I love the photo they selected to illustrate it! (And I’m not unpleased to be in an issue with an essay titled “I Watch Slacker to Read Austin in the Original,” either).

 And as a place-centered writer, I’ve always considered myself to be a southern writer; genus Texas-Georgia hybrid.  Because of that, I’m particularly pleased that my story The Sailor’s Horn-Book for the Law of Storms  is  in Crab Orchard Review’s current special issue, Old and New: Re-Visions of the American South.  245 pages; southern-fried! Single copies of the magazine can be purchased here.

And a plug:  Crab Orchard Review is a class act. Galleys, professional editing, thoughtful communications with authors, decent pay to contributors.  Yep, we all know the writing business is in flux.  But I hope hard-copy journals like this can continue to exist as publishing figures out what it wants to be in the 21st century.

At the same time,  the online world ain’t all bad.  A while back, I was contacted by the assistant editor at an online journal interested in reprinting a poem of mine.  The journal is Places: Design Observer; my poem isn’t “up” yet, but Places — an interdisciplinary journal of contemporary architecture, landscape and urbanism, with particular emphasis on the public realm as physical place and social ideal — is including outstanding prose and poetry along with great essays and photographs.  Their August series of short stories in which landscapes are central to mood and meaning included some amazing writing (and I should have posted this at the beginning of August, not in September).  Barry Lopez, Anthony Doerr, Emily MItchell — great stuff.  Place’s clean, crisp design and quality content are a delight.

But let’s be honest. I’ve never been one for either the bang (“too quiet” say certain powers-that-be about my work) or the buck  — have I?

Multitask, multitask! sez the world, and what do I do?

Dig in my heels.

I could be more efficient, I could better marshal my forces.  But what would I miss then?

The rosy filaments of the mimosa blossoms; the whiff when I walk past them.  Of summer nights,  of my now 40-years-gone childhood. Bottled up, captured, exactly the same. 

Last night, when I passed a particular brick storefront converted into apartments, a door slapped open and out strode a boy with a skateboard. Nobody I knew of course.  I’m a middle aged lady.  What do I know, about people with skateboards!

Or so I thought, until he stopped and looked at me closely and called me the nickname of my childhood, that 70s-era, plump-and-shy-girl Kathy  that always yanks me back.

This happens sometimes.  After redoubts and round-abouts and removes across the country, I now live 70 short miles from the place where I spent my childhood.  It stands to reason that now and then I run into people from my past: someone I hung with in high school walking up the street I just drove down, a friend-of-a-college roommate waiting in line for peaches at the farmer’s market.

So there I was last night, stopped at the curb as the sky turned tender with dusk and neighbors walked their dogs past.  Catching up with someone I’d known in college.  What are you up to these days?  How many kids?   All the while  I was trying to remember— what was it my mom had told me a few months back, a snippet of news, the sort she tends to relay in phone calls? Middle-aged, we commiserated.  Exhausted! The newborns we had in tow the last time we ran into each other are now elementary-school aged.

And then I remembered.

I’m so sorry about your dad, I blurted.

Yeah, he said frankly.  It was terrible. 

It was, and it is.  Time passes; we grow up; losses accrue.

For most of my youth I felt so stifled by the place where I grew up.  People knew too much about me!  I was never going to be able to shake free of it!

But nowadays, there’s something consoling these brief reunions, some sense of being known.  Even when that knowledge is superficial at best — what does the person I run into have but a visual image of who my parents are, or  the house I grew up in? What more than that do I know of him, really?

But they’re our tiny links between then and now.  If we were more efficient, if we moved faster, would we have time — to bump into a bit of our lives on the street, so unexpected, so surprising?

A week’s worth of tasks that have to be jigsawed into the next four hours — looming. Timetables and agendas and lists… laundry and dishes.  The plate of my day.  The overfull plate of everyone’s day.   I am putting off  pulling that plate, heaped so high,  toward me.

I suppose you could say I  am shirking my duties.  I am taking inventory.  I am walking the yard, listening to the fulbodied voice of the singer-songwriter recently profiled by the New Yorker sing a song called “Drover” — and I am thinking if to sing is to be some lily of the fields, toiling not nor spinning neither, then God bless them all, each and every one, the world’s singers.

The last peony in my garden is unfolding.   Some days I love them, those peonies, best — the way  they’re like the blowsy madams of the garden.  They squander their riches, they never hold back.  They are too much of a muchness. 

I am shirking my duties; I am counting my blessings.

The first morning glory, true to its name, a glorious, impenetrable purple, is twining up tbe fence —

striving, striving.

The tomatoes are already grown gangly, smell, when I reach out to pinch off their suckers, of  heat and summer and my simpler, early-seventies childhood.  They make my mouth water.  Not for tomatoes, exactly, good as tomatoes might be, but for something else, something less, something more —

Summer.

The roses are spent.  Their petals litter the sidewalk.  And I walk past, thinking: ashes of roses, a color I heard described in a book. What could be more apt, than that description of the roses’ pinky gray brown, shot through with melancholy?

The man with the handlebar mustache and the nineteenth-century face jogs up the street, as he does, every morning. He is angular, lopes up the sidewalk.  He probably works in IT, or at a bank, but in another life, I like to think he was the strongman in some Victorian circus, at home in a singlet.

Because he has the sort of face that in silent movies unloosens the ropes that tie heroines to the train tracks.

I am shirking my duties; I am counting my blessings.

I am for a few minutes happily stopped in my tracks by the world — that miraculous too much of a muchness.

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Being the ambivalent sort that I am, though, not even love can erase an awareness of its faults.  Its basement, where the scaffolding and rigging hidden elsewhere are revealed, is a horror show.  I suspect people leave our house after dinner parties idly wondering how I’m able to produce anything halfway edible in our counterless kitchen.

And the neighborhood the house sits in?  It’s scrappy and colorful enough, on a good day.  On bad ones?  On bad ones, the grass is always greener on the other side — the other side in this case being Interstate 20.  On the other side people also fret about housing prices and school options and and carry the same weight — of living in a sprawling spendthrift southern city* that wasn’t once called The Big Hustle for nothing.  Over there, though, they can head down the street to the neighborhood restaurant to order an ultra-up St. Germain champagne cocktail with which to toast their worries, and, oh, yeah, while they’re at it they can pick up a gallon of organic milk.

I’ve lived in this house 6 years. Over 2000 days.  How many times have I scrubbed the toilets in it (some would say not enough; others that I need a maid)?  How many times have I rushed down the dark length of the hallway in the middle of the night, toward the bedroom of the feverish child who just called out?  How many times, as I hustle from doing one thing to doing something else, have I glanced quickly out the front window?

One daughter is holding up a princess costume that must be safety-pinned together before this afternoon’s theatre class, because someone (uh, me) forgot to sew it.  The other wants to know:  will it be cold out today, will it? Will it?  Mommy, mommy, what are you thinking about?  Why aren’t you listening?

I am thinking about everything; and nothing.   About the fact that it is possible to purchase a brand-new copy of my first collection of short stories online for seventy-seven cents. About the emails that multiplied in my inbox overnight, like bacteria samples in a petri dish.  About parents (mine, myself) and children (me, mine).  About the need to buy groceries.  There are backpacks to be found, notes to sign, dishes to wash. There is the step back to be taken, while brushing my youngest daughter’s hair, to admire her freckles.

And there is also, in the midst of all that, that quick glance to be thrown out the window, where my eyes catch on the green street sign I’ve looked at thousands of times before.

We live on Eden Avenue.  I know, I know, I shouldn’t reveal this.  All the same, it took six years for the true import of this name to hit me blindside, and leave me amazed.

We live on — in — Eden.

Why bother with words, when the world outside the window does so much of our heavy lifting?

*news just came out that the radio transmitters on 25 percent of the city water meters recently updated  so as to properly usher in all the technological advances of the day, were  installed upside down, which, as you can imagine, makes them useless.

The ones my neighbor’s hens —her girls, she calls them —  lay are an even, pale brown and a faint, barely-there blue and a  few of them are dusted with a sprinkling of darker freckles.  Some of them are larger than others.  Some are more oval.  Every single one of them nestles in its space in the cardboard carton my neighbor hands over like a diamond ring in a velveteen-lined box.

Night before last, I squandered four of the dozen I’d just bought on the cupcakes I was making for my older daughter’s class, for her ninth birthday.

The first one I picked up fit so satisfactorily in the cup of my hand.  It somehow felt realer than eggs you get from the store.  Was that because I know the back yard these particular hens peck bugs from, the red-tailed hawk that sits the pine tree overlooking the tumble of kudzu and blackberry bramble behind it?  Or was it just because, knowing all that background, I gave this egg more scrutiny than I usually give the ones I purchase during a harried trip to the grocery store on Saturday morning?  Was it that my brain might be large enough to absorb the thought of five hens in a backyard coop doing what it’s in their chicken natures to do, but before the enormity of thousands and thousands of chickens laying thousands and thousands of eggs — all uniform and white and indistinguishable from one another — my poor human brain fails me?

I tapped each egg — gently, gently, harder — against the rim of a green mixing bowl.  The shell cracked open cleanly, the contents slid into the bowl, the yolk high and domed, bright orange.

It’s interesting, how many of our sayings are influenced by animal husbandry and by the barnyard.  Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.  Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

The egg, of course, I thought, as I stood in my kitchen after my children had gone to bed, hugging a green mixing bowl to myself as I beat yolks into a pale yellow froth.

I could’ve bought cupcakes at the store. The kids who were going to eat them didn’t care, either way.  One of them hates vanilla icing, another dislikes cupcakes altogether. The recipe I was using was persnickety and kind of a pain, it was almost ten o’clock at night, and I hadn’t made enough butter cream frosting.   I opened another box of butter, retrieved the confectioner’s sugar from the cupboard. I thought how silly I was, how silly this was. There’s not time for this, I lectured myself.

I was born the year The Feminine Mystique was published.  From childhood on, I’ve imbibed this message: domestic is demeaning. A smart woman, a woman worth her salt, is above domestic duties, although under duress, in between more fulfilling work, she does them.  Not for nothing did my mother have thumbtacked to the bulletin board in her office the sentiment:  Dull Women Have Immaculate Homes.

And more recently I’ve read much — I understand that the rituals of motherhood can be indulgences, the by-products of luxury and privilege.

Poor little egg, how can it keep from being crushed by all this weight?

I held one in my hand, and it was serene and complete, in its eggness.  Besides, I’d already started on this course, and twenty-four cupcakes were in-process on the kitchen island.  I turned from there to the counter.  I sifted flour.  I beat egg whites.  I remembered as if it were yesterday the mixture of love and abject terror I’d felt the day we brought Elder Girleen home from the hospital; I thought on the tilt of her feathery eyebrows.

They’re amazing things, my neighbor’s eggs.  Every day, the girls — Poppy and Iris and Marigold — lay them.  Every single day.

Nine years, I thought, since she was born, my eldest daughter.  Nine years since I held that crumpled bud of a baby with a shock of dark hair in my arms.  In nine more years, she’ll go off to college.  Equally amazing.

I bent to pull muffin tins from the oven. Life moves so fast; we have so many choices.   Most of the time I forget — that there is joy to be had in small gestures, performed with intention.

It was ten o’clock at night, and I stood yawning in my kitchen, alit with a still, small urgent spark of desire:  to honor the eggs my neighbor’s chickens laid; to honor the universe for giving me daughters, and birthdays.

I have to admit that I’ve never found the rooms where writers worked (even famous ones)  extraordinarily interesting; such tours have never been something I planned a vacation around —what sort of sick pup would do that? The Houses of Famous Writers are, instead, places I’ve ended up paying good money to walk through  because

1. I’ve found myself with free time in a place where the Writer’s House has been promoted as a tourist attraction since time began  (ie, Hemingway’s House, in Key West, of which I remember little except that the gardens surrounding it reeked of cat piss).  Or,
2. I see a sign for the Writer’s House as I’m on my way from Here to There, and anything has become a great excuse to get out of the car (ie, Carl Sandburg’s House, where I was most impressed by the fact that he raised goats, which seems in many ways a more sensible (and lucrative) profession than writing)*.

For many many years the rooms where I wrote had once been dining rooms in rental houses that had seen better days.  Who on earth in modern America needs a dining room, particularly if they live alone or with roommates or a significant other but sans children and eat dinner every night with a plate balanced on their knees and the television on?**

Now, I write in a room that was once a porch and was glassed-in by previous owners, nominally at least. The aluminum casement windows that prove just how long ago it was glassed in were like some red carpet for tiny spiders — man, the bugs just sauntered in. The space is cold in winter, hot in summer — or at least it was until recently, when an “incident” that caused an apple from our front yard tree to fly out of an older sibling’s hand and miss the intended younger sibling target***) spurred us to go ahead and get “real” windows to replace the “fake” ones.

Now my writing room is, in fact, a room.  It’s a room that also contains a bicycle and crayons scattered across the floor like so much tinder, but it’s a room, all the same.  The windows perform as intended, and in an added, unexpected benefit, also serve as a lovely frame, now and then transforming the everyday into a form of artwork.

Would it be too tired a cliché to say — maybe sometimes you notice more when your view has been just a bit constrained?

We are on the cusp of fall.  Four days ago we were still wrestling with the draggling tag-end of a long hot summer, but the temperature has finally, mercifully, just in the nick of time dropped.  The leaves of the hickory tree to be noticed through the windows are still green, drought-limp and still, and waiting, waiting.  Drowsy, and they dream of falling.

Soon.

We have passed into a new season.  Two children in elementary school!  This transition might contain one of parenthood’s great secrets:  once all your children are in school, you get some of your life back.  And this secret is so secret exactly why?  Because admitting you might have once had some sort of life you long to regain marks you as  —what? — a dreadful, dreadful traitor?

Our mornings are different than they used to be.  By third grade, clothes matter, at least to girls.  Hair sometimes refuses to do what it should!  Things are misplaced; schoolwork left undone!  Let us bow our heads, engage in torrents of loud weeping!  Last night I dreamed one of Elder Girleen’s peers arrived at school in three-inch heels and c-cups.  It’s that non-organic milk, I tried to assure myself and woke up in a cold sweat.

The corollary  to the fact that I am regaining something of my old life is that I also have new work to do:  to give my daughters, who no longer need me quite the same way, their lives.

We have passed into a new season.  The childless on the neighborhood e-list are stewing over Halloween.  So many children!  They knock on the door uncostumed!  They’re van-loaded in from Henry County!  Sometimes they hit the same houses twice! They’ve been raised wrong!

We have passed into a new season.  Early mornings, the middle-schoolers bike to their school in the center of this neighborhood, toiling up the hills and coasting down, in a scarfed and bundled pack.  Today, a straggler was pedally madly, desperately, to catch up. Around the corner behind her, one last cyclist.  The straggler’s dad.  He’s hanging back, but oh, he’s there.

I was walking by; I saw it.  I fiddled with the ipod tucked into one jacket pocket, turned the volume way  way up, loud enough to drown out the voices on the neighborhood e-list who’ve deemed such behavior an unsafe, subversive act.

Oh brave new world!  O brave new season!  Miraculously, my children are changing. I pray — to what? To whom?  Unknown —for the wisdom to change with them, and walk on.

*The second thing I was impressed by was the “napping couch” beside Sandburg’s desk — what rosy times there were then!

** Given how often dining rooms are pressed into service as writer’s workplaces, I suppose a conclusion could be drawn about the ability of words to serve as nourishment, but I’d really rather wax eloquent about goat-farming.

***Most recent spin regarding the apple-tree/broken window mishap:  “She should have to pay for the window too because she WANTED me to hit her.”

I am lifting weights, but really, what I am doing is remembering, the soundtrack from the speakers conjuring up the day of Kurt Cobain’s death, a friend’s apartment, an ashtray squared companionably on the table and Come As You Are on the radio.  That was the year I was starting to have just enough intimations of mortality that wishful thinking had made me read the label on the pack of American Spirits we were splitting as Addictive — rather than Additive — Free.

Were we grieving for poor Kurt Cobain as we sat there at the table?  Not much.  So many rock stars, drowned or shot or suicided! We had cut our teeth on them.  We were contemplating a day off from work; we were overeducated and underemployed, we had postponed adulthood with graduate school; we didn’t realize how good we might have things.

And just like that the music has done what it was meant to do, and I am transported.  Away from this tiny gym lacking bells-and-whistles in a stripmall where at least half the storefronts are empty, it having been built in  those halcyon optimistic days before the bubble burst.

Alternate mornings, I lace up my sneakers and head out, silver oblong of ipod nestled in one hand; I nod at the neighbors I pass, we are all of us sealed off, the music loud.  In our own worlds.

When my daughters hear music, they can’t help but dance. In the cereal aisle of Whole Foods, while the childless edge past them, wishing I had my offspring under better control.  In our living room; on the front steps; on the walkway leading to the car.  At the Arts Center, weekly, where one of the instructors recently pulled me aside and whispered in my ear Like it or not, I think you’re going to be bringing kids here for classes for years.  You’re the mother of dancers.

It’s one of the joys of my life, to sit on the waxed floor of the hallway at the Arts Center outside the classrooms, while on the other side of the door, my daughters are dancing to Debussy, the ballet mistress’s voice counting time.

The Art Center was built in the twenties, was once the residence of the son of a Coca-Cola magnate.  The downstairs is paneled with mahogany pulled from Pullman cars. Eighty years ago, the magnate’s son’s private menagerie roamed the grounds. Now girls clad in leotards have the run of the house.  They are beautiful in the late afternoon light that streams through the Arts Center’s stained glass windows.  I could eat them up; I could sit there forever while my daughters dance right where the daughters of the Coca Cola magnate’s son slept in ornate beds.

Is it cold comfort, the way that as we reach adulthood we replace that effervescent joy in movement with running in place to music  that’s become “the Oldies” — or is that as good as things get?

Better than nothing, I think as I walk, earbuds nestled in the rosy, still young coil of my ears. This morning there was a two-degree drop of temperature, signal enough to the hopeful of a change of seasons.  Butterflies hover over our zinnias, making hay while the last of the sun shines.  In front of a particular house, chartreuse balls dropped from a Bois D’arc tree lie in the grass like an interrupted game of croquet.  Good as it gets, and better than nothing.  We all dance as we can, each in our own way.