Tag: friendship

Art, Children, Friends

Love before Love

smirkpretty

Valentine's Soup

Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.

– Elie Wiesel

Bug creeps out of his bed and tiptoes into my room. “Mommy, I made twenty-eight bowls!” His eyes are far too bright for this ungodly hour. For the third time, I walk him back to his room and perch next to him on the bed. He has been drawing a Valentine’s Day picture. The pink and red markers are running to chalky streaks.

“You know it’s well past time for sleep, buddy.”

“I know, but see?” He starts to color in the legs of the lone person on the page, already forgetting why he called me in. Continue reading “Love before Love” →

Happy Days, Mindfulness

Happy 100 Days: 31

smirkpretty

We stand in the mist outside the restaurant stretching out our goodbye. One of the servers lingers by the back door smoking a cigarette and peering into his cellphone. Streetlights yellow the asphalt. The rain let up hours ago but it feels like it could start to fall again now.
 
“I don’t know if I’m saying too much,” she says. I want to tell her that a 12 year friendship allows for speaking versions of the truth that are hard to choke down. And anyway, tonight’s version will not stay. This right here is not anything like the last time we stood in the same spot on a June night two summers ago. I had just celebrated my 5th anniversary by realizing my marriage was over. This friend listened to me gasp through the dawning awareness that life would never again look anything like it almost had.
 
Now, it is a birthday dinner with gossip and giggles.
 
“Oh, just say it,” I tell her.
 
“It’s just. . . well, don’t let your fears about money consume you.” She nods to herself and looks at me with something like apology. Over our brown rice and sweet veggies, I had told her all about the condo. About how life is about to become even tighter. About how I still wheedle Giovanni about earning power and crack beans-and-rice gallows humor no one finds funny anymore.  She goes on. “I see what that narrow focus on money can do to a person. With my mother, it’s a real wake-up call. She has always had enough. She still does. But a day doesn’t go by that she isn’t obsessed with how she will make ends meet.” She pauses. Then,in a quiet voice, “It’s a miserable way to live.”
 
I take this in. “It’s a funny thing about abundance, isn’t it?” I say. “How if you start believing that you have enough, then you start to find these reserves of energy and creativity that make it possible to have enough.”
 
She laughs. “If I took half the time I spent worrying about things and used it on projects, just imagine how much I could accomplish!”
 
We hug and say our good nights. As I head home, I chew on the truth of her advice. She is right, of course. When I am rested and right in my head, it is as if I wake up in a parallel universe. “Look at all this,” I marvel. “Look how much is right here!” On these rare days, maybe one in a year if I am lucky, the whole earth falls open and offers herself up to me.
 
Love in abundance. Security in abundance. Resources, ideas, opportunities in abundance. Creativity is a river. Truth spills from unlikely mouths. The bond between my son and me caulks the fissures in the universe. The clock’s tempo shifts and the day spreads a blanket under the sun and reclines there, leaving room for everyone.
 
At an edge of the clearing,a breeze parts the trees and reveals the hidden trail.
 
There will be plenty to eat on the journey. There will be plenty of time to rest. There will be plenty to learn and plenty of companionship.
 
There will be plenty.
 
Right here is plenty.
 

Uncategorized

Happy 100 Days: 45

smirkpretty

She asks me how to tag the posts. I tell her any words that capture the essence of the content will do. She considers her options. “Everyone must use ‘gratitude,'” she says.
 
If only.
 
Afternoon light creeps in through the endless windows and churns to warmth the mango walls edged in cream. Her grown son is on the sofa doing his own work. He overhears our circuitous meanderings through the wilds of WordPress, and I catch him grinning. He takes a photo of us. We are too absorbed to look up to cheese for the camera. We manage to create her gravatar and a profile picture, and that bright smile of hers begins to leave its traces across the internet.
 
She is bubbling at the edges. Who would not be tickled at what we are attempting? She asks me to pause before tripping on to setting up an About page. In her notebook, she jots down “Gravatar,” and “Add Post” and “Dashboard.” She tries to number the steps, but sequence is not the way the interface works. It is cross-hatched and concentric (web-like, I daresay).
 
She recounts the story of the Young Monk, Old Monk , and we laugh as she peers into the screen trying to recall which button will get her to the page where a person just writes. She clicks her her first post to life. Her second and third, she whips right through. Less than an hour in, and my help is already unnecessary. I hold my breath as she hovers over the “publish” button. She clicks, and we both wiggle and pump our fists in the air.
 
Alive! The words are waking up, stretching out into the virtual world where anyone anywhere can stumble across them. It is a great contribution, this choice to learn past the boundaries for the sole purpose of marveling aloud.
 
She types in her tags. She chooses Gratitude.
 
I choose it, too.
 
I also choose Friendship. And Learning. And Perfect.
 
And Welcome.
 
And This.
 

When the flower is sated,
the stunted fifth stamen,
secret and invisible below the bee’s belly,
awaits his departure,
then lifts like a drawbridge
and shuts the door.
 
From “Upland Suite” in Sun in an Empty Room by Maryhelen Snyder.

 

Uncategorized

Happy 100 Days: 62

smirkpretty

My pirate boy races down the neighbor’s driveway with his ninja friend. Light from paper bag lanterns dances low against blacktop. The two disappear into a pool of ink oozing from hedges. For all we know, they have slipped into the underworld. Silence. Dark. After a beat, the knock and the sing-song “trick or treat” drift back up towards us. The door closes and a gauze ghost billows from clothesline. The boys cut behind the houses, gone into night. We call and call but they do not respond. A few moments later, we hear them again, chattering as they clomp back up the hill. “Mommy! I got a soda!” Comparing the heft of their booty and ogling their matching ring-pops, they wind dizzy circles around each other. Candy measured, they break to spar with foam swords before charging off towards another doorway ringed with bones.
 

Children, Co-Parenting, Outdoors, Purpose

Happy 100 Days: 79

smirkpretty

Tee is responsible for

  • drinks
  • ice
  • cookies
  • fruit platters
  • a camera
  • sending invites
  • crafting a scavenger hunt for the playground and nature trail outside the rec center

I am in charge of

  • lego cake
  • paper goods
  • birthday signs
  • cheddar bunnies
  • goodie bags
  • having a stack of pizzas delivered hot at 1:15pm

Continue reading “Happy 100 Days: 79” →

Uncategorized

Happy 100 Days: 94

smirkpretty

 
At the Colonial Farm Park, we walk back into 1771. It is all bonnets and woolen trousers. The family living there hangs tobacco in the barn to dry. The cast-iron belly of a pot hangs low over a fire that heats a potage of turnips, onions, and potatoes to boiling. The children are at work pulling “mile o’minute” from the fence with large wooden rakes. The skinny black cat is stuck in the tree, but one of the women uses a thick branch to help him down. As soon as he is back on the ground, he races off to terrorize the chickens.
 
Bug and his friend scoot around the corner to get in on the action when the clutch of young people returns from rounding up a loose piglet. A boy tosses darts made of corn cobs through a hoop. The girls spread their skirts and rest in the shade before supper. They show the two children from the future their dolls made of twisted corn husks wrapped in scraps of hand-dyed wool.
 
The place is inches away from one of the most congested metropolitan areas in the country. Or rather, what will become such a place in another 250 years. My friend’s little boy points out a cumulus cloud. A leaf falls into the collar of his shirt and he giggles. I hear the geese jabber at someone passing over the hill.
 
Time passes. Maybe a long time, maybe not. My friend and I talk, sitting on stumps outside the warming face of the log house where garlic dries in the rafters. Bug and his buddy are somewhere out of sight. A chicken squawks its disapproval at the relentless kitten. Eventually, Bug comes around to see me.
 
“Mommy, do you know what we are doing?”
 
“I have no idea.”
 
“We’re building a dollhouse.”
 
We rise and shake of the torpor. Indeed, he and my friend’s daughter have collected fallen sticks and sleeves of bark, gathered stones, overturned logs. They continue to balance these mismatched building block across one another, higher and wider. All around them, the skirts spread, the bonnets loll. No one speaks. Somehow, the house is erected.
 
My friend and I sit some more. Later, we wake, and 20 years has passed. The sun has moved our rough seats into the shade. We shiver a little and pull sweaters back over our sunburned shoulders. When we leave, we find the children have assembled the corn-husk family in its new quarters. The rooster struts past, swishing his black-ringed tail. The kitten watches from a distance. Everyone is ready for winter.
 

 

Uncategorized

Happy 100 Days: 99

smirkpretty

We only see each other in passing after months and months apart. She lives too far and I have the kid. She keeps reminding me she has never met my son, which is sort of extraordinary considering how much a part of me she feels. We make plans again to get together. We mean it every time.
 
She knew me before Tee. Back then, we walked together along the river and ate heaps of pancakes at the little grill where she sometimes worked. She always was the finest waltz partner. That has not changed. She lifts my arm up and over to twirl my cloddish feet in the most elegant of arcs.
 
After, in a dark corner away from the whirling dancers, we huddle together and gossip. I have known her for a decade at least. Longer? Yes, so we discover. A dozen years. Amazing.
 
We laugh like schoolgirls. Like sisters. I know the funny way she rolls her eyes, and feel what lives in layers there: the tenderness down under the scar down under the sarcasm down under the sugary flutter of the lashes. She knows my history so I don’t have to masticate all over again that mouthful of ineffective words just to get her up to speed. We get right to the laughing.
 
It is hard to believe either of us is so much older than we were then. We still circle back around to the same silly patterns. We are still always who we have always been. For once, this is a reason for hilarity rather than angst. Just leaning close to her welcome skin for 10 minutes, that fleeting return to the familiar, puts the fizz back in my tired blood. We hug good night with more promises of visits. She returns to the dance floor and I head to the parking lot. I cruise out onto the Beltway feeling the strangest of sensations. What is that, I wonder? Serenity? Happiness? Something new, but also like coming home.