Author Archives: Amelia

Revisiting

Posted in Asher, Holidays, Motherhood by

Hiya.

In (belated) honor of Mother’s Day, I thought that I would share a post that I wrote in 2011. I think that Asher was about 18 months old when I wrote this, but I’m pretty sure that I will be thinking about these car window down moments when he’s 40.

Car Windows Down

Yesterday when I picked Asher up I instinctively reached for the AC button, not wanting the car to be too hot or too cold and started to roll the windows up.  Before I clicked the button though, I looked in the backseat to see Asher’s downy red hair blowing straight up in the wind and he had both arms up in the air feeling the wind move through his fingertips with his eyes closed and the biggest grin on his tipped up face.  He was feeling the world, I could see it.

He was so beautiful in that moment.

So instead of rolling the windows up, I rolled the other two down and we drove on for 35 miles in the noisy sunshine filled cabin of our car singing the ABCs a little too loudly (me) and waving arms wildly in the wind (him) and as I was cruising down the highway a thought filtered through my mind that was so striking I had to stop in the middle of L-M-N-O-P to catch my breath.

I’ve known my whole life that this moment with my child was coming.

My mom used to pick me up from Mr. Ron’s (if you want to see my mama get all atwitter, ask her about Mr. Ron sometime) where I spent my preschool days doing the things that kids in Montessori preschools do.  One of my earliest and most distinct memories is of one of those afternoons in the car with my mom, or most likely a lot of those afternoons mashed into one golden moment; memory is broad-sweeping in its desire to distill.  Anyway, she worked as an educator in the hospital and so her workdays were marked in my mind with skirts and suit jackets, but in this memory I see her as I so often did, driving down the highway with all of the windows down in our blue Toyota Tercel (later dubbed the Blue Goose by my brother) both of our hair flying, her skirt pulled up over her knees, jacket off and in the passenger seat, fingers claiming a little of the blowing hair with her left hand and twirling it absentmindedly with her elbow crooked on the rim of the open window, her right hand on the steering wheel.  And that’s it, that’s the extent of the memory, but there we are, two women at opposite sides of the female spectrum, and I remember how free I felt, and I remember thinking how free she must have felt too.  I remembering thinking, we’re in this thing together.

Yesterday, in my own car, with my own son in the backseat, I could see the images of my mother and myself superimposed over the joy-filled bodies of Asher and me and it was one of those halting full-circle moments.  To feel that long-ago formed memory from the child’s perspective, I see my mother that I loved, confidently driving us home to dinner and bedtime kisses, patiently listening to me rattle on about all of the things that I never stopped talking about as a child.  To feel that memory now from a mother’s perspective, I think about my mom knowing that she was going home to an unraveling marriage, that she would have to cook for us, get a little girl settled for sleep, and a budding teenage boy settled from his own brand of divorced heartache, and I wonder what thoughts swept through her mind as the wind filled our car and blew us on home.

Just a couple of years after those car window down drives home, my mom would fall in love with her life-long partner, my brother would disappear into the world of college, we would settle into the house that I came to know as my childhood home, and the car window down drives would be replaced with my adolescent desire to control everything with air conditioning and radio stations.  But.  I can’t help but think that I can still remember a little of that acute observance that young children possess, and that my 4-year-old mind was watching my mom closely to figure out how to be a woman one day.  I can’t help but think that the beautiful abandon that I witnessed twenty five years ago reared its head again yesterday.

Part of parenthood is falling madly in love with your child, falling in love with parenting your child, learning your own thoughts and watching them change as you start to think like a parent.  But another astonishing (and I mean that, I’m not being cute here) thing about becoming a parent is seeing your parents for the first time.  It’s not like I didn’t know that was going to happen as one of the clichéd rites of passage into claiming a child as your own, that I didn’t know that I would one day empathize more with my parents than I ever believed possible, it’s just that I couldn’t have possibly known what it was going to feel like until it happened.  It overwhelms me.  Feeling what my mother in particular felt towards me, feeling the shame of abusing that love 1,000 times throughout my life, having an acute awareness of how potent it is, how fierce it is, how all-consuming it is to love a child, and finally understanding that I am on the receiving end of that love is overwhelming.  It overwhelms me because it’s such a powerful gift, and because I realize that Asher may not ever know the depth of my feelings for him unless he decides to one day have a child of his own.

One of my wonderful friends has been talking recently about her strong desire to be able to genuinely and effectively express the breadth of her gratitude to her husband as they’ve become parents together.  I’ve been thinking about that a lot because the truth is, there’s no gift that says thank you well enough when those are the kinds of the things on the table that you’re trying to thank someone for.  What I’ve come up with is that the biggest expression of gratitude is in our actions, and in this case it’s in the way that we love.  The kind of partner or parent or child or friend that we are and the level of thoughtful respect and care that we charge ourselves with in those roles.  I will never know how to say thank you adequately enough to my parents, all four of you, but I do know how to love my child as much as I possibly can, and I can pledge part of that love as a devotion to all that you have given me in your own ways.  I know that I will make mistakes as a mother, but I hope that in my triumphs my parents see a reflection of themselves and know that they are being honored and that I am, in my way, always whispering thank you.

My final thought is this: when Asher is in the backseat thinking his thoughts, is he observing a woman?  Someone who rolls the windows down and sings badly and looks so grown up?  Does he also see a skirt pulled up to free knees, an arm draped casually, a level of confidence that children assume comes with height?  Sometimes I think he might, others I’m beyond sure that my shortcomings are palpable. In either case, I am reminded of what my little brain knew way back then, which is that if nothing else we’re in this thing together, wind blown hair and all, and then I just turn the radio up a little louder and marvel at my beautiful child and the inevitable truth that we are marching forward, steadily on.

Taking Care

Posted in General by

And now for a PSA:

I was raised by a nurse. My husband is a nurse. Several of my dear friends are nurses. Many of you are slogging through nursing school right now. When I gave birth, there were two people with us: our midwife and a nurse named Felicia who I still would stop in the street and hug (much to her horror, I’m sure) were I to see her again. In today’s medical system, nurses are becoming increasingly responsible for our care, and they have one of the most prolific, strange, and often gross jobs on the face of the earth. It’s true. I’m fascinated by it, but after hearing about even one of Drew’s work days in the world of Critical Care, all I’m left with is a sense of gratitude that there are people that are willing to do what he and many, many others do every day because…geeeehhhhh, you know?

At the dinner table when we talk about Asher growing up, he will boldly announce that he’s going to “work in the hospital with Popi and make the patients feel better”. My heart swells. I’ve said this a lot over the years, but Drew has insane days at work where he helps people die, grieve, stay alive, poop, eat, breathe…and then he comes home and says, ‘it was pretty busy today’. And that’s that. That completely blows my mind, but it’s his superpower. He’s at peace with everything the body is capable of, and because of that, he can give incredible care.

Over the course of his career, there have only been a few times when he’s brought work home, and it’s never because of what the body did, it’s because of the relationships that he witnesses as people are dying in the hospital. Most recently it was a wife saying goodbye to her husband, looking at Drew and saying simply, “he’s my best friend”. They were in their 70s. It shook Drew, not because the man died, but because he knew the grief that lay waiting for his wife. Drew does a lot of amazing life-saving blow-your-mind kind of stuff at work, but I think that so much of what nurses do is to be the one to hold a hand, accept a hug, and calmly bear witness to the unbearable truths of our humanness.

In this country, we’re quick to get misty eyed about our various heroes (as we should) but during the month of May, National Nurses Month, I hope that everyone will take a minute to find a nurse to thank for their service to your community. While they may not be running into a burning building or arresting the bad guys, they are doing the unthinkable minutia that it takes to keep our sometimes very disgusting human bodies up and running. They’re the ones that sit with wives and watch a husband take the last breath that ends a 58 year marriage. They’re the ones breaking up fist fights among grieving family members (I’m’ not joking about that one), holding down hallucinating patients that are trying to find their shoes to ‘jump over the fence over there’ in the hospital room, administering chest compressions until they can’t feel their arms, giving your baby her first gentle bath; nurses do all of the medical things that we think of nurses doing, and then the work starts.

I’m supremely proud of Drew and all of the nurses that we know. I’m proud of them for giving up weekends, nights, holidays with their families to take care of the rest of us. But more than that, I’m thankful. We all are.

So that’s that. End of PSA. Go hug a nurse.

Week 19: Reckoning

Posted in Asher, Motherhood, New Baby by

There is a pinhole in the bottom of my cup and it seems that my two options for getting the contents out are letting them continue to slowly drip out of that tiny hole, or to completely punch out the bottom, and neither of these options feel very timely. I forget though that I’m a glass-all-the-way-full kinda gal and that my third option is to try to capture some it all as it proverbially runneth over. So I’m there. Somewhere between a pinhole and a floodgate. Holding a bucket. Totally normal, right?

I think the thing about this pregnancy is that I keep waiting for something to click, but second pregnancy love is a little more multi-faceted, maybe less simple. I stayed up all night the night that I found out that I was pregnant with Asher. Immediately I started talking to his little soul and the camaraderie was fast and intense. It was quiet and powerful, me and baby first, everything else second. Then between Asher and this little one, there was another one, the one that got away, and it bruised my baby-meeting optimism. And so with this pregnancy, I spent the first 12 weeks on my hands and knees, somewhat literally and figuratively. I was sick as a dog (another first) but also sick with worry that I would fall in love again, hard, and be left with a hollow core yet again, the weight of those displaced feelings anchoring me back to that isolated doubt.

Here we are at week 19 and I am ready to change my narrative. What I’ve been holding on to is not the loss of the baby, I do think that I’ve made peace with that, but it’s the betrayal that I felt from my body, the insecurity that’s come about in its wake, and it’s time to let this last little grief go. I’m almost half way through and still I get surprised every morning by my swelling shape, I still breathe a sigh of relief when I feel the first fluttering kick of the day, and I am still coaching myself along to trust the life-making process that happens inside of us. I’m converting my anxiety into a fake-it-until-you-make-it bubble of enthusiasm, and it’s working. I’m less enamored with the pregnancy perhaps, but almost ravenously excited about the end goal. The weight of this child in our arms. A gasping, air breathing, here-I-am-world cry. In many ways I think that the connection that I have with this child is one of reverence and a deep sense of being in it together.  Asher was a call, this one is an answer.

So there we have it. I am filled to the brim with absorbing these final months of just being a family of three, of negotiating Asher’s cycle of 3-year-old 8 minute emotional highs, mediums, and lows. Of navigating life with a growing child inside my body, and another one hanging all over us on the outside, of wanting to grow things in our garden, of riding the tides of my own crazy hormones, of loving this opportunity, and of finding gratitude for another day where it all seems to be working. It’s hard for me to know if what I’m experiencing is the universal experience of second-time moms, the universally silent experience of women who have lost a pregnancy, or, more likely, all of the above. I’m trying to patiently pace myself for this marathon, but the truth is, I want to sprint to the end, fold my arms around this little one and give thanks again and again for his or her presence in our lives. I want to be on the other side of this, watching those unexpectedly tiny fingers curl around ours. I want to see Asher smiling his shy smile when people ask if that is his little brother or sister. I want to be there. But for now, until September, we wait.

Thanks for capturing some of what’s in this cup with me, let’s take a stab at getting back to our regularly scheduled programming, shall we? Here are some more scenes from our world of late:

Asher’s Birthday Present

Posted in General, Motherhood, New Baby, pictures by

First I’ll let him tell you about it:

And then I’ll show you this:

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And finally, I’ll say this:

To borrow from Paul McCartney (and for the record, one of my least favorite Beatles songs) it’s been a long and winding road to make the leap from a family of three to a family of four. On the one hand, I anticipated this happening much, much sooner and on the other, it’s overwhelming (but exciting!) to be thinking about a new person in our lives. In the way that these things go, we are getting exactly what we’ve dreamed about, but we also have no idea what that dream means. I remember feeling this way when I was pregnant with Asher, knowing that we were realizing a shared hope, but also having the sense that I was searching in the dark for a flashlight every time that I tried to imagine our new life ahead. That seems to be the way with pregnancy, we wait and wait, and then there’s a first breath, and suddenly the flashlight is in your hand and all of the answers are found in the beam of that new-life light.

I remember my sweet friend Katie visiting us when Asher was younger and as I was giving him a bath and she asked me how I learned how to bathe him. I didn’t have an answer, because as it turns out, we stitch together a heavy blanket of knowledge about our children, embellishing with shared stories, research, observation, what our children teach us about their needs, and intuition. Before having one child I had no idea if I knew how to give a baby a bath. Now I will have two, and all I can do is wait patiently to discover what else it is that I have to learn, and then laugh at myself one day when I realize that I’m doing exactly the thing I never knew I could. My clever cousin told me over Easter weekend that he’s removed the phrase, “I can’t imagine” from his speech because we can always imagine…perhaps not accurately or with great clarity, but we can always tap into that possibility, and we undermine ourselves when we assume that we can’t. I would have loved this conversation any time, but I don’t think that he could have known that he was giving my pregnant brain a little life boat by reminding me that all this daydreaming that I’m doing is just another joy of being human.

So in September, on or around September 23rd to be exact, another little light will click on in our lives and we will start down the path of siblings and nighttime feedings and deep breaths of that newborn aphrodisiac, and just like that, three will become four. Here’s to you little one, to your days ahead on the inside as you prepare for the world out here, and to the great imaginings of this life. May your journey continue to be a safe and peaceful one.

And yes, I promise that I will keep feeding you watermelon.

February

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Every year I think that I want to break up with February a little more. I feel bad being so hard on a month, but of the whole year, this is the one month that I could just skip, and with good reason. It’s the dregs of winter, the no-(wo)man’s land before the promise of spring, because even if March is in like a lion, we all know how it goes out…with buds on trees and greening grass. The little lambs of spring. I don’t have any particularly hard feelings about Valentine’s, I generally like love and chocolate and we had fun sharing it all with Asher, so my distaste for this month has everything to do with my impatience. I’m impatient to leave the door open and step outside without clinching up my body, I’m impatient to gain back our outdoor living space and lifestyle, I’m impatient to see green again, I’m impatient for the car to not need to warm up, I’m impatient for bare skin and sunhats and the charming work of warm weather.

Looked at another way, February is part of the unspoken series of lessons on patience that Life seems to be certain that I need to continue to explore. I am someone that catches a whiff of a cusp and instantly I’m pushing through to the other side. I don’t enjoy being in between, and though I regularly think about the important role of ambiguity, the truth is, I don’t feel all that comfortable with it. And no month is more ambiguous than February.

In spite of this, we’re of course having a fine time and here we are at the end of the month, just two days away from March, and I am again getting excited for the month ahead, and the months that will follow. At the end of March there will be a wedding and I will be gaining one of the sassiest girls on this good (almost) green earth as a cousin-sister. Tender sprigs are poking through the frozen ground, early morning fires still fill our kitchen with a warm charm, I’ve been making biscuits, and Asher suddenly has a keen interest in dragging me to the couch for a quick snuggle from time to time. I feel much like the Virginia landscape right now…a bit dormant, but the rumblings of the new life of a change of seasons is rattling around in my core and because I can sniff the change on the horizon, I’m itching to get to it.

That’s not really such a bad feeling after all.

Maybe I don’t want to break up with you, February. Maybe I just want to see other months. You know, have some space. It’s probably not you, it’s me.

Shimmer

Posted in Asher, General, Motherhood by

On Thursday night last week, Asher’s teacher called to let me know that his name had been drawn the previous week and that it was his turn to bring home the class pet for the weekend. While I’m not terribly keen on any animal that requires a cage (being that it’s notoriously gross to clean out animal cages) I am intent on being participatory in Asher’s school stuff and thus gave a cheery response that we were looking forward to it. I didn’t realize that they even had a class pet (it’s a big room with various aquariums. Aquariums, I have learned, are integral to the preschool experience.) and asked his teacher, “what kind of pet is it?” and she responded that it was a frog named Shimmer and that Shimmer would be coming to us with a book so that we could record her adventures while she was with us. With devious images of a frog cage filled with booze and barbies in bikinis flashing through my mind, I said that we would dutifully show Shimmer a good time and record her ‘adventures’ for the weekend and then we hung up.

On Friday I reminded Asher that we were bringing Shimmer home and sure enough that afternoon there was a small but heavy black backpack hanging on his hook. I was informed that Shimmer was in the bag.

Here, dear readers, is where I made my first mistake. I did not open the backpack to examine Shimmer and I did not inquire as to what Shimmer would be eating, her zodiac sign, her favorite Beatle, or any other useful piece of biographical information. We are raising a child with moderate success, I assumed that we could wing taking care of a frog for the weekend. Plus I had already been told that there was a book in there and I figured that if the frog had a gluten sensitivity or an aversion to broad spectrum light it would be mentioned. It’s fair to say that I assumed much in this situation.

So we’re driving home and I briefly thought about the frog and wondered if it would be expensive to find its identical twin should anything unexpected occur, and then I got hot and tossed my jacket on the passenger seat (covering the backpack) and then I forgot about the frog.

Drew was working on Friday and I had plans to meet some ladies to see Silver Linings Playbook (really enjoyed it) so I was dropping Asher off with my parents where Drew would retrieve him on the way home from work. It’s been a balmy 20 degrees here for about a week and it had snowed a little earlier in the day, but the roads were fine, so after a kiss on Asher’s cheek I headed back out the door, excited to be going to a grown up movie with other grown ups who like grown up things.

I was cruising along happily until I got to the main road and looked over to see the black backpack still in the car with me. Shimmer. Given that it was only in the twenties and that Shimmer was likely used to the tropics, I knew that three hours in the freezing cold would not end well for the old girl. I dutifully turned around and drove back to my mother’s house to deposit the frog in the warm non-frog-killing climate that they enjoy and let my friends know that I was now running behind because of the turn-around. Once at my parent’s house, I got concerned that the frog might have already gone on to the great Frog Spirit In The Sky in the hour that she had spent in the freezing car, and thought that we better face the truth now in case I was going to need to call the teacher and run a recon mission to a pet store that night. Shock doesn’t really describe what I felt when we opened the backpack at my parent’s house and discovered that indeed the frog was not alive.

Ya’ll, meet Shimmer:

afterglow (1)

I share this story with all of you as a cautionary tale to prevent any epic parent-teacher miscommunications coming your way. In hindsight it seems very obvious that a three year old would not be sent home with a living creature, though I distinctly remember strapping my parents with a smelly fat hamster a time or two when I was of a class pet age. And to be fair, at no point did I ask about care instructions, mating habits, or anything else that might have led to the teacher telling me that Shimmer was a stuffed animal but…doesn’t that seem like something that would be put on the table from the get go? Would you be willing to take the class pet WHO IS A GIGANTIC STUFFED FROG WEARING A TUTU home for the weekend? Maybe just some friendly air quotes when the word “pet” was mentioned?

We all had a good laugh about it and I’ll be the first to say that I was thrilled with the way things worked out. Asher made quite a splash with his gigantic tie dyed frog at lunch on Saturday and all in all, the class pet is welcome at our house any time. Especially now that I know I can leave it in the car. Which I would never, ever do.

The end.

A day for heart

Posted in Asher, Holidays, Motherhood, pictures by

This year in honor of Martin Luther King Jr, I was thinking about all of the words that we whispered into Asher’s ear on the day that he was born…the world is here for the taking, little man, you can be anything. Even in the most dire of circumstances, I believe that every child hears some version of this on the day that he or she enters the world. If not from a mother or father, perhaps from a nurse, a family member, a social worker, but I think that nothing inspires hope like the face of a child taking a first breath. If even only for a moment, I do believe that we all start here.

We forget that as we age. We forget that we were all that baby once, that little vessel of possibility. We start to see color, money, differences, dogma, fear, selfishness, pride, partisanship and power. We forget that there was a moment for each of us when it was possible to become anything, love anyone, learn everything, become triumphant, all simply because we were born. Yesterday I was thinking about all of the children that Asher has brought into our lives and the way that their curiosity erases stigma, the way that their openness invites smiles, and the way that their intensity brings parents and people together because children are so thirsty for the experience of this world, not the divisions within it. We see examples every day of people taking one step and then another in a steady march toward this narrow brand of forgetfulness, but yesterday there were words all over the United States that were about hope and love and equality. Words that helped me to remember that every person is created equal. That every single person, every person, all of us, are created equal. Yesterday reminded me that I can be doing more to be working toward acceptance in my actions and with my words, that I too am forgetting our universal starting point and sometimes seek out what separates from us one another before looking for what is common between us. It reminded me that there is still work to do and that equality is not something that is to be earned, it is a birthright.

And on a lighter note, Asher is deeply absorbed in Richard Scarry’s Cars and Trucks and Things that Go. Heartwarming to look in the backseat and see that on a chilly Tuesday morning.

afterglow

And because why not…here’s my post from 2010 on the subject. Little has changed.

Turn to dust with style

Posted in House, pictures by

Last week was a bit of a study in contrast, which is always welcome. I traveled to New York for work and returned home in time to unpack my heels and take advantage of the warm weather to knock out some much needed and welcome yard work. I love brushing elbows with the city, with any new place really, but more and more I’m always chomping at the bit to return home to the quiet hills and my fellas.

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On Sunday it was gloriously warm (Old Man Winter must have known that we all needed a break) and Drew and I woke up reaching for our work clothes. We decided to tackle the compost bin that we’ve been wanting to build, despite the impractical nature of starting a compost pile in January. You hush. A friend had suggested that we wire pallets together for a quick (and free) bin, but Drew felt pretty strongly that since the bin will be in a pretty visible part of our yard, it needed to look a little more polished. Nothing like having something polished looking to let your banana peels turn to dirt in! So we combined the two ideas, building the majority of the body out of salvaged pallets, but Drew put his trim carpenter’s background to work to frame it out and put some ‘finished’ looking sides on it. He also built some pretty sassy doors for both bays so that we’ll be able to access the pile for turning/soil as it’s ready. This shows the pallet back (which will eventually butt up against the garden fence and won’t be visible) and the start of Drew’s frame work. It has two bays so that we can eventually have a pile going and one to grow on, quite literally. Gardening puns, anyone?

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While Drew was hammering away, I worked on cleaning out a long neglected flower bed and raked up a pretty hefty pile of leaves. As I ripped out the remnants of last summer from the flower bed I was surprised to see various bulbs making their way through the soil. Also, just to keep things real, I’ll tell you that I stayed with my family tradition of taking down Christmas for the New Year, but had left the tree on the porch because the woods seemed awfully far away the day that I was doing all of that. Compelled by the fear that it might really be Spring, I took a turn at the Highland Games and did my very best to haul it and then pitch it far into the woods. If you’re wondering if I looked graceful in this moment, the answer is a resounding no. No, I did not. But it was oddly cathartic to pitch the tree, and I did wish it well.

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Proof that it was a good day:

Back to It

Posted in General, Holidays, Motherhood by

I’ve let this slip again, haven’t I? Well let’s see if we can back to it with a promise and a confession (two of my many favorite things). The promise is more to me than anyone that might be reading (Bueller?…Bueller?…) but I promise to post at least twice a week between now and March. That seems reasonable and it’s a good exercise for me. So there’s that.

Second, the confession. 2012 became a hard year to rattle on about round about June of last year. In some ways it was just because life got so dense, and pardon the tree-laden pun (for those of you that have been following along) but I couldn’t see the forest through the trees. Or is it for the trees? Well, the point being, our cup did runneth over, mostly with heart-filling stuff, but with some heart-tugging stuff too. And because confessions are supposed to be honest, I’m going to come on out and say it. 2012 kind of kicked the shit out of me. If there is a delicate way to have such a thing done, then I’ve been on the business end of a delicate butt kicking. It was good for me. Sometimes it hurt.

So here we are, 2013, right back to it. My backside is recovering, my ego is humbled, our home fires are burning, and in the scope of the first world universe, even a tough year was undeniably a good one. As with most people, we’re setting our sights on patterning for a good year ahead, but unlike many years in the past, Drew and I both seem to be at a crossroads where the work that we want to put in this year isn’t dedicated to a trimmer waistline or a more frequently cleaned bathroom (though, let’s do those things too), but really we’re focusing on life in terms of decades. One turns 30, one starts thinking about What Comes Next. The word that I would like to give to 2013 is pivotal.

In the dreamy summer that I spent in Madison, Wisconsin nearly ten years ago, my dear friend Nelle and I would steal away with a canoe and paddle through the locks between the two lakes that hug Madison. We would paddle into one, sink down with the water, have the lock open up and glide through safely to the other side. Something big was happening around us, we were dwarfed by larger boats with big engines, but even in the narrow little canoe, we were able to stick our paddles in the water and row to what felt like the other side of the rainbow. It was thrilling and a simple enough mechanism, but one that was ultimately transformative. This year feels like that adventure. perhaps 2012 was the distance that I needed to travel between my twenties and thirties, a slow and discreet move between the prolonged adolescence that America is so fond of and my arrival into womanhood. It seems though that right now, on this day, and this point, I’m sitting in the locks watching the water slowly drain, waiting to see the gate in front of my little boat open. It seems like I might be about to paddle through to the next phase of my life.

You see why I haven’t been blogging? I’m like the weird weepy aunt at the family picnic that everyone wishes would go wandering off to find the nearest man selling a horse. Perhaps if I get all this I’m-on-the-threshold business out, I can go back to telling you things about wanting to build a chicken coop and my concern for Tuesday’s dinner. I don’t know though, there’s something different here. I needed that delicate butt kicking. It made my heart grow.

So there we go, a new year, a promise, a confession, and a long winded boat metaphor. It’s as though no time has passed at all. Happy New Year!