Here Lies Hope

by Seattle Mamacita at Mama Mia No Sabia
Posted on October 26, 2007

Just before I slipped into the operating room for my D & C, my Mama caught my arm and whispered, If you're scared chiquita sing a song. Think of your song right now and sing it loudly.

Under a fiery Autumn sun, I couldn't get that song out of my head as we planted the tree that my dear hermana Bgirl gave us in memoriam, a plant she chose especially because it blooms in the dead of winter even when the ground is hard, cold and unforgiving.

There is something beautiful about this kind of resilience, the notion that this tender creature can thrive under the harshest of conditions. Read more...

light a penny candle

by bon at cribchronicles
Posted on October 15, 2007

i don’t do ritual very well. i do not know how seriously to take it, whether it requires of me a solemnity and focus i can seldom sustain. i long for it, for the way it imbues acts with meaning, with signification, but i skitter from it too…unable to trust myself to do it justice.

but at 7 pm tonight, while i was in the midst of running out for circuit training class (a passing fancy, i fear), and Dave was giving Oscar his bath, i lit a candle.

we stopped for a minute in the noise and the haste and the splashing, and lit a candle in the bathroom and turned out the lights. we watched the flame flicker across the porcelain and cast long shadows on the wall, and we watched Oscar’s eyes grow big and black and full of magic. and we told him about his brother, spoke him by name. and we laughed a bit, and tears spashed in O’s bathwater, and duck silhouettes were cast on the tub wall. it was…kinda nice. to not split myself, on any level. to be there in the most mundane of circumstances, present at bathtime to both my children, the living and the dead. Read more...

The things that bind

by Aliki2006 at World of One Thousands Different Things
posted on August 8, 2007

Yesterday, pulling away from the college where I teach, I drove past a homeless man pushing one of those old-fashioned baby carriages. It was, somewhat stereotypically, filled with all sorts of random things and probably also personal belongings. I wondered where he was headed, so purposefully, in the 99 degree heat, with that rusty old baby carriage filled with remnants from his life. I always have an incredible desire, at moments like that, to see the story to its end, so to speak. I wanted to follow that man, watch where he went with that carriage, but even then I wouldn't have had all the answers, only more questions; perhaps that same voyeuristic desire to get at someone's life through their things--their artifacts--is what drives some of us (myself included) to wander through estate sales, thinking about the stories behind a silver spoon, or a glass bowl, or a collection of books.

But I drove off and he soldiered on, purposefully, pushing that carriage up the hill, one foot after the other, headed who knows where, in a heat that must have weighed on him like many bricks. Read more...

birthright

by bon at cribchronicles.com
Posted on August 4, 2007

i have been watching Oscar play with little boys these past few weeks. the majority of the babies he’s known and interacted with on any regular basis since his birth - among friends, at the sitter’s - have been girls, and most are within a month or two of his own age. but the summer and all the visitors have brought boys. slightly older boys, born in late 2004 or 2005, most of them. just slimming out past the toddler stage, words beginning to tumble from their mouths in complexities my own boy watches with wonder, and puzzlement.

Oscar seems to like these older creatures, these running, laughing, jumping, talking boys. he tries to emulate them, ranging further afield across the lawn as they do…studying their toys and their movements, trying to take some for his own. he is open and friendly, if sometimes oblivious to their rights of possession, but he’s surprised me with how willing he’s been to share with them, to offer them his treasures, his favourite books and bath squishies, to court their favour. Read more...

Bees and Dying

by Deb at Tired Mummy
Posted on August 1, 2007


I was working out in my garden this afternoon, cutting off the dead flowers, pulling weeds, watering. It's only August first but it feels late in the year already. Last night was cold here and it was a reminder that fall isn't that far away. We have a beehive in our garage. We generally tend to ignore each other, the bees and the people but it's hard to do that sometimes. As the days start to get shorter and the nights get cooler the bees start dying. There was a bee walking in circles on the driveway today, unable to fly but still trying to get home. Eventually there will be a line of their dead bodies leading out from the hive, scattered across the sidewalk and lawn, all of them heading home in a line, dying in mid flight. It makes me sad to see so many of them dead and yet I know it is the way, all things die. Read More...

Doors, Shut and Open

by andrea at a garden of nna mmoy
Posted on July 18, 2007

One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Too true.

Toys, for instance. The baby carrot hasn't been seen since April, and the baby bunny is getting hungry. The little doll girl's skirt. The green shovel. All will be uncovered no doubt when we pack up the house.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

The hours badly spent are accumulating--mostly on the computer, writing emails when I have a million other things to do.

Or books. Magazine subscription forms. Email addresses. Telephone numbers. Deadlines and promises. Minor losses, slipping away; putting things down, forgetting to pick them up again. Apologies piling up in summer snowdrifts. "Sorry, sorry; overwhelmed, busy, forgetful, stressed. I forgot." Losing peace and losing sleep. Read more...

Plain Truths and Phallacy

by Kate at Sweet/Salty
Posted on June 29, 2007

I am not good enough for him, and I don't say this fishing to be convinced otherwise. It's the plain truth.

He is a living Old Spice commercial, all impeccable goodness. He kills bugs on-demand and airplanes our son until his legs ache and smells like woodsmoke and knows how to whistle grass and stays out until he collapses building rock walls, restoring clapboard, painting, pruning the roses, refinishing the tiller of a neighbour’s sailboat. Read more...