The rain reigns

It's raining the kind of rain that begs you to imagine waterways and deep underground wells. It's the kind of rain that runs in rivulets down dirt paths, etching out a presence there. It's the kind of rain that dredges up memories because you can't very well escape a rain like this. You're left with yourself.

I remember this rain. It rained like this when I was a kid. I used to look out my bedroom window, standing on tiptoes, at my backyard. Our yard abutted a 40-acre forest and I imagined places where I could hide from the rain, just listening to it hit the leaves above me. I used to put a leash on my dog and dress in rain pants and a raincoat and rubber boots, and go outside. Sometimes I'd bring a snack. Mostly I was excited to explore. I would often pack a journal and a pen, planning to catalogue what I saw out there. Sometimes I'd set out with a plan (find gnomes); other times I would plan simply to see how far I could go before the trees ended and I found road.

That solitude formed a part of my brain that is happiest when imagination reigns. I would sit quietly and imagine a big space up ahead of me, a life that was my own. Nevermind that I never did see a gnome or a fairy. The act of believing gave me a sense of energy and excitement. It made me feel like I could bend the ways of the world.

Age makes people stop believing in things that don't make sense. I remember a friend of mine telling me that we spend a lot of our time searching for Easy Street when in reality it just doesn't exist. This thought cracked against my heart while I sat across from her, sipping my tea and nodding my head in agreement. I might have been wearing heels. It's possible the 3-inch alteration of self is what tipped me over into a heady, sad spin. No Easy Street? But I want to believe in the idea of personal bliss. I love reading stories about people who find theirs. I love simple endings filled with a sublime sense of love, or of finding oneself, or of overcoming odds, or even of just believing in happiness enough to search for it.

I love all kinds of stories. I particularly like stories about people who refuse to believe all is as it seems. I like to think that everything gets better over time, that each small effort is a step closer to peace and satisfaction, that we become better people just be thinking about our place and by directing ourselves to where we want to be.

I think that's why I have an obsession with quiet, homey places, and the woods. I want a place in the trees that always reminds me of that sense of self that washed over me as a child, when it suddenly occurred to me that there were windows of opportunity up ahead, that destination and destiny could be altered by effort and hope.

I would like to be one of those people who deftly ties together a bunch of wildflowers from my backyard and places them in a blue vase on my driftwood mantle, where I store sand-polished rocks from the beach and spots of blue like blue glass or blue beads or an old blue marble, where everything is awash in calm, and where I know just exactly where to find my favorite pen.

I feel cluttered here. We own things we don't need. We have a junk drawer that is overwhelming. I have drawers filled with clothes I don't wear. We heard helicopters and sirens circling the neighborhood for the better part of an hour before Cora's nap time, and I thought well, now. This is not the peaceful song I want my girl to hear before she goes to sleep.

What I think I am trying to say is that I am obsessed with the ethereal. I like words like blue and sea and sky and clouds, rain and wind and magic and the future, dreams and hope and rushing and wild. I prefer to think of them than to look at the clutter on my desk or the unframed 1910 poster of Melinda's Wedding Day that I received for our wedding in 2005, and which I have been meaning to frame ever since. I continue to wash and fold my ill-fitting clothes and to look outside at the weeds.

The reason, for the moment? I have a girl calling from her bedroom. I will go open the door and lift her up and nuzzle my face into her sweet little neck. And we will go do something fun together. We have an entire, untapped afternoon ahead of us. Possibility poking its nose up from every playground and tree in town.

The first thing we shall do together? Go outside and clip some of the lilacs from our tree, and arrange them in a blue vase on our dining room table. We will put bluebells on the mantle.

Escape

We camped and hiked Deception Pass this weekend. It was just a two-day excursion but it felt like we reset our lives and everything going forward will have a new tone. I love that feeling.

We took a lot of pictures. I'll post a few here this week.

We wandered on rocky beaches, set our toes out to dry on sandy strips of sun, held hands as a family, and watched our daughter explore landscapes that made our hearts soar. We even, while Cora took an unexpected late-afternoon nap on Brian's back, clinked plastic cups of chilled sparkling wine while watching the sun make its lazy descent in the sky.

There were a lot of trees. Cora always says hello to trees. She pats them gently and gives them a sniff. There were also many bugs. She is fascinated by anything that moves, and wants to befriend whatever that might be. She tried to kiss a bug of questionable origin at our campsite; when asked not to do so, she bent down very, very close to it and said hello. She also waved.

The landscape and the sun was like a shot to our winter-weary souls. But it was the dreaminess we felt together that made me feel transported. (It is wonderful to dream alone. It is deeply comfortable to dream with a friend. Even more so to dream with a partner. The world seems to open up. Possibilities abound.)

There were long moments of gazing out at dark water catching light in the breeze, of wondering how fast we would go if the current caught us. We imagined boats, a variety of sizes and shapes, with sleeping nooks and sunny sterns; wind in our faces and little picnic baskets filled with small and delicious lunches; craggy ports and sunny scapes.

We dreamed about adventures and peaceful dwellings, old age and an old love, Cora growing up with a reverence for all living things and that which preserves them--for salt water and colored rocks and dandelion puffs, tiny bugs and warbling birds, cold night air and a sky filled with stars, views that change the way you see the world.

Reflections

As most parents often say, having a child brings a lot of laughter and love into your life. (And, often, too, a lot of sleeplessness and exhaustion.) As Cora starts her foray into toddlerhood, I am discovering a new kind of connection to her. Having a baby is very parental; it's very much focused on taking care of and changing and swaddling and rocking and soothing. Having a near-toddler is a new phase, it begins to brush against my own memories of being a wee one, navigating around my home and getting into mischief. It's when memory started. All the little connections started firing away and I began to see the world as something I was a part of, something separate and yet connected, a vast and exciting world of discoveries. Everything is new to Cora! Sometimes I can't get over that. She just keeps growing and stretching, everything is getting bigger--even her little hands and feet are noticeably wider and longer, more able to grip things and walk upon.

Nearly every morning when she wakes up, one of us will get up and bring her into our bed, where I will nurse her back to sleep. She snuggles between us, looking infinitely secure and so small next to her 6'2" dad. This morning I got up for a glass of water, and when I crept back into bed I had one of those moments when it all becomes so clear for the briefest of instants: this is my life. Those two people are my family, the ones I love more than anything else in the whole world, would break to pieces without, wait for at the end of a long day, look for in the mornings, want to hold and squeeze and cuddle. In the quiet of the morning, while light crept through our curtains, I looked at them while total gratitude ran through my veins. This is our life: three linked people--two grown-ups and a little helix of us sleeping softly between.

As I watch Cora grow into her adamant self, I find myself reflecting more on my own childhood. If I stop and ask myself to define the first memories I associate with being a kid, it is so easy--immediately I remember exploring the woodsy acreage on Bainbridge Island, the stomping ground of my first 12 years. We had the immense luck of having a 40-acre, forested backyard owned by a reclusive rich lady who never used her land. I think I spent the majority of my childhood exploring the mossy interior of those woods, making booby traps and keeping a nature log and writing bad poetry. I often set out with my sister or my friends, but what stands out the most are the days when it was just me and my dog Valley, snuffling through the land looking for fairies and gnomes, listening to the birds, making bouquets of trilliums (until I learned, to my horror, that they can take up to 15 years to first produce a flower, and, if you pick the bloom, it can take up to seven years for it to flower again), and feeling the world roll at my feet. These spaces of solitude continue to define happiness for me. I think I have been searching for that place ever since we left. I also remember getting into a lot of mischief with my sister, stealing stuff and making prank calls, trying to smoke tea bags and almost burning down our backyard. And while there are countless memories of adventures with my family, going camping on Orcas Island or Shi Shi beach, walking on rocky beaches, or helping my mom cook in the kitchen, those aren't the times that stand out first and foremost.

All the time and attention that we pour into our children is for the purpose of helping them thrive on their own. We spend their young lives trying to fill them with our love, hope with all our might that they will search for experiences that mirror the love and trust and security we hope they felt as a member of our family. And if they are able to wander into the world by themselves and feel a sense of awe, and give something of themselves that comes from a place of security, then perhaps we can credit ourselves a little bit for that. Or perhaps it is entirely to our children's credit.

I waffle on this point because we all have such different experiences. What breaks one bolsters another. What defines one is only peripheral to another. I mention this because, interestingly, sometimes my most vivid memories of my parents are negative ones. They are the breaks in the fabric of an idyllic existence, ones that began to unravel everything until our perfect home on the island became tattered and worn out, exhausted and dangerous. It has taken 30-plus years to revisit those tough times in my head and look at them with adult eyes, to understand the network of stuff that slowly broke everything down. So I wonder if there is some kind of cadence to it all, a process by which we filter through all the good and all the junk and arrive at a balanced equation that defines us. There was obviously a huge amount of good in my childhood, so many moments that surprise me when I remember them, so much dedication and kindness, so much attention and care. I give my mom and dad great credit for the parents they wanted to be. They put effort into it. I have huge respect for that.

And with the tough stuff, I got perspective. For better or worse, it makes me, me. Admittedly, when I lie on my pillow and look at my slumbering baby and incredible husband, and think about everything around me, from the memories that are so vivid they are like fixtures, to the walls of our house to the food in our refrigerator, I feel...lucky. I remember closing my eyes and wishing wishing wishing.

It is all so deeply personal. That's what I continue to arrive at. We all have our own stories: stories that we tell ourselves, stories that happened to us, stories where we become the heroic protagonists of our own fate--stories that define us in ways that inspire our present and shape our future. And at some level, we can't help comparing ourselves to each other, because that's what we do. As human beings, we look inside and then look out, and somehow place ourselves somewhere on that trajectory. Some people are so fascinated by the similarities and differences that exist between people or countries or solar systems that they make it their life work to analyze them. Some focus on our psychology, studying inner realities and drawing connections to outer experiences. Some, like my husband, are artists, have trained a huge section of their brain to memorize lines and light, shape and form, and they create new worlds for us to enter quietly, helping us play and imagine.

For some reason, I like to tell stories. Was it because my mom used to tell me I was a good writer, would sit with great attention while I read her my stories about squirrels and rabbits in the woods? Is it because I liked the quiet time, or because I have escapist issues, or because I like to study people? When do our dreams begin, and what starts them? What is the energy that draws us to our life work, and what sustains it?

The Gist of It

My main goals for this blog are to be myself--to not get all caught up in whether I sound interesting or funny or cool. To not over-edit my sentences to the point where I whittle away each word and forget to write a whole paragraph. And to write here often enough that there emerges a story of some kind, some kind of path that seems to be sort of just written word by word, but eventually gets where I want to go. That would be gratifying.

Lately I've been trying to remind myself to take things a day at a time. Day by day, I say to myself when I feel overwhelmed. Or else I'll start humming a St. Francis song, something like, "do your work and do it well, step by step go slowly." It's such an enormous concept. To just focus on the moment at hand, to zone in on the present experience and stop all the muddling about of an over-stimulated, over-tired brain. I think daily life can have a way of making people forget themselves, and that's what I am trying to battle right now. It feels too easy to get up every morning, make my tea, follow the same routine, and march forward to evening time where a good book sits next to my pillow and I read a page or two before my eyes can't stay open any longer.

Dream, imagine, happen. A lot fits in there. It's what I believe--maybe more than I care to admit: That every thought you have starts to gain energy. When you think the same thought over and over, it begins to form its own force field, it starts to have actual mass, it begins to head down its own trajectory. Suddenly there you are. But even if you're an optimist, it's very unlikely you'll pat yourself on the back for having the wherewithal to think a good thought and bring about a happy ending. You'll chalk it up to luck or chance or fate, or you might decide the stars had aligned. But my point is that I believe it is all interconnected, that it's impossible to have a thought and for that thought to not have any impact.

I put the word Dream on my daughter's wall, right above her window looking out on our backyard, and that is the only word I want her to worry about for her entire childhood.

It's so easy to look at your offspring and want to give them the world, to hand them every pearl, to wish for them every inspired moment. It's a lot harder to remember to cast your line into the vast, soupy muck of your own adult experience and believe you can pluck out the thing you've been wanting all your life.