mother

henry doesn't feel good.

isn't that one of the most terrifying sentences for a new mother? [besides, perhaps, henry's in jail or henry isn't breathing or henry is in the living room with an uncapped permanent marker...?]

the past few days i've held him endlessly as he kicks his legs and squirms and vomits and fills his pants. he'll smile occasionally, a tiny apologetic line. his cries open a giant ache: one that throbs in my head, rips across my heart, sticks in my brain.

i look at his little face, twisted and angry at the pain, and i marvel at my own mother -- who held four of us and watched us grow and put on our bandaids and held back our ponytails when we hovered over the toilet and snapped pictures before prom.

how did she do it?
she is a hero.

twilight

i jumped on the junior high bandwagon: i'm about halfway through twilight and i'm obsessed -- caught somewhere between a teenage crush and a perverse fascination.

while poor little hal gurgled and cooed through his formula this morning, i propped him in my elbow and held the novel in my other hand, racing through sentences and paragraphs to see how many times bella would brush against edward. it's ridiculous, isn't it? a few breaths into a novel and i already feel like i'm sitting in the bay of windows next to my junior high locker again. waiting with my little maroon padded trapper-keeper on my lap, hoping to see derek. wanting him to sit next to me ... really close. wanting him to touch me, even by accident. wanting him to talk to me about algebra, about our teacher in his white lab coat, about steel edged rulers, about anything -- just so long as he was talking to me. [unfortunately, i haven't exactly been able to stir up the same amount of attention for my husband when he talks about teeth and root canals and amalgam fillings.]

there is nothing more intoxicating than a high school crush. and stephenie meyer got it perfectly right, in a fantastic tongue-in-cheek, yet entirely serious: "i noticed that he wore no jacket himself, just a light gray knit V-neck shirt with long sleeves. again, the fabric clung to his perfectly muscled chest. it was a colossal tribute to his face that it kept my eyes away from his body." sheesh ... i'm shivering, aren't you?

this book is going to consume the rest of my weekend. meyer has captured the essence of high school and that little twinge inside all girls -- we all want to believe that we are the most beautiful and we don't know it -- we all want to believe that the most intriguing and handsome man in the class is staring at us -- we all want to believe that there is someone hovering just outside our peripheral vision, waiting to save us -- we all want to date vampires.

weather

three days of ohio rain. thick clouds grazing the tops of buildings. drowning in the dark: i dug my lightbox out from behind the couch this morning.

when i was little, in colorado, rain was mythic. rain didn't just come, it never stooped out of the sky of its own accord. we had to coax it from heaven, with prayers, with dances, with long dead stalks of weeds and rituals we imagined and performed from the ridges of red rock. and when it would come, finally!, we ran outside. we laid on the warm cement driveway and let rain crackle over us. we turned over our bigwheels and collected the rain in its crevices. we opened our palms and let them soak with rain. we shouted, we laughed, we jumped double-dutch, we watched it stream in flash-flood rivers down the gutters of the street. rain! rain! rain! and that night we would thank god for moisture, because that was all that was left. a filmy hint of wet along the grass, pretending not to notice the return of the sun.

in ohio, the rain is a faucet a bucket a shower a deluge. after one day of rain, two days, three, four, five, i want to punch through the clouds. i want to collect the wetness in my arms and throw it back: somewhere ... to the bosom of lake erie or the clouds that spilled it. i want it to stop. drowning me.

dewey decimal system

the library supply catalog i sent for came in the mail yesterday. i had no idea i needed a card catalog cabinet until i saw the one on page 588. all those perfect little drawers stacked on top of each other. five different types of finishes. i could put it in my study to hold paper clips. or in henry's room to organize his socks or his desitin or his hats. i could use it in the kitchen: pour my spices into individual compartments, tuck away my spatula collection, collect all the twisty ties from loaves of store-bought bread, hide potatoes and onions and short skinny squashes. i could put it in the bathroom, a roll of toilet paper in each tiny drawer. i could put it next to my bed and spoon paperbacks into each little crevice.

it doesn't stop at just the card catalog cabinet. no. i also need a gallon of glue! forty retractable sharpies! a box of 894 crayons! revolving media storage and a wall size map of the world and the entire collection of goosebumps by r.l. stine! a rubber snake, a decorative penguin statue, a motivational 10 poster set! and three thousand three hundred sheets of perforated computer paper!

spring

when i peeked into henry's crib this morning, he smiled at me: big and full and better than the sun.

wind

the wind is gusting at fifty miles today. fitting for the strange grief that's gusting around me. i spent the morning with two slices of peanut butter toast and the newspaper, haunted by article after article of the shootings in virginia. i'm tightened by that same strange rock-like hurt that came after columbine -- when i sat with my mother, my hair dripping wet, watching the tv as bombsquads surrounded the school i passed a hundred thousand times on my way to our public library. we waited and waited for my little brother and sister to come home, for the lockdown to end. and for weeks i always felt like crying. for weeks i looked at my ashen faced sister and her trembling hands and wondered if sitting in the cultural hall at church tying quilts for those kids who were locked in the choir room could really help. it's the same thing now: it seems wrong to talk about strawberries or the weather or doing the laundry because everything is different. because people are gone. people that mattered to other people. whole chains of friendship and family whipped apart by an inexplicable violence that newscasters spend mornings and evenings trying to explain.

shout

i took henry to see the mountains today. we didn't have to go far: i just opened the curtain in my aunt's spare bedroom where we've been staying and pressed my nose against the window. mountains are bigger than i remember. they push up and up and up, all brown and crumbly and staked with trees. with such a clear big gasp of sky hanging between the peaks in the east and their sisters across the valley. i want to take them home with me. i want to wrestle them into my diaper bag next to the burp rags and the tinkly rattles and drag them across the threshold of my little apartment. i want them to jump like a real live pop-up, cut outs of greatness filling my living room. i want the wash of cool mountain air to stream around my ankles. i want henry to know how it feels to stand at the top of something so tall and shout shout shout.

rotisserie

i cleaned out my fridge this morning. a small bout of heroism.

my husband poo poos at me every time i wrap the last bit of cheese in a cocoon of cellophane or spoon a half a ladle of soup into plastic container or save the heel of the bread, tucked into an empty space on the door of the fridge. it will just go moldy, he says. and he's right. my brilliant plans to save leftovers and have them return in a triumphant new form dissipate into night after night of campbell's tomato soup until there's no more space for another gallon of milk and i have to attack the memories with a garbage bag in hand.

this morning, digging through my past life, i ran into the cranberry sauce from thanksgiving -- four bags of cranberries, my sister-in-law said we could never eat that much, but we did, save half a cup full which i've been harboring in the lee of the aloe juice ever since. i dumped out the spaghetti sauce my mother made the week after i had henry when i had to ease myself into chairs and wear mesh underwear lined with bags of ice. i put to rest two full bags of cucumber salad: the pungent smell of vinegar and dill hadn't eased since my husband made dinner for my sister in february and again for his brother in march. there were four skinless lemons that sacrificed their yellow lustre for a sour cream and berry trifle. one green pepper that never made it into the red beans and rice. and the leftover bits of a rotisserie chicken: we bought it when i was feeling nostalgic for russia, ripping it apart with our fingers, rolling it in yogurt garlic sauce and eating it wrapped in thin tortillas.

now there's just a carton of eggs, slices of kraft cheese (for hashbrowns scattered and smothered), gallons of milk. the fridge is gaping open at me. jaws wide, mouth hinting saliva.

farenheit

when my husband told me this afternoon that there might be a job for us in small town nevada, i put on my coat and boots and took a walk in the spring blizzard. i got to the corner of mayfield and murray hill and stood pretending to wait for the 9X express.

i faced the wind and let the snow hit my cheeks, let it make my nose run, let it tickle my fingertips. i smelled the warm burst of hot dogs, the sizzle of garlic roasting in every italian restaurant up and down the street, the sweet warmth of cassata cake puffing in an industrial oven.

i watched a woman walk into la barberia di laura holding a pack of smokes and a bar of chocolate and walk out again a few seconds later holding only one smoldering cigarette. i watched students wearing sweats and scarves hurry to mama santa's and duck inside the double wooden doors, shivering.

would all of this smell the same, look the same if cleveland scorched in a bath of sun year round? would i be as relieved to pull open the door of corbo's bakery and hide myself in a white paper bag of cannoli and butter cookies if it was always warm enough to wade in lake erie? if a rose could bloom at 122 degrees farenheit, would it smell as sweet as the first taste of spring and mud and rain after months of deep icy clouds?

erosion

i am losing my hair. it comes out in long clumps, the strands wrapping around my hand and fingers. it sticks to the shower curtain. it nests in tiny piles in the corners of the bathroom. it threads its way through my husband's underwear: i find it as i fold the laundry and pull and pull the strand until it comes loose and floats away. it catches itself in the crevices of my son's neck. it turns up in the bread dough, the cracks in the keyboard, the toes of my socks, the soup, the pages of anna karenina. i find it underneath my pillow, long strands curled and waiting for who knows what -- easter bunny, tooth fairy, santa claus, a postpartum godmother?

it feels like erosion. my goddess body of motherhood [the curves, the thick rope of hair, the puffy ankles, the shining eyes] is disappearing: a mountain of sand caught in the fury of a spring rain. i am left a shuddering pile of pebbles, weary and missing sleep.

should i collect the hair, coaxing it from between my toes and underneath the couch cushions, into my lap? will i need a reminder of the way my body expanded as wide as the universe? will i forget the moment i first felt my son leap, somewhere between my navel and my hip? will it be buried in my own strata of memory?

she will deny this

i remember an afternoon digging through my mother's old things [frayed scrapbooks, reams of paper, bits of photographs] and finding a notecard with a few lines of ee cummings written in ballpoint pen.

though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously) her first rose

i didn't know it was ee cummings then, i only reeled back with shocked delight, sucking in air. my mother! poetry! and a stanza as sultry and velvet as this one! i copied the lines down into my own notebook, keeping them, reading them at night after everyone was asleep.

this is how spring should feel: a close secret, a delight, a petal by petal moment that reveals just a little more beauty, a little more color until the whole world is alive and gasping for breath.

this is how spring should feel. but i'm in cleveland. and it's april. and it's snowing hard bitter pellets: the snow of february, not even the wet snow of spring.

Birds

we put a bird feeder outside our front window approximately nine days ago. since then we have had approximately zero birds visit.

are birds frightened of ambulances?

Congestion

I saw a woman standing in a flowerbed along the side of the road holding a parrot. She was whispering something into its ear.