A Stranger

February Photo A Day

These two children are not strangers to me but I caught them one day in matching blue plaid, their bare feet against wood and dirt, and there was something magical about the conversation that happened, how it overcame the fence that separated them and the green that blocked the way.

Hands

February Photo A Day

Well, I posted baby feet, so it seems only right that I post baby hands today. 

And a repost of something I wrote a few years ago to go with the theme of hands. 

Sunday, April 1, 2012

I found peach blossoms at the market.  I bought them too early, at the beginning of a morning full of errands.  So I carried the branches through the neighborhood, snuck them through crowded sidewalks.  They brushed past boarded construction sites and I raised them to avoid strollers, street lamps, stray passersby. 

The hunchbacked butcher, who I love, who moves slow and steady behind the counter lugging meat in his blood-stained coat, asked me if I had brought them for him. I held them out and he laughed and told me he has his own tree in the yard, how beautiful it is, though he worries about the cold snap, how many blooms he'll lose.

Later, we rode our bicycles through Williamsburg, to Greenpoint, and an endless string of cars lined the streets to Steiner Studios.  An open trunk revealed giant sacks of potatoes and carrots.  Men in suits, with wide-brimmed hats and payot, slung them over their shoulders and moved through the procession to an event we wondered about, one we could not possibly know.

As I pedaled, I saw many hands clutch leafy palms as church let out. I was reminded of Sundays as a little girl, sitting restlessly in wooden pews. I'd kick my feet against the sturdy pew in front of me, snatch a bundle of palms when they came my way. 

My mother, a talented knitter, would effortlessly weave them together in delicate designs. I'd bend and twist and curve my palms and it frustrated me that they never looked like hers.

Do it to mine too, I'd pout.  And she'd take them from me in the car on the way home, braid them the way she braided my hair.  I'd sit in the backseat and she'd hand them back to me, something newer than what they were, the green ends dangling like delicate ribbons of silk.

Words

More of February Photo A Day.

As far as the theme of words, this is what I think it's like to be a writer. To make sense of letters and words. To arrange them. To fit them where they don't belong. To squeeze them into a space. To eek them out in the dark when no one else is looking. To help them find their places. 

View Today

It's been a little over three weeks since we welcomed Little O (as he shall be named) to the world and things have been going well.  There have been many sleepless nights but it's an adventure each day. We learn about one another. I figure out how to add mother to the roles I've assumed throughout my life.

I love to hold him in my arms. I love to watch him sleep. I like to dress him -- a real life doll, squirming, squeaking, as I fit a tiny arm through a sleeve.  Right now, I am simply amazed at the way he moves from sleep to waking and reverse. Then I wonder what he might see when he is awake, wide-eyed and staring out into our world. His eyes are big and, right now, blue, and I like to watch them look. I try not to think too much of what's to come but it's hard not to wonder who he will be.

This month, I'm going to attempt the February Photo A Day Challenge which I discovered, during a late-night, bleary-eyed feeding. I thought it might be a low-stress way to be on the blog a bit and work creatively in small patches of time.

I missed the first day but I have a few photos that I believe fit that theme of a view today.  I love the foot bridge at the end of our street.  It takes us over the highway to the subway, to our neighborhood of shops and restaurants and tree-lined streets and stoops.

To me, this is what it looks like to live where I live, on the waterfront. If I were to close my eyes and imagine our neighborhood, these are the first structures I think about, the movement of shipping containers all along our ribbon of street. 

Baby's Here!

I'm over the moon to share this news: baby boy is here! He came two weeks early this past Saturday. I was so totally clueless about labor and delivery that, after 2 hours of steady abdominal pain (which I attributed to another health issue I had experienced earlier in the pregnancy) I thought Tyler and I should go to the hospital and see what was 'the matter'.  I didn't even think to bring my carefully packed overnight bag but, ever practical, I did decide to bring my glasses and some paperwork 'just in case'. 

Imagine my surprise when the doctors said I was in early labor.

Thirty-one blissful hours later we welcomed him to the world.  While he was perfectly healthy, I wondered out loud in those first few minutes Aren't babies supposed to cry? After a half hour of lovely grunts, he gave us a few beautiful wails.  I like to think this makes him a pretty chill kid.

At this time, I'm not sure about how to handle photographs through social media. I suppose this is a twenty-first century problem. For now, I believe everyone loves sunlit newborn feet and if you need a picture of his absolutely precious face, feel free to email me.

Life has already changed drastically, in the most wonderful way it could but I think it will be hard to adjust to a lot of the changes. Considering this might be the longest post I've been able to type in the past few months, I think I'll be continuously surprised about how time will be handled. Right now newborn care is a strange sort of exhausting repetition with hours of frantic scurry and screams followed by waves of peaceful calm.

All this to say, I don't know what blogging will be like for the next few months but I know I'll make my way here when I can. In fact, I've wanted to write more, in general, in these first few day's of the baby's life than I have in the exhausting nine months leading up to this time.  

I guess I've often seen writing as another form of dreaming. And dreams seem new and big and beautiful here.

Snow Day and the Black Diamond Triumph

It's a snowy day here and I'm cozied up inside with some work and a book. The children who live downstairs are off and yelling from the stoop to the sidewalk and in the stairwell and I hear all the excitement from up here while under strict orders from, well, everyone, not to step foot in cold and ice and snow while in my 'delicate' (arguably more like elephant) condition.

And even though I want to go outside and play more than anything, I'm begrudgingly following the rules. I've got the camera lens and from the third floor window the wind blows around the already fallen snow and it looks a lot like glitter.

Today I am thinking of my Uncle John who I always called Uncle because I knew him from the time I was born. He liked to tell a story of how I once ate chocolate and ran around and around and around the coffee table thinking no one could catch me. He took me skiing every year at Mt. Snow in Vermont until I shipped off to college.

I remember holding the paper ski map, always sticking to the blue squares and green circles, the easy and intermediate trails, until Uncle John took me up on the lift and told me we'd do a black diamond trail next. Nuh uh, no way, I shook my head and insisted I wasn't ready, those were too hard and the map I clutched said there were moguls and I didn't know how to do those but we got to the top and he laughed and, quite literally, pushed me down.

I was terrified and forgot how to do any turns, basically flew down the hill in one straight line, avoiding the mogul section entirely, my heart pounding in my chest until I reached the bottom of the hill, stunned.

We did the run a few more times after that and I was so thrilled that I had 'conquered' (if you could call practically squeezing your eyes shut and praying you reach the bottom without hitting a tree, 'conquering') that I babbled about my black diamond triumph all the way back to the lodge.

I laugh today, remembering Uncle John's words before we met up with Aunt Ginny and my Mom at the lodge, his super tall frame knocking around in his boots, nose and cheeks red, hat crumpled, and a happy smirk, Just don't tell your mother. 

The Wonderment of What's To Come

This has been a quiet but wonderful year for me, a year brewing with the anticipation of change. In the spring, I signed with an agent and discovered that Tyler and I would welcome a child into the world. Two events that would seem unrelated if they hadn't intersected and happened at the same time.  They indicated a shift, a new way of the wind, and they've carried me to now.

Perhaps I've never been as reflective as I am at this moment, this today, thinking about the year that was and the year that will be. I've spent a lot of time, this year, rearranging words and stories, dreaming them new, hoping they resonate. I've spent an equal amount of time making space inside myself, inside our home, for a tiny someone. No matter how his bones poke and prod and arrange themselves inside me, it's hard to believe he'll be real. That he'll be known.

In preparing for the unknown, Tyler and I cleared our apartment. We had to purge. It was necessity. I got rid of my writing desk which felt like giving away an important piece of who I am even if I know that words can always be written, no matter where.

We found ourselves placing the things left over in closets already too full and three empty boxes, the pretty kind, for keepsakes. Then we watched as an avalanche of generous baby gifts found their way into all the empty spaces, as our apartment flooded with new furniture and gear and gadgets unfurling their miles long instruction sheets.

We like to joke about our three boxes.

Do you know where my pen is? 

   Did you check your box?

Where can I put my new gloves?

   Is there room in the box?

Yes, we cling to our three beloved, crammed, boxes. Some kind of physical testament to who we've been, since the rest of our world and our hearts are already full with the anticipation of new arrivals. I'll admit, it's been hard, wondering how I'll keep those pieces of myself, how those pieces might arrange themselves into someone new.

But it's been a such a lucky year, much of it spent inside the wonderment of what's to come, and I've never dreamed bigger,  on so many fronts, even if, truth be told, I have no idea, really, what the year will bring. Maybe only the sculpt of it.  The skeleton. But not the soul of it. That's to come.

Happy, happy new year everyone.