painted stark white, with Moroccan-patterned tiles in grey and white to enliven the kitchen and bath, and there are pops of canary yellow, fuschia, blueberry, and orange in cushions and rugs and framed designs, which combine with taxidermy and abundant linen drapes to create a modern "Pays de Merveilles" straight out of Pinterest. One surmises that Anne-Laure, who is a journalist, is creative and lots of fun, and that her small son and daughter are at the center of her world. There is the notable absence of a husband or father, except for a delicate gold band on a pregnant Anne-Laure's finger in one of the photos, which has disappeared by the time the second child is old enough appear in the photos with her. There is definitely no guy in the atmosphere of the apartment, as Steve pointed out the moment we stepped through the door. This is a Paris pied-a-terre for women and children only.

The sun has been up for an hour already--were we still in Stockholm it would have been three-and-a-half; even in Riga it would have been light almost three hours ago--and the rumblings of heavy machinery passing by outside started not long after the late-night laughter and shouts of loitering, drunk young men had stopped. Apparently Anne-Laure's little street is the ideal thoroughfare for construction equipment and partiers making their way to the other side of the river. It is the end of July, and as this is Europe there is no A/C, so the windows stay open day and night, making it sound like we are sleeping in the street.

A whispered morning prayer of gratitude while still in bed, then I get up to brush my teeth. Almost immediately Townsie--or Thomas as he is used to being called here--peeks into the bathroom, fresh-faced and sweet in a white tank top and no pajama bottoms. After the requisite snuggle into my legs, he announces that his tummy is hungry and he is going to get his own breakfast. He reappears in bathroom doorway a minute later, holding a large acrylic serving spoon.

"And I am going to eat it with this giant spoon!" he says in delight, then disappears again.

By the time I emerge from my morning ablutions, mascaraed and smelling of Jo Malone, Townes is eating cereal while he watches Violette swing on the trapeze bar next to the table.

"Mom! Look how high I can go!" she calls out cheerfully. 

I dodge in front of and under her for a belt amongst the luggage, then lunge behind her to grab a pair of black gladiators, purchased the year Townsend was a baby and we came to Europe with our nieces for the summer. I bought two pairs of sandals at home in NYC for that trip--both are with me on this one--and packed all my best clothes, trying to prove that I was not letting myself go after two babies. Even though my memories are mostly of looking around ancient marvels for a spot to sit and breastfeed, the wardrobe did work in the photos. I grab my bag and, right on cue, Steve stumbles out of the bedroom, rubbing sleep from his eyes, to pick up where I leave off.

The acrid scent of urine hits the nostrils as one traipses down the stairs and through the lobby, which is quintessentially French, in that it has the most gorgeous ancient tiles but smells like a sewer. By the time I am on the Metro, Steve will have dropped the kids "at school" which is what we are calling their daycare this week (since it is in French), and he will grab a baguette to nosh on throughout the day as he does grad school prep and researches non-profits back at the apartment.

During my transfer from the 9 (direction Montreuil) to the 10 (direction Gare d'Austerlitz), a dapper gentleman in his sixties several paces ahead of me pauses, looking back along the platform, and motions to a young father with a baby carriage that he will help them up the stairs. The father reaches him just as I do, and when the two men crouch to lift the baby, I feel the sting of tears under my eyelids. Little acts of kindness. They will save the world.

On the 10, holding the bar to steady myself, mine is one of six hands stacked vertically onto the cold metal. On one side of me stands a girl in her twenties, chic and effusing ambition. The young man on the other side of me is reading, as am I, and his suit sleeve brushes my arm as the train sways. He and I and the girl next to me all sway along with the crowd that is pressing in around us, and I remember what it was like to feel part of humanity in this way on the subway during rush hour in Manhattan, and how much momentum for the day I always felt as I rushed up the concrete steps out into a city that was just getting to work. I feel that today, emerging into the Gallic sunshine.

During the morning class on American writers in Paris, I talk perhaps a little too much because I am so excited to be back in a university setting and discussing one of my favorite topics. The professor is of the artfully disheveled intellectual type, which puts a slight buzz into the room of mostly female students. Referencing the Proust I read on the train could be perceived as a bid for attention and I do it with some hesitation, but it really is apropos--we are talking about Gertrude Stein's quote about writers having two countries, real and imagined--and he treats my comment deferentially. There are the expected photos of flappers and Josephine Baker, and familiar readings from Hemingway and Fitzgerald, as well a couple that are new to me from James Wheldon Johnson and Harry Crosby. I make a note to get their books when we are back in the States. Hemingway's A Moveable Feast was my favorite book when I read it at sixteen, and for many years afterward. I feel like I'm visiting old, dear friends.

Afterward, on my way to lunch, a teeny tiny Sofia Coppola pops out of a taxi onto the sidewalk right in front of me. My eyes immediately lock straight ahead and past her--standard NYC celebrity-sighting protocol--but I am not wearing my sunglasses, and the recognition has registered on my face. Her companion, a gentle-looking woman with long, romantically-waved copper hair, gives me a look of empathetic amusement, and after they have passed I realize that Ms. Coppola and I are dressed almost identically and have similarly bobbed hair. I would like to have been a filmmaker, I reflect, over my chicken salad and pain au chocolat at Eric Kayser. I even flirted with a film major all of those years ago in college. But now I am thirty-eight and into simplifying life, and my writing and design work and our family's amateur painting and music-making will be enough for my kids to build upon, if they would like to be filmmakers. That's how it's supposed to work, right? Each generation building upon the last? That's what Sofia Coppola did. We are not Francis Ford Coppola, Steve and I, but it's a start.

Toward the end of my afternoon course on French feminist literature, I look around the classroom. We have been taught by the chair of the department, whose intelligence and ease with the subject matter have made me wish I could note every last word. There are a few of us who are "older," meaning outside of the university system, and we uniformly wear expressions of rapture. The other two dozen students are currently in their last year at universities around the world, and the three-hour class is KILLING them.  They are falling asleep, doodling, packing up their belongings as a hint to the professor to wrap it up, and casually talking to their friends. Wasted! I want to shout. All of this is wasted on you! To be sitting here at the Sorbonne, no other responsibility but to fill your brains with wisdom to interpret the world around you! But, of course, I keep these thoughts to myself and make a little plan to walk over to Shakespeare & Company and buy A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf. My copy was lost at least a decade ago, and a reference to it in the lecture has given me an itch to see it on my bookshelf again.
 
The idea of a warm crêpe buerre salé lures me out of the rain--I have forgotten my umbrella--on the way to the bookstore.  Outside of Shakespeare & Company there is a queue of three or four students waiting to get in, but a guitar-violin duo is playing a bit of Pre-War jazz in front of the shop, and it is nice to listen while we wait, even with the drizzle. Inside, I find a beautiful copy of Woolf's book plus a slim volume from George Orwell, and after the salesman has stamped both books with the name of the bookstore and I have handed over my twenty-two euros, I film the appealing young musical vagabonds to send to Jane--her Davis plays the violin and I think she would like the idea of his growing up to play jazz with Shakespeare & Company as a backdrop, his long hair in a man-bun and surrounded by a crowd of appreciative females.

The walk from the Metro to Anne-Laure's is always longer in the evening. My leather satchel (in pink, naturally) is heavier after being on my shoulder all day, and the air is sticky and warm. When I get to the apartment I put my feet up for a bit in deference to my marshmallow ankles, unused to an entire day of sitting followed by an hour of walking. Not my exercise model. The kids are bouncing around in their usual evening mood of agitated joy, ostensibly putting on their pajamas in preparation for movie night, although there is little actual evidence that any wardrobe change is taking place. I enjoy them just a little bit more because I haven't seen them all day. Later, I will fall asleep with them in their room as we read, then shuffle into Anne-Laure's bohemian mattress on the floor sometime during the night. There I will stay in a hazy doze until early morning, when the heavy trucks begin making noise outside again and the words in my head will wake me up and try to arrange themselves on page or screen. 

After my week of classes has finished, we will play wantonly in France for the last two weeks of these two incredible years we have spent in Europe. And then...and then.  We will board an airplane to San Francisco and hang out there for a couple of weeks before going Utah. There, we will to camp out at the cabin for a few months--maybe a year--and get reacquainted with family and friends while we do grad school and NGO applications. I will write like a demon to get closer to that magical threshold of 10,000 hours that promises proficiency (if not genius)*. And we will begin to outline the second book in what we hope will be the nice long trilogy of our life as a couple and a family. The first book was a really good one. We can't wait to see what happens next. 

(*According to studies, including those mentioned in the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, currently a family favorite.)

on time

The sign at the trail's head read Herzogstand, 2.5h, with an

arrow directing us to ditch the car, at which the clouds overhead were tossing smatterings of precipitation, and hike up into the woods to our right. The gondola to the lodge at the top of the mountain, where Joerg's fortieth birthday party was underway, had stopped running twenty minutes earlier. On foot was the only way up, and we had two over-traveled kids in the backseat and two exhausted parents in the front.

We had been late even before leaving Munich to sit in weekend construction traffic on the Autobahn. After a late-night return from Salzburg the day before, we had planned a morning of quick errands at Merianplatz--wooden hairbrush, giant pretzels, sausages--before our departure for the mountains. Parking difficulties and torrential rain, however, had turned our Hour, tops jaunt into four hours of leapfrogging from shop awning to shop awning, both umbrellas having gone the way of all the earth. From time to time our children would belly-flop onto the wet cobblestones and emit such high-pitched screams that every head in the square would turn in our direction, and elderly passers-by would fix them with disapproving looks and give them what I assume were lectures about their bad behavior in German. Back at the car we had checked the party email for directions only to find that the festivities were to commence mid-afternoon, not around dinnertime as I had thought, in spite of my having glanced over the email on at least two prior occasions.

Now, staring at the trail head sign and frantically considering what it would take to hike the two-and-a-half hours up the mountain with our kids and an overnight bag, embarrassment, frustration, fatigue, and, worst of all, the knowledge that we were missing celebrating with our friends, washed over me in quick succession.  I whispered Uncle from behind the hand covering my face and Steve put the car in motion again. We drove on in silence, past Lake Walchensee, stunning in the filtered light and framed by blue mountains, and cute little Bavarian chalets, until my phone indicated that it had 4G outside of a picture-perfect Bavarian restaurant.  In five minutes we had a hotel for the night in the next town, and in another five we were in the restaurant ordering a locally-grown salad and wood-fired pizza, to be followed by homemade strawberry and banana ice cream.

Bamburg, Germany

Davis in Ghent

Public poetry project, Utrecht

I felt awful; fatally flawed. Then, unexpectedly, peace washed over me. It was like the relief of a storm breaking after days of oppressive heat. The dramatic gesture of missing the party for which we had spent nearly two weeks and a significant amount of money to attend, all because of a minor logistical error on my part, allowed me to admit to myself that I had not been realistic at all about our summer and my ability to adapt to its constant changes. I remembered our anticipation in mid-June at the idea of having so many people we enjoy visiting in quick succession, showing them our new home and favorite day-trips, popping over to Belgium for a night here and Normandy for a few nights there, showing a friend's niece Paris for the first time. We had done it and were rapturous to be seeing everyone, but all along we had had the feeling it would be more fun to look back on than it was in the moment. Not the way I had envisioned it.

I sat waiting for the pizza while Steve and the kids played outside, my thumbs poised to make notes on my phone in the absence of a notebook, trying to make sense of our lives so as to avoid repeating such mistakes in the future. I realized that there had been several clues that things were out of control which I had been ignoring for weeks: constant difficulty getting out of the door on time, a physical sensation of always being severely out of breath, the fact that we left home driving in the general direction of Munich with no specific plans or hotels booked, even for that night, ten days before the missed party. I usually research like a fiend, brandishing printed sheets full of options tailored to our needs for any country we are visiting.  I had been so busy before we left that my sheets wallowed on my laptop at home, incomplete and unprinted.

In this moment of honest self-reflection at the pizza place, I also had to admit that I had not truly had a grasp on Time since our move last year, and tried to remember what I had done in the past to organize myself. It took a few minutes to unearth simple procedural memories: a single handbag tidied daily; in that handbag, a paper agenda, rather than a calendar on my phone; a dedicated time every morning for correspondence and calendar items; an apartment in which I had designated a place for everything, and never put anything anywhere but in its place. To do otherwise left me prone to the chaos of my mind, as I was demonstrating so thoroughly.

Over the summer, with such close proximity to so many people that we know well, I observed that individuals and their relationships to Time and Place can be arranged on a sort of spectrum, and that couples tend to be composed of one individual from either side of center on the spectrum, however similar they may be to one another when compared with the world at large.

On one side lives the Time-Keeper. If she says she will be at x place at x time, she is there. She views time as something to be carefully managed, budgeted, and spent. She is most likely an early riser and is good at accomplishing fixed goals. She is dependable. From the other side of the spectrum, the Time-Keeper may seem rigid or unemotional. Her less time-conscious partner may feel that she is not as thorough as she could be, or leaves things imperfect in her effort to be in the right place at the right time. The Time-Keeper views tardiness as irresponsible, disrespectful, and an indication of priorities. And she is not wrong.

Except that, on the other side of the spectrum there exists the Dreamer, a philosophical type for whom the physical world may be less real than the world of Ideas, Imagery, and Emotion. For this type, wrapping one's head around time can sometimes feel nearly impossible, and prioritizing and organizing it may take monumental effort. Without constant vigilance, he slips back into his world of ideas and that twenty minutes that he had to get where he was going somehow vanished half an hour ago. A fixed appointment, even something routine like getting kids to school or getting to work on time, may require headache-inducing focus. This type may lose things often or be forgetful. It takes years or decades to learn tricks and adopt habits that will mitigate these difficulties, and he may have to start the process over again whenever there is a major life change (e.g. new job, new child, new class schedule). The Dreamer may require a great deal of spacial organization to be functional. Shocking, I know, that I naturally fall into this category.

(I think sheepishly of a line on the C.V. from my early professional life:  "Adapts quickly to new situations and procedures."  True, if we are talking about new foods, music, places, or this season's trends. Not so, unfortunately, with organizational procedures, schedules, or unspoken rules of etiquette, although I wasn't self-aware enough to realize it at the the time that I was shopping this gem around. Luckily, aside from one corporate P.R. internship, I have worked in creative fields, where my adaptive tendencies are more at home.)

While our natures may be immutable, our indulgences (whether to be late or to be impatient with another's lateness) can be disciplined. In our eleven years together, I and my resident Time-Keeper have gradually moved to the center of the spectrum, although we will probably have to exercise patience with each other until the day we no longer have children at home. On that day, I expect that we will magically start being fifteen minutes early for everything, the years of resistance training having finally paid off. (Have you ever noticed that about grandparents?) 

I asked him, in the throes of my self-flagellation over the missed party and all of my other time misses this summer, how he tolerates me. He laughed and said that it was hard at the beginning, but then he started paying attention to how hard I was trying, how much more stressed I was about being on time than he was, actually. I already felt like a failure. He couldn't change that for me,and he couldn't wish me--or berate me--into being on time. In fact, the more he tapped his foot, the more fraught those already stressful minutes became, and the later we ended up being. He decided that he would change himself. Instead of seeing five minutes late as being a failure to be on time, he would look at my gradual improvements and the effort I was making. Aside from the rare big-ticket event, what were the actual consequences, he asked himself, if I made him late? Was he placing what other people thought of him or of us above what was most of worth to him? Was his anger or feeling that he was right in that situation worth what it cost our relationship? And how did these qualities that led to my functional difficulties benefit him in other ways?  According to him, I make his life more fun than another spreadsheet jockey like himself would have. Vague but I'll take it.

As for myself, I had to learn the opposite. First, I had to step back from my own stress and embarrassment and think about how my actions were making others, especially my husband, feel.

Then what? For times when I know there will be a lot of upheaval and excitement, I have to remember to schedule days for rest and organization. In college I realized that I had to get rid of my watch, which I would look at obsessively rather than doing the things that would actually help me to be punctual. At some point, after a missed flight on Christmas Eve early in our married life, I figured out that nothing works so well as leaving a big fat cushion before a serious deadline. I know that our weaknesses can become strengths, given enough time and work, because we don't miss flights anymore.

I have to repeatedly teach myself, still, after all these years, how to prioritize items with deadlines and make plans to meet them, sometimes at a level of detail that a child (well, a Time-Keeper child) would scoff at. Put shoes by front door. Pack church bag night before. Set alarm for thirty minutes before I have to leave for school pick up. I have to remind myself that emotion and spontaneity are good traits only when bridled properly. I have to watch the things that people who are on time do, and figure out how to do them for myself. Luckily for me, there are a lot of punctual people in the world to emulate. I make my travel dossiers.

I also have to convince myself again and again that not doing these things naturally does not make me an idiot. I have to remind myself that while Steve may run errands twice as fast as I do or clean the kitchen in fifteen minutes less, he doesn't always think things through and do them as thoroughly as I do.

It seems so simple: On time = Good. Late = Bad. The truth, though, like almost all truths, is more complex. The world needs all of us, Dreamers and Time-Keepers alike, even with the faults that accompany our gifts. We need big ideas and we need the trains to run on time. We want mind-blowing art projects and people to manage the logistics of mounting exhibitions that allow us all to see them. We need people at every position of the spectrum. We need that, and we want it, too.

That stormy day and night in Bavaria made the rest of our trip a bucolic one. We stopped in beautiful Fussen, Germany for a couple of days and had dinner in Lichtenstein, adding a new country to our list. I spent a day enjoying the collection at the Kunstmuseum in Basel, Switzerland while Steve and the kids went to the zoo. We peeked at the antiques in Colmar, France and loaded up on local treats at a boulangerie in Strasbourg. By the time we met up again with Jen and Alex in Ghent, Belgium we were able to revel in things as they were happening. Sometimes it just takes stopping for a minute to look at things, even if the stop is a forced one. 

Yes, those are my thoughts for the summer, finally, in November. Here are a few photos from the second half of our summer. As you can see, it was not so bad as all that.

Skinny-dipping at Nymphenburg Castle

Boating at Nymphenburg Castle

Ghent

Sunset in Salzburg

BMW Museum, Munich.  I love Townsend's face, like he owns this thing.

Saint Nicolas, Ghent

Playing at home in the North Sea

a violet(te) by any other name

What's in a name? Shakespeare was very clever with words, but it is an inescapable fact of life that names imbue people, places, and things with a certain je ne sais quoi (pardon my French). He must have known so. After all, his ladies have such fabulous monikers: Portia, Ophelia, Desdemona, Hippolyta, et al. Recently, we had trial ownership of a dog over a long weekend. The dog's original owner had designated her Maddie, and while we considered keeping the dog, there was no way we were keeping the name. We know several children with variations of that name, and besides, if we were going to walk her, feed her, and care for her, we were going to name her. So, for the few days she was with us, before allergies and our children's innate disobedience sent Maddie back whence she had come, I tried out a number of potential appellations.

In doing so, I realized that each made her look like a different dog, at least in my eyes. Emily Dickenson, Edie for short, was perky and comfortable, loved long walks, and was smart but not intimidating. Dorothy Parker, on the other hand, was intriguing but a little worse for wear, as though the afternoons were a bit too long. I think I loved her best as Capucine, after the famous French fashion model best known for playing Peter Sellers's wife in The Pink Panther. Capucine the dog was elegant and mysterious; her coat seemed a little shinier, her ears more regal. And that's just a dog, an animal that is non-verbal and is unlikely ever to have a curriculum vitae to worry about. With people, the issue is so much more loaded. All this to say that I know how it sounds:  We move to Europe, and before you know it we have changed the spelling of our daughter's name from Violet to Violette. The Snobs, you must be thinking, the Carpetbaggers, the Yuppity-Ups. I don't blame you. I would probably think the same. But it's not quite as it seems. (Is it ever?)

Let's go back to The Night It All Began, in that hospital delivery room perched high above FDR Drive.  In the minute of new parent enchantment between the torture of delivery and the terror of all that went wrong afterward, Steve, his eyes wet as he gazed upon that magnificent, moon-faced, howling purple infant, said, "Maybe we should call her Violet(te)." 

Then some other stuff happened that I won't go into just now. My sister took the baby, the room filled up with doctors, and I was wheeled into an operating room. All that night alone in recovery, and the next morning as I waited for my husband to be released from the psych ward and my baby to be cleared by the neonatal ICU, the thought running 'round and 'round in my mind was, "I need to see my little Violet(te)."  By the time we were finally together as a family, sometime around noon, she had a name.

But did her name have a spelling?  Well. The great-grandmother who was partial originator of the name, as far as our baby name list was concerned, was Violet. I, being an amateur Francophone, while respecting the traditional British spelling, couldn't easily get past the fact that in French, violet is the masculine form of the word, and violette, the feminine. Violette just looked prettier to me, and could be pronounced either way. Ah, but we had both spent our entire lives spelling our own names for strangers, we said, pen hovering over the blank line on the birth certificate. Did we want to curse our daughter with the same fate? Everyone, most English-speakers, anyway, would know how to spell Violet by sound. Violette would require constant verbal correction of schoolteachers and receptionists, and the ladies at the DMV. Pragmatism got the better of us, and we quickly wrote V-I-O-L-E-T on the page, handing it to a nurse before we could change our minds.

Over the next few years, I had moments of doubt, but none serious. Actually, most of my doubts had more to do with our not having given her my last name in addition to Steve's, again done out of pragmatism. I spoke French with Violet at home quite a lot, and when I did she was always Violette, but the spelling didn't seem to matter either way. When she learned to write her name, she learned it both ways, because she asked to. Two years later, school application time arrived--which in New York is something akin to writing and defending a doctoral thesis (or so I have heard from friends who have done both)--and for various reasons, Violet was enrolled at a French school. There she officially became Violette. She loved school, made friends, and started to get comfortable with the bilingual program, but we noticed with concern that she began to differentiate between when she was as Violet, and when Violette.

Then we moved to Holland. A transfer into another French school was easy--the curriculum is consistent throughout the French system--but a move is always a bit emotional, and a new school in a new country, neither of which speaks the family's native language, is a lot of change. Violet(te) transitioned remarkably well for an almost-six-year-old, but the name differentiation became worse, and we worried that we were creating a situation in which she might believe she is a different person "out there" than she is "in here". We made a decision, undertook an experiment. Her name would be spelled Violette all the time, regardless of the pronunciation. No paperwork has been filed or changed, no official pronouncement made to family and friends. She is six, so her personal correspondents are few, mostly grandmothers, and she is rarely saddled with the task of completing legal forms. We figure we have a little time to test our hypothesis. In the long term, this change could be brilliant...or meaningless, or possibly misguided. That is parenthood. Things could also be back to the way they were before you read this post. That, too, is parenthood.

She is quite a Violet(te), though, no matter the spelling of her name, and she just lost her first tooth! (She added the exclamation point as she copy-edited my original draft.) Adolescence is just around the corner.

then + now

The summer has not quite been what I thought it would be. A cough with fever just after we arrived in Utah set off a chain reaction upon which I won't elaborate, except to say that it feels alternately comical and like something from the Book of Job. Nothing serious, just inconveniences enough to keep me humble and give me lots of time for escapist binge-watching of BBC offerings on Amazon while kind grandparents take my children canoeing and teach them the names of all the wildflowers and birds in the canyon.

Being in my adolescent home blurs space and time. I am fully in the present, a grown woman with a life and family of her own, just visiting. Then I find myself sitting at my grandmother's vanity, now in my parents' guestroom, drying my hair with Townsie, who so resembles my father, sitting on my lap. I wonder how often my grandmother sat in front of this very mirror with her baby, seeing an image so similar to the one I am looking at now. Or my car is in use and I find myself driving my dad's Toyota truck to fetch Steve from the airport. I pop an indie rock-chick cd into the player and relive being the twenty-year-old me for an hour as I drive through stunning mountains and suburban sprawl. 

Or I stand in my parents' backyard watching Violet ride a bicycle for the very first time, my dad holding onto the back to steady her, just as I remember his doing with me when I was exactly her age, or see my kids running through the sprinklers, once of my favorite summer activities when I was a kid. Later, as we lie on the grass at Sundance, watching a musical with our enthralled daughter, I am suddenly eighteen again, on a date with a boy I can't now remember. Even the British television is a throwback, reminding me of the semester I spent in London and how, upon my return, I would cuddle up in front of Miss Marple, Absolutely Fabulous, or Mapp & Lucia when I was pining for England.

And then there are the mental snapshots I take for the future. Townes charging about the house shouting out everything he sees for which he knows the words, even if they still emerge in forms that only his mother could understand. We laugh as he confuses grandparents' names, sure he has them down pat. Baba O! Dada Robba! My memory captures his delight in his newest cousin, gently stroking her tummy or kissing her cheek, begging Hold! Hold! Baby Lila! Violet running out onto on the deck of the cabin in pink Converse sneakers and white sundress, butterfly net in hand, calling to her grandfather that she just caught her first butterfly, her blonde hair loose and luminous in the sunlight. Townes plopping down next to me on the stairs and casually draping his fat little hand across my forearm before snuggling in. Violet poised to jump onto her daddy's back for a piggyback at bedtime, both of their faces bright with anticipation. They are glimpses of absolute purity that pass in an instant, moments of lucidity.

This morning, unable to sleep, I woke before dawn and wandered into the living room of the cabin. Outside, the aspens glowed so brightly against the darkness that they seemed unearthly, and I added them, too, to my mind's photo album. Two more weeks and these things, the beautiful as well as the frustrating, will melt into the past. We will be in a flurry of new experiences and places, completely emerged in a new life. Maybe I'll take it slow just a little longer. I still have a few more episodes of As Time Goes By, Ab Fab, and Good Neighbors on my playlist. Violet wouldn't mind a little more time on her borrowed pink bicycle, either...

 

this land, part iii

I have always loved cities and mountains for their ability to block out the sky. A wide open sky renders me vulnerable to the relentless sun during the day, to the vastness of starry space at night. I cannot wrap my mind around it any more than I can grasp it in my hand. It is sublime, terrifying.

Ironic, then, that one of great pleasures of a road trip, for me, is watching the skies change with the topography. I grew up in the mountains of Utah, where the sky is a straightforward and brilliant blue, punctuated by cotton ball clouds. When it rains, they take on an aspect of charcoal but retain their reassuringly friendly form. In West Virginia, we had pale blue skies with long wisps of clouds, and when a storm was brewing the wisps would accumulate until they were opaque and heavy, dumping gigantic splotches of rain onto the windshield.  In the Midwest, we saw layer upon layer of incongruous shapes and textures, various heights and shades mixing together, sometimes flat and sometimes roiling, as fronts from north and south, east and west, collided.  And in Kansas, well...

A week before we left NYC I woke up at two a.m. in a sweat. Tornadoes! Was this tornado season? Was that a thing? Earlier that evening, a Pinterest search for Hays, Kansas, one of the likely stops on our route, had resulted in one promising looking restaurant and several pictures of single and double twisters. The longest stretch of our drive would be across flat, sparsely inhabited Kansas and eastern Colorado, with little chance of finding a cellar in case of a storm. I recalled two summers spent in Minnesota and the occasional evenings when the sky would transform in a few minutes' time from its typical grey-blue to a menacing emerald. Tornado watches and warnings would be issued, at which my friend's family would shrug, This isn't Kansas.

Still in bed, I reached for my iPhone. Tornado statistics. When there were earthquakes in San Diego I used to comfort myself in this way, with numbers. Earthquakes are really not as bad as you think, once you have the statistics. Tornadoes were probably not as prevalent as I thought.  Or... Kansas averages twenty-two tornadoes in June (National Climactic Data Center), and those are only the ones that are seen by human eyes? And there is no way of predicting them with any accuracy?  Headlines from the end of May were no more comforting: After two days of storms and tornadoes, Kansas is forecast to get hit again (The Kansas City Star), Multiple tornadoes reported in Kansas (Fox News), and best of all, More massive tornadoes leave trail of destruction in Kansas (CBS News). Public service sites mentioned that, while tornadoes can devastate neighborhoods, deaths from tornadoes are few; typically only those in cars, trailer homes, and other lightweight structures not heavy enough to withstand the winds are at risk. Reality was not helping my anxiety.

A few days on the road had dulled my worries. We had a lovely dinner at Julian in Kansas City, Missouri, I grabbed green tea and local Christopher Elbow chocolates at the Roasterie next door, and we got our wiggles out (some of them) at a pleasant neighborhood park. Earlier, we had found ourselves in Independence, Missouri, a town of significance in Mormon history. We went to the visitors' center there and had a look at the temple of the Community of Christ (formerly RLDS) across the street, which is one of the most unusual structures in North America, resembling a steel-plated alien spacecraft in the shape of a drill, or in Steve's opinion, a fortress from the Superman movies. The Community of Christ also claims Joseph Smith as its founder, but it separated from what is now considered mainstream Mormonism at his death. It had been a good mini-detour.

As we left Kansas City, storm clouds were visible ahead of us. I checked the weather on my phone. Yes, a rainstorm, but nothing terrible. Winds were low and it was already starting to clear in Salina, three hours away, where we were planning to spend the night. We stopped for fuel and it was as though the entire sky was sporting a dark wooly cap, with brilliance peaking out from underneath it at the horizons. We drove on.

It began to rain and we watched with relaxed delight as bolts of lightning ripping through the sky to our right. It looked like the storm would veer around us somewhat, on its way to Kansas City. Soon, Topeka was behind us and the rest of Kansas opened before us, vast and devoid of shelter. Tornado watches for central Kansas started to pop up on my iPhone just before I lost reception. I turned on the radio, hoping for both news and distraction, finding neither. We turned it off again.

Off to our right the sky cleared and we could see the sunset, fiery orange and brilliant against the clouds. It was stunning, celestial. To our left and above us the sky was increasingly apocalyptic, the clouds crackling and intensely electric, casting great white bolts of lighting to the ground with ceaseless frequency. A wall of darkness moved across the sunset, obscuring it from view, and we were plunged into night prematurely. I uttered a silent prayer and told myself that God is aware of the sparrow, and us. I clung feebly to the thought, though the scene before my eyes was a persuasive display of the sweeping power of nature and our little family's insignificance before it. I told myself that my fear was simply lack of familiarity, that the blizzards and hurricanes and gun crimes that threaten NYC, yet cause me nary a worry, are far more destructive than the odd Kansas tornado, but my white knuckles were unconvinced. We made an attempt at an audiobook, but it was impossible with the deafening thunder and we decided to let the storm have its way. We rode in silence.

For an hour, maybe more, we drove on through sheets of rain and searing lighting, simultaneously enraptured by its beauty and and alarmed by its savageness. I eyed the sea of glowering clouds, vigilantly searching for the slightest sign of funneling, though what we would do in that case was by no means obvious, since even such mean shelters as ditches and overpasses were nowhere to be seen on the bare ribbon of highway that stretched out before us. There were still a few tractor-trailers on the road, and seeking solace wherever I could find it, I reasoned that, were there any true danger, the drivers would have heard something on their CB radios and abandoned the highway in search of refuge. We passed the occasional farm or freestanding house and I envied the inhabitants' ability to regard the storm from the safety of a solid structure, evening routines undisturbed by the magnificent turmoil outside. We drove on.

As we neared Salina, small white dots began to glimmer in the velvety black and the torrents eased to a light mist. By the time we pulled up to our hotel, the air was warm and clear, and insects were emerging from their hiding places. We gave each other subdued smiles and assumed the business of checking in for the night. Half-an-hour later, I lay in my bed with nature silent outside the window and the sleeping bodies of my loved ones around me, and gave thanks for the marvels we had seen and our safety in the midst of them.

p.s. I will never be a storm chaser.

kindergarten

There is no one universal emotion for the day your first child reaches her first day of kindergarten, any more than there was a single predictable reaction to have at the moment you met that child for the first time. What is universal on both of those dates, though, is that whatever you feel will be marked in your memory like a time stamp.  It is an Occasion.

I am not one of those parents who looked at my child upon her first day of elementary school and thought that the last five years had passed in a flash. They have not. I have felt every day of them; I have reveled in every minute of the joy and, sometimes, the difficulty of them. I thought I would look at her on that first day of school and think, She is so old!, especially as I have thought that nearly every day of her life. But, on this occasion, it was quite the opposite. We were an hour earlier than we meant to be, having been misinformed about the schedule for the first day, and while we waited we walked around the school, watching middle school girls admiring a friend's arm cast and teenage boys running in late, hair flopping, or alternatively, sauntering about, literally too cool for school. Later, as we sat in her classroom together and parents began to depart, she looked at me with great big eyes beginning to swim with tears, grasped my hand tightly, and begged in a whisper, Please stay! Don't go to our home without me! She looked so tiny for such a big school.

I said whatever soothing words I could, and as I stood up to leave, I saw her set her jaw and fix her eyes on the paper she was coloring, determined to be brave. She did not watch me walk out of the room. I was so proud, and yet my heart broke at the same time; at that instant she embarked on a whole world of experiences, six hours a day of them, that I will have very little to do with, aside from having chosen where she would have them. Much of what will happen during that time, or how she will feel about it, I will never know, no matter how many questions I ask or how close our relationship may be. When she was about eighteen months old, I was trying to spare her some pain or another and was suddenly shocked to realize that this was her life, not mine, and that the pains and joys were uniquely hers, no matter how much I might want to (and try to) own them. I realized that again at the end of preschool when, looking through the memory book her school sent home, I found that I had heard about none of the activities from her. None, not even the really cool ones. I had asked her probing questions every single day about what she had done and with whom she had played, and had received very flat answers in return, and annoyance if I pressed her more.

So I will let her have her life for these six hours a day because I have no choice in the matter. Her life belongs to her alone. All I can do is love and teach in the moments we have together, and pray for wisdom enough to place her in the right places at the right times, and to be there and ready to listen when she does want to share with me. Because those moments, the ones when she pours her heart out or gives some detail in passing, those are what we parents live for. That is the Best Feeling Ever!, as the new kindergartener herself would say. One might even say they are Occasions.

ten years

That first August was unbearably hot. I arrived with one suitcase and a round-trip airline ticket, convinced it was nothing but a graduation trip. I did pack a few resumes in my carry-on, though, just in case. On the first evening of my visit, looking across the Hudson from New Jersey to Manhattan, I was struck with a sudden conviction that the metropolis that lay before me was to be my new home and, at the same moment, besieged by an intense revulsion at the very thought. I pictured hoardes of type-A workers in miniature, scurrying around shadowy, litter-strewn sidewalks and streets and up and down subway stairs, like rodents. For several nights afterward, I lay awake in bed at my friend Laura's apartment in Hoboken as summer thunderstorms beat outside the window, listening to Norah Jones on my iPod to distract myself from the nervousness that constricted my midsection like a corset, convinced it could not all work out, and not sure I wanted it to. I prayed desperately for aid and wisdom, though exactly what I wanted them for was a bit unclear.

When my friend Dodge called a few days into my visit to say that the girl who had been subletting his Upper East Side apartment had bailed, and did I want to stay there until he found someone else, Laura and I took a bus into the city to see the place. From the street we pushed through a pair of ugly brown doors and went directly to the stairs, alongside of which sat a collection of large plastic trash bins. It was a long climb to the fourth floor. Once we were actually inside the apartment, having gained access using a set of malfitted keys I had picked up from a friend of the friend who was "officially" renting the place, it was only slightly less discouraging. The high ceilings, marble fireplace, and large bedroom were less noticeable than the layers of grime covering the walls and window frames and the dust floating in the dim afternoon sunlight. The closets were full of Dodge's old stuff, which I would later ship to him via Media Mail in a dozen large boxes, and the toilet wouldn't flush without repairs.  When I sank onto the mustard leather Mission-style armchair in the corner--a street find, I later learned--it exhaled with a distinct scent of age and rot that I can still smell when I picture it. Laura, who had been in the city for a year before marrying and relocating to Hoboken, asked me how much the rent would be.

"$1,050," I answered, the number sounding impossibly large.

"Take it," Laura said emphatically.

I cancelled my return flight. Later that same week, an internship fell into place when I, the newly-minted Humanities graduate, mentioned to an acquaintance that I was looking to go into public relations, not knowing he worked for a corporate PR firm. My acquaintance proved to be a scoundrel and a liar, who blamed me for his many mistakes and took credit for my few successes, but the internship paid almost enough to cover the rent, and kept me in the city long enough to decide that I could make a life for myself here.

Those first six months were like standing in front of a screaming jet engine, trying to resist being sucked in. I would wake at six a.m. and put on one of my two new suits, purchased with credit card debt, or one of the couple of dresses I had packed in my suitcase and that had, until then, been worn only for church and wedding receptions. Outside, invigorated by the cool morning air and youthful ambition, I walked with a purposeful stride toward the subway. A block or two from the 77th Street Station, what had been a few straggling pedestrians grew into a teeming mass of similarly attired professionals, until at last we descended the stairs in a crush, passing through turnstiles and onto the six train, pressing ever closer until we formed a single, sweaty block that swayed together with the motion of the train. A long day's work, then home again the way I had come. By the time I walked in the door at eight p.m. I was so tired that I would collapse onto the couch and fall asleep, often waking the following morning still in my clothes. And then I would do it all over again. At the end of the month I would put my meager earnings with some of the money my parents were loaning me on a monthly basis into an unmarked envelope and walk to an old barber shop a few blocks away, where I would say I had something for Tony. I would hold out the envelope and someone would slide it under the cash register. I never asked questions. Neither did they.

Every Tuesday after work I would buy a whole rotisserie chicken at Dallas BBQ, a box of oats, and a head of lettuce at Citarella, from which I would glean a week's worth of breakfasts and dinners. Lunch was pizza-by-the-slice, unless by some good fortune there had been a meeting with clients at work, which meant catering leftovers. I also met a few kind men who were happy to provide a young intern with a decent meal out in exchange for conversation and a moderately pretty face to look at across the table. Without them I may have starved. Saturdays I would go to the Metropolitan Museum to sketch or walk down Madison Avenue looking in shop windows, and in the evenings, if I didn't have a date, I would work on the apartment, eking what little cleanliness and order I could out of the outrageously neglected space. I would listen to old BBC comedies on the little television that had come with the apartment and, standing on an old metal filing cabinet, wash walls or paint trim until it looked halfway decent. It did occur to me occasionally to wonder, if I were to fall and fatally injure myself, how long it would be before someone noticed I was missing. Weeks, I reckoned.

In early October my parents came to visit, bringing the remainder of my useful belongings and hoping to reassure themselves of my well-being. We drove upstate to visit my grandparents, who were temporarily serving as missionaries there. It was a welcome escape, if only for a weekend. We walked through woods of intense green and breathed clean air, and I felt bathed in the warmth of familial affection. When my parents had to return me to the city, my father stood at my apartment door for a long time with a hand resting on the knob, looking extremely reluctant to leave. My mother later confessed that she had cried for days afterward. My own feelings of loneliness and confusion about why I was staying were palpable. Nightly prayers were fervent and accompanied by tears.

The difficulties began to ease. I found a roommate to cover half the rent and began to make friends, including the one I would eventually marry. A more established female colleague took me under her wing and taught me how to properly hail a cab and gave me useful encouragement when the jerk who had gotten me the internship began to undermine my efforts to turn it into a real job. I found five hundred dollars on my first solo cab ride and the driver insisted that I keep it, as cash could not be turned in to the lost and found. Steve and I moved from friendship to dating. And by the time I went home for Christmas, there were still plenty of questions--would our relationship succeed, what would I do next, now that my internship had finished and I was no longer interested in PR--but whether or not I would stay in New York was not one of them. I had found my place in the world.

corner makeovers + a cautionary tale, part i

It may not fit any clinical definition, but I think I have been suffering from a rare form of postpartum depression for the last few months. I adore the baby and have frequent feelings of joy and well-being with regard to my children and husband, but shortly after the baby's birth our apartment, once my peaceful haven in our busy city life, became a constant source of rancor to me. 

It began the first or second night home from the hospital. Our beautifully-tufted tuxedo sofa, in all its platinum velvet glory, began shedding its buttons. Whenever one sat down there was the possibility that when he or she rose, a button would come along. Within our complaints about our now-weekly sofa repairs, for which we invested in a set of sturdy upholstery needles, Violet  saw opportunity. She became adept at removing the buttons manually. Watching her from my perch on the couch, newborn babe in arms, I saw choking hazards, thirty-six of them. Not only that, but the buttons that remained were brutally uncomfortable, with a tendency to poke one in the backside with every shift in position. Perhaps they always had, we just hadn't spent sufficient time on the sofa to know it. As it was now our primary resting spot, day and night, we were literally developing welts and bruises. Something had to give, and it was going to have to be me and my Old Hollywood upholstery dreams.

During the after-Christmas sales, I found a big, down-filled, linen-slipcovered sofa. A family sofa. We resigned ourselves to it, by which I mean I wiped my tears and found my beloved tuxedo a home with the cool young couple who occasionally babysits for us, and Steve tried to suppress his exultation at finally having a sofa that would be suitable for both slouching and spooning. While we waited the requisite six weeks for delivery, there was another casualty. The living room rug, which had been part of the design calculations when we purchased the sofa, suffered a fatal blow. Violet, keyed up after a long week with a cranky mother and without her nightly wrestling bouts--Daddy was out of town on business--threw a shoe across the living room, where it hit a large dish of takeout sauce and catapulted it into the air. The dish landed face down on the rug, which greedily drank up its contents. I wasn't sure how long it would take for the sauce to become rancid, but it wouldn't be more than a couple of days. There was a brief debate between replacing the rug with an identical jute one, which was durable and design neutral, or getting tufted wool that would be softer underfoot and better for horseplay with the kids. Once again, comfort won the day. I found a yellow and cream Thomas Paul rug with a tree design, which seemed like it would fit with the new scheme.

So there I was with a handsome new sofa and rug, lucky girl. There should have been nothing to complain about. But as I nestled into the couch eight times a day to feed the baby, sleep-deprived and in a hormonally heightened state, I couldn't get comfortable. I felt irked, irrationally, that my visual equilibrium had been disrupted. Everything felt beige and mustard yellow. With the only free parts of me, one hand and two eyes, I began obsessively poring over design magazines and blogs, as well as the daily sales online at One Kings Lane and Gilt. Convinced I had found the solution, a grey Rococo rug from Designers Guild, that would return us to normalcy, I tried to ebay the Thomas Paul in order to be able to afford it. When that didn't work, I became fixated on our "need" for a colorful throw for the sofa, purchasing one at some point that was, when it arrived, a grape color that clashed dramatically with the marigold of the rug. I thought salvation might lie in having a blue and white bowl for flowers on an end table to add a pop of color. We needed a wing chair so that Steve would have the reading corner he was always saying he wanted. The walls felt appallingly empty as they closed in on me. Did they need paint, mirrors, art, demolition? White now felt unfinished and bland, not classic. The chandeliers, which I had preferred unembellished when the living room was platinum, now felt barren. I had crystals in the closet a few feet away, purchased five years ago, but was powerless to attach them with a baby on my lap and a four-year-old crawling all over me. I began looking the other way when I walked through the front hallway, feeling that it was unwelcoming. I would lie awake in the middle of the night debating paint colors and wall decor, and throw pillows. Oh, the throw pillows!

Our apartment no longer felt like a home, our home, homey. That my feelings might be a reaction to our new family configuration, and not that of our living room, occurred to me, but that acknowledgement did nothing to ease the feelings themselves. When a friend who was living in the midst of a gut-renovation that had yet to supply a wall for the bathroom or a ceiling of any kind, sank into an armchair in our living room and, with a sigh, said that it felt so civilized, I insensitively replied that I hated it, before apologizing and nearly bursting into tears. Sample paint squares in various greys, pastels, and hot pink took over the walls in the kitchen and master bedroom. Violet, who loved all this insanity, made "sandwiches" of fabric samples for the tufted ottoman that I thought would restore glamour to our lives. She browsed piles of rejected wallpaper samples and taped the most girlish ones to her own bedroom walls, insisting that they, too, needed redoing. She spent an hour rearranging throw pillows at Lilian August while I looked for a table, and had to be bribed to leave. I worried that I was ruining my child forever, turning her into an implacable aesthete, just like her mother. I read the Gospel of Matthew through the myopic lens of my obsession and took from it that I was creating a whited sepulchre rather than a home. I felt chastised and depressed, but couldn't seem to do anything about it.

And then, the clouds began to part. The baby started sleeping nights and we resumed a regular social calendar. We were going on weekend outings to Brooklyn again and planning trips for the summer. I ordered a large white mirror for the living room and found a gilt one at the antiques fair, and for once they worked. As the mirrors and crystals were hung, enlivening the living room and entry hall, the urge to paint retreated. The baby swing in the corner of the living room swapped places with the rocking chair in Violet's room, and just like that, we had our reading corner. I found brass nesting hooks to organize the perpetual mess of coats, bags, and umbrellas that made it impossible to use the hall bench. The ivory cashmere throw that resided on our previous sofa, purchased in Mongolia by my father-in-law, found its way onto the new one. Violet made me a vase for the living room for Mothers' Day.

As those two small corners of our home took shape and life gradually returned to normal, or the "new normal," as we have come to call it, many of the projects that seemed essential only a couple of months ago fell by the wayside. With the ebb of postpartum hormones and a few full nights of sleep, a new patience emerged, or rather, my former patience returned, one that acknowledges that the projects that truly need doing can wait until we have the time and means to tackle them. In the meantime, a big wide world awaits the four of us outside these walls, and our home will have a well-earned vacation from us for a while. (And I think I will revisit Erich Fromm's anti-materialism treatise To Have or To Be? as part of my summer reading, just in case any embers of imbalance remain.)

Hall, before:

After:

Living room, before:

After: