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December 2003
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February 2004

2 Cleveland Court

Today would have been my grandmother's 99th birthday. She died 14 years ago this month. A first generation American, Grandma was born on Elizabeth Street in New York City. She married young - 15 - to my grandfather. She had five children, the oldest died at birth. My mother was the second born, the second daughter. Two boys followed, both lawyers, one a judge.

She's been on my mind all month, my grandmother. This weekend especially, her spirit was very intense. I had to resist going past the house, it's a big house on the end of a small dead-end and it's difficult to gape without being seen. Besides, the family sold it last year and it's been devastatingly remuddled into three families, sheathed in spare, ugly grey siding, and the grounds level and chained off with a wrought iron fence.

The house was a big Victorian rambling ship of a house. It stood at the end of a street, with a leafy backdrop of woods separating it from the next street. In the mid-50's Eisenhower's plan to link every state in the Union resulted in Interstate 95 slicing through our city. And specifically, through the back half of my grandparents' house.

It had taken Grandma 25 years to get up the nerve to leave her own mother's house in the Italian section of the city. She raised her family in the flat on the second floor, her parents' below, her younger sister and her family above. The grocery store was across the street, the bakery up the hill, and the butcher on the next block. A big stone bridge that held up the train tracks separated the enclave from the rolling hills of the two cemeteries a block away.

When my own parents married after the war, Grandma had the reason to move to the other side of the tracks - literally - and leave her parents' house. Post-war housing was scarce, and she bought the big Victorian for her family, and my parents to live in on the second floor. For 13 years they all lived together, grandparents, two uncles, aunt, my parents, and eventually three of us girls. All of us sharing three floors - but one bathroom.

I wonder how my grandmother felt when the letter came to tell them that the property had been condemned by eminent domain. She must have been devastated, afraid and panicky. I understand that my uncle took the lead in negotiating the terms with the government, the family agreeing to take the money and have the house moved across the lot. We have photos of the move, the house denuded of its two-story wooden front porch and wide front steps, jacked up onto rolling beams and dragged across the lot like a Lincoln Log house.

And with the windfall, my grandparents modernized the old girl. A bath and half was put in. The kitchen received knotty pine cabinets, pink countertops, and a pink and maroon linoleum floor. Very fifties. The floor-to-ceiling 15 foot glass-fronted pantry doors were painted green so they could be used more efficiently for storage. The sliding oak pocket doors were sealed into the walls and the several of the nine foot windows were enclosed so as to provide needed wall space. The chimney closet in the kitchen was retrofitted with a cupboard and a separate entrance for my parents apartment was added on. The basement was finished with beige and maroon tiles and my uncle practiced with his college band down there on summer nights. The soft, aged cedar shingles were covered with grey asbestos ones and the windows sported pink shutters to match the front door.

My own family moved out of the house in 1959, a few years later. We moved to yet the other side of the city, into a pretty center hall colonial in a neighborhood of older, quiet families. We must have been the noisiest people on the street with the five of us girls running around. But it was too quiet and sterile after the noise and hum of Grandma’s house, the smell of cooking always in the air, the rooms full of adults with plenty of time and laps in which to hold a middle child. I went back often, spending days and summer vacations sleeping over, exploring the attic rooms, the cool basement, the mysterious closet under the stairs with its porthole window and shelves stuffed with ladies' hatboxes and furs.

As a teenager, we scolded our grandmother for the 1950's modernization and the stripping away of the beautiful antique oak and features of the lovely old house. But there were still plenty there, like the two story oak staircase graced with a landing and stained glass window and oak balustrade, and the mysterious passageway between the attic room walls and storage areas. We played hours on the player piano, pulling out the large lower drawer that contained hundreds of buttons, now our spaceship. We drank soda in the screened in patio, and poked our noses into the old detached garage, now used for storage since the house sat on a new two-car garage.

The house began to fall apart after my grandfather died when I was in college. The upkeep was formidable and my grandmother didn't have the patience or energy. And she suffered from depression and couldn't stand the upheaval of painters or workmen around the house. Yet, even after she died 15 years later, my aunt lived in it another ten years, and squirrels had had the run of the attic, we all assumed that somehow it would stay in the family.

Of course, it couldn't. It's value had risen a thousand fold since its purchase in the 40's, but the neighborhood had declined at the same rate. None of us would take on the decades long project of restoring it because the Thruway was so noisy and the neighborhood so cramped.

Yet, none of us were prepared for the house to be completely stripped and gutted in the six months following its sale. The family were contractors, we knew, but somehow we hoped they were going to restore it and live there. Instead they ripped everything out, even the great staircase, installing stairs that were flipped and gave better access for apartments on each of the floors. they leveled the sloping yard, ringed it with a wrought iron fence and installed a large lamppost with three glass balls. We all wonder where the oak banisters went, what they did with the marble sink, and if we could have salvaged any of it. We each had a different opinion about going there on Halloween on the guise of trick or treating with the kids, but the consensus was that none of us wanted to see it. I'll spend my life regretting not hiring an electrician to remove the green cut-glass chandelier from the entry way before it was sold.

It hurts to go past and see it so stark and remuddled. Yet, it's just another phase of the modernization that began with my grandparents in the 50's. The older generation doesn't talk about it, or shrug their shoulders in their pragmatic, Italian way. What could you do? It was time to sell. Grandma would have been the first to say it. And I know she was happy that she didn't have to clean out those 9-foot pantry cupboards.

I do have one thing. After my aunt died, and we were cleaning out the senior citizen apartment she had moved into in her last year, I took down the little sign she had kept from the house and hung on the wall. It was four small pieces of wood, about 5" by 5" on which someone had tacked glittering reflective dots that made up the numeral "2", for 2 Cleveland Court. The little sign used to hang on the lamppost by the driveway where the cars' headlights would catch its reflective glints at night. When I first visited my aunt in the apartment and saw it tacked to the hall wall, my breath caught in my throat and I could not trust myself to speak for several minutes and busied myself in the kitchen helping her take out mugs for cups of tea. I have the sign now. I've hung it on my art room wall, over my computer. Sometimes when the cars go by on the street, the headlights just catch it at the right angle and it sparkles for a second.


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Stuffed Up

I finally went to the doctor yesterday for the upper head congestion that's been plagueing me since before Thanksgiving. Yep, got a sinus infecton. So after going to work and flying and pretending forever that I didn't have it, I let the doc's diagnosis allow me to succumb to it. I came home, climbed into bed and didn't get up until this morning. Before I was able to do this, I went to court, went back to the office, typed up 20 reports, packed up my stuff, slid in the snow and landed on my butt carrying a vase of flowers (didn't spill an inch of water!), drove to my daughter's school, signed her out because she was sick, went to the grocery store, delivered her and the groceries home, then went to the doctor, then came home and made a late lunch and collapsed. Daughter was in bed next to me and we had contests about who had higher temperature (she won).

I watched bad TV for several hours, held Middlesex in my hand but my eyes hurt too much to read. Today is a little better and I'm doing fun stuff like the wash, and my son's college applications (he's at work, he's not loafing around). Hubby bought the fixin's for the Super Bowl Sunday bash - which in my house means chili, and me watching TV upstairs while he watches the Super Bowl and he yells up to me when the cool commercials come on

Ah, life in the fast lane. This is why we left our gigantic house and inground pool in Memphis and moved back to Noo Yawk City!!


Art as Spirit

Everyone is knitting these days. The blogs are full of full, quirky sites about knitters. I am tempted to run to the knitting store and load up on bamboo needles and that "caterpillar" wool that has little fly-away threads and make myself a boa in luscious crimson. Sure would brighten up the monochromatic world we are trudging through this month.

In Sacred Ordinary, Fran writes about spiritual practices and mentions a zen knitting story. About ten years ago, I read the book that I believe started the return to our grandmother's craft - "The Knitting Sutra". If you go to this link, there are about ten other books listed that discuss knitting as a spiritual practice and a meditative experience, for example:Zen and the Art of Knitting by Bernadette Murphy; Knitlit:Sweater and their Stories ...and Other Stories About Knitting by Linda Roghaar. What all these books and the practice has in common is the desire to bring some hand-worthy moments of grace into our lives. What is more satisfactory than the tactile sensation of holding cool needles that warm in our hands as our fingers fly over variegated yarns in the colors of our heart? And what gives us more satisfaction in these days of work and stress than producing small, intimate items of handwork. In other words, "Hey! Look at what I made!"

I learned to knit and crochet from my grandmother and my great-aunt. My mother left me off at Great-Aunt Gussie's house a couple of times and she taught me the basics of knitting and purling. She gave me big clunky green plastic needles and some of the yarn she had stuffed all over her house. Auntie Gussie was a telephone operator - overseas mind you, and she was the queen of crafts before anyone knew what a craft was. She knitting us huge afghans, crocheted us vests, made clowns that covered doorknobs (why??), poodles that covered extra rolls of toilet paper (why again?), and my favorite, an elegant doll with voluminous skirts that sat on her daughter's bed. Gussie was also my godmother, a fact she never let me forget through phone calls, cards, and many dollar bills pressed into my hand. She was quite a character with her widow's peak, husky voice, apple-shaped body, and wide pants that she wore before any other self-respecting Italian American woman of a certain age would have dared to.

But most of all, she had the patience to teach me to knit. With my grubby, sweaty hands soiling the wool, I worked my way through potholders, tubes, scarves, and whatever else she could think of. My piece de resistance was a loud, garishly orange muffler done with the cable stitch. I can still remember the thrill of taking off the four stitches and twisting them onto another needle to make the cable. I wore that muffler all through high school. You Would never lose me in a snow storm.

Gussie and my grandmother are gone, but I still have the Variegated crocheted afghans, the boxes of booties, layers of bunting, car blankets, bassinette covers, and baby blankets. My favorite is a thick yellow sweater that Gussie knit for Jessica. The arms were twice as long as the sweater was wide, but when we went to visit her, I wrapped Jessica up in it, rolled the sleeves back to fat doughnuts, and gave her to Gussie to hold.

I don't knit anymore, and don't know if I should take it up again since I have carpal tunnel syndrome, but I know that I was instilled in my love of craft and art by these busy women who found time to work a little grace into each day of their lives.


When I first started the blog, I set up three categories. "Lined Pages" was my every day journal writing; "The Azure Journal" was extended essays about my family; "The Red Journal" was supposed to be fiction. Only it didn't work. I would start writing, and it might morph from a basic entry into an extended one, or turn into fiction, or be none of the above. So I just gave it up.

I'm beginning to think I may split the blog into two: one for writing and one for art. But then if I start writing about what I did over the weekend and it was mainly art, do I post it to one and not the other. Way too confusing and brings out my worst anal tendencies. So forget it. But I am going to have an art journal site that will be mainly visual. This weekend is the set up, so look here soon for the link.

I finally bought the Moleskine sketch journal, which I ended up finding at Borders, the very last one, Haven't used it yet, work has eaten me up this week. Then my wonderful artist friend, Julianna sent me a copy of The Studio Reloaded, Teesha Moore's cool zine (don't rush to subscribe to it because it is a closed sub list. I missed the sign-up period by being on vacation!!) Anyway, Julianna has kindly lent me hers - and what else was in the envelope she mailed from D.C.? An incredibly cool, tiny, "Van Gogh Moleskine" in beautiful persimmon orange.

How cool are artist friends??


And a Little More Snow

More snow, sheets and sheets of it filling up all the cracks in my soul. It started about 7:00 p.m. and is predicted to go through the night into the morning. I'm sur they'll be no school and my office will at least have a delayed opening. Pray that it keeps us at least through noon so that my office will officially close!

This is what I will do tomorrow if I get a SNOW DAY!!!!!

-Sleep till 8:00 and then grind the Starbucks new blend and make Italian bread french toast which I will eat on my new rattan bed tray
-while perusing all my favorite blogs on my laptop
-then I will have a bubble bath during which I will begin reading Middlesex
-go through the books on map-making that I've kept by my bed
-continue lettering the first page of my new artist's book on Memory and Maps
-paint the inside of my pine hutch with Golden's Matte turquoise that dries to look like milk paint
-braise spareribs and sausages for dinner, with sauerkraut if I can get out to the store
-sleep from 1:00 to 2:00
-make silly Valentines for my friends
-clean the top of my art closet (only if the mood strikes)
-wait for Artiology to release its classes for the retreat so I can sign up
-scan in my travel journals for my new art blog (coming soon to a computer near you)
-write a draft of the second half of my short story "At the Rock"
-make a snow cave in the backyard and drink hot chocolate from a thermos
-walk to my sister's and make biscotti
-paint my nails
-research the cost of collagen and Botox injections ;>
-have a homemade facial instead
-order pantyhose because I'm down to two pairs
-rearrange all my books on the living room shelves so I can pretend I haven't bought a ton of books in the last month
-oh, and prep the two trials I have for the end of the week and brought home with me and it would be a shame to breing them back unopened and cram it all into Thursday, RIGHT???



Idle Hands & All That

Significant snow due in New York and Boston. Bitter temperatures, low, grey skies, days and days of it. I feel as though I'm trudging everywhere: to work, to the store, to the courthouse, and home. My feet are heavy with snowboots and my heart leaden with lack of cheer. The nights melt into mindless TV viewing and trips up and down the stairs in search of sugar and fat. My God, I'm a bear hibernating!

Last night I had to finish a swap that was long overdue and supposedly in the mail on Monday (sorry Sarah!). It was a fun little art project, nothing creatively taxing. I had the project worked out and had assembled all the supplies before Christmas, but I just couldn't find the time to sit down and just do it. Of course, now that I was ready to go, I couldn't find the little cards that were supposed to be the heart of the project. After tearing apart my dresser where I put them for safekeeping, I found them neatly piled on my art desk where I'd put them Saturday. Right, forgot about that. I rifled through my art papers looking for some crazily patterened paper I remembered buying at some point. Only when I assembled it all, the colors were more preppy pinks and greens than 60's tie-dye, so I nixed that. I found some cardstock that was earmarked for another purpose and cut it down into large-sized tags. Later I'd punch a hole in the top, insert some cool eyelets in the shapes of daisies, and add a loop of wild pink chenille.

Before doing that, I I found some die-cuts in of butterflies, flowers, and hearts in vibrant colors and glued these to the tags. Last week (before I broke my printer, aargh!), I'd printed groovy sayings in bright colors on acetate. Tonight I cut the acetate down to fit the tags, then loaded my sewing machine with a flat, shiny variegated thread I'd never used and sewed the acetate onto the cards. Or tried to anyway. The shiny plastic thread was too thin for the machine and I as sewed a side, the thread would break, rethreheaded, sewed, broke, etctera until I gave up and found some polyester-cotton variegated thread, not as shiny, but so much sturdier and finished them up. I left the botton open and filled the pocket with confetti of daisies and peace signs and glow-in-the-dark plastic shapes.

In a fit of madness on Sunday night, I'd taken cardboard slide cases and made "slides" of teeny, tiny stickers of 60's images like peace signs, daisies, hearts, and happy faces. Teeny, tiny little stickers. 6 in each. Lined up perfectly. In 6 slides cases. How anal retentive am I?? I took the cards, the slides, and some groovy tatoos (the extra of which Julia immediatley scooped up and hid in her room) and put them in a little envelope which I glued to the back of the card. Now I just had to hole punch the tops and thread the chenille. As soon as I used one of my 4 hole punches. The 4 holes punches that I keep in a jar above my desk. The 4 hole punches that were now ALL missing. Raid held through children's rooms. Nada. Husband thinks he has one in briefcase, but no, it has mysteriously disappeared also. If I cut a hole with an Exacto knife, it will look like shit, right? Yep.

Okay, so now it's after ten and I'm bleary-eyed. I decide that in the spirit of the age of Aquarius I will just go with the flow and send them sans hole and chenille loop. Not as cute, but you know what, it's time for bed. This morning after court I'll stop at the post office and send it off priority mail. It was fun to make something frivolous and playful, and it was a good to get back into the artroom and out from in front of that damn TV, Discovery Channel or not! Tonight I'm going to clean the mess off the art desk, rightnow it's an archeological dig back to before Christmas with unfinished projects. And I'll bet I find at least one of those hole punches buried in the debris.


Some of us believe that our relationships with our partners and loved ones exist within a circle that encompasses every moment spent together, every word spoken to each other, and every touch shared with each other. We reassure ourselves that as long as we stay within this magic circle, even if we stray to the perimeter of it, or even press up against the diameter until it has an unsightly bulge, that as long as we do not break through the curve, the relationship is alive and will survive, grow, and prosper.

The problem is when only one partner is bobbing up and down in the magic circle and the other partner is looking in. The other partner considers the relationship a timeline in which the only event that is of import is that which occurred last. The partner reviews the relationship and marks the high and low points with a number 2 pencil point: “here is where you said this to me”, and “this is the day that you forgot to ask me about that”, and “here, here is the time you did that awful thing”. They examine the relationship and peruse its checkpoints, burdening it with black hatch marks that tote up the hurts, the slights, and the failed expectations.

Of course, in a relationship, partners often switch places: one moment you may be in the magic circle and your partner is furiously toting up your transgressions. In another moment, you may leap right out of the circle and be the one scribbling away on your lengthy list of wrongs.

When one partner is bobbing within the magic circle, maybe bouncing off the walls sometimes, but always coming back to the center, and the other partner is filling the line with black marks, eventually that line is going to intersect that circle and pop it. The partner that was swimming along in the magic circle grabs at the other's relationship timeline as a rescue line and begins to make his or her own black slashes in order to even up the score. As the days progress, each partner is off in corners playing connect the dots, matching hurt for hurt, slight for slight until two parallel lines emerge and never the two shall meet again.

But maybe you won't grab for that easy rescue line, maybe you'll try to plug the hole by searching for the deep hairline fracture where it all began and refill the circle. Or maybe you think you can fill the circle back up again and drag your partner in with you by sheer force of will. You change your hair, your tone of voice, lose weight, make a favorite meal, leave morsels of charm and wit to be discovered by chance like breadcrumbs in the woods. Or you stick floaties on your arms and try to appear weightless while you struggle in the shoals. Or maybe you just say screw it all, and you get yourself a big fat pink marker, and begin to draw a new circle, one that begins as curve from your center outwards and slowly grows and gathers within its embrace all that you love, all that you hold dear, all that you wish to rescue and rediscover and renew, until it you are encircled once again.


I'm here, surfacing for a brief look around. The weekend was spent catching up on household things and family needs. I also am way behind in an art swap that was due last week. Almost done, but need another evening to get it out. Various viruses are running their course around here. Nothing awful, but enough to earn the title of the "creeping crud".

I finally bought Middlesex and plan to begin it this week. January seems to be made for reading and not much else. New snow is expected and Tueday into Wednesday looks like a mess.

Ciao till tonight.


Saturday Stuff

It takes a village to design a weblog, or at least some interested and caring relatives. Many, many thanks to my sister, Carol, for the beautifully designed new logo for pomegranatesandpaper. With only a few emails back and forth, she managed to capture exactly what I was looking for.

And thanks to my son Chris who had the patience to figure out how to get those button ups in the side bars. It was simple, actually, but it took quite awhile to wade through typepad's incomplete instructions to fill in the missing parts.

So I am back online after being away since Wednesday in Syracuse. My paralegal and I were congratulating ourselves on our foresight in deciding to leave on Friday morning instead of Thursday night when it was snowing heavily after the meeting ended. However, the snow ended shortly after 6:00 pm on Thursday, then began again Friday morning. We spent Friday morning biting our nails and calling US Air repeatedly to see if the flight was delayed. We ended up taking off quite uneventfully through the snow, but then were buffeted like bumper cars as we came into the New York air over LaGuardia. Our little twin engine 37-seater was tossing around like a dinghy in a hurricane. Of course, my grip on my arm rest and the many prayers, novenas and rosaries I was offering was the single-handed reason why we landed without incident!

Thursday night I started Donna Tartt's "Secret History" which I somehow missed ten years ago. I was intrigued to read it after finishing "The Little Friend". I've read it obsessively since then and just finished it a few hours ago. The writing is more even than in The Little Friend and the story more riveting. I found myself becoming paranoid and filled with dread as the story progressed and I had to remind myself repeatedly that I hadn't committed a crime.

I came home to find my order of these gorgeous journals from Claire Fontaine. They're a little too small, so I'm still on the search for this type, but in a larger format, like the ill-fated order at Kate's Paperie. LMK if anyone knows a source. In the meanwhile, I am trying to control my urge to run to Barnes and Noble and buy a Moleskine journal. Seems like EVERYONE has one - do I need one? Probably not, but when did this ever stop me?


Mid-week

Much as I try to keep up my writing during the week, I find it next to impossible. This week is a write-off, no pun intended. I'm leaving for 3 days on a business trip, so they'll be no posts until Friday night.

In the meanwhile, talk amongst yourselves.

Or check out this link and have your personality tested: http://www.colorquiz.com/
According to this test, I am insecure and emotionally detached. I cannot cope with the tensions in my life and try to escape to a world which I have made up. I want to be attractive and charming to people and try to change my personality to do so.

Well, duh.

All that from picking through two groups of colors.

And I broke my printer by snapping a piece off the housing for the printer cartridges, not just once but twice as I tried to put the cartridges in. Maybe that's why this Epson was only $60 bucks?

Off to fly to Syracuse where it is 5 degrees (it sounded like a good idea back in November when we booked this trip....)


Tracks of the Soul

I remember sitting in the back of the limousine: myself, the two kids, the baby, my mother-in-law, and our Siberian Husky in a dog crate. There was a foot of snow on the ground but rain had created a fogbank, so we glided out of our old neighborhood as if flying through a cloud, past the cozy bungalows steaming with heat, past the vacant summer cottages with blank window eyes, past our scruffy spit of lakefront beach, up the hill, and away, away from my children's friends, my friends, their schools, their birthplace, the only home they'd ever known.

The ride to the airport hotel was silent, all of us caught up in our separate worlds. Even the dog was quiet, head resting between her paws, already groggy from the tranquilizers the vet gave us for the cross-country trip. Stan was to meet us at the airport later that night since the moving company was creating a horrid, muddled mess of it, complaining about the stairs, the attic , our books, and taking our furniture out unprotected in the rain. They were hours past their bug-out time and with no end in sight, we elected for me to take the kids to the airport hotel and Stan would get their whenever the movers left, as long as he made it for the 8:00 a.m. flight the next morning.

My family was under strict orders to stay away. We'd already had a mournful, gut-wrenching good-bye at my sister's the day before and the knots in my stomach had not eased. Jessica and I had sobbed with broken hearts on the way home until Stan turned to us with a look of wonder and said "Boy, you must really love me to do this." Yes, I guess we did.

My mother-in-law was the most silent of all, sitting in her ramrod straight position, a posture I would come to know and hate at times during our sojourns together. This new vagabond, melded family was shape-shifting in the limo, trying on new roles of rebels, travelers, cast-abouts, feeling like voyeurs in our own lives. Later on we would half-jest about being in the underground witness protection program, and this was just the beginning of our vanquishing. Only the baby was unperturbed, still on my familiar shoulder, close to breast. She had just turned one and would be eight before we finally made the circle complete. My eyes hurt from crying and my head was tight with adrenalin and sleeplessness. I sighed at one point and they all turned to me. Automatically I smiled, beaming at them with lies: "Isn't this fun, what an adventure!" My daughter's lip quivered, my mother-in-law did not react.

I didn't know the language to use to console them in this uncharted territory. I could not explain the future in the old syntax when it stared at us in hieroglyphs. The children were sick of words, we all were. We needed runes to hold in our hand and divine what portents lay before us. We needed lucky charms to ward off the evil eye. Instead of a seatbelt, I wished I had a medicine bag strapped around my waist. From a magic pouch, I could spread out pieces of our lives on the leather seat next to me and they could hold the pieces on the journey:

- a pine bough sticky with resin from the tall trees that sheltered our house;
- a flask of water from the lake where Jessica passed the test to swim to the float when she was only 6;
- peach-colored baby booties that my mother knit for Jessica and that each baby had worn;
- hardened bits of Playdough and Barbie shoes from endless wintry days spent at neighbors' homes, new moms crashed together trying to survive;
- tarralla cookies redolent of almonds and holidays from their great-grandmother and great-aunt ;
- the cinders from my father's pipe;
- a feather from the large crow caught on the webbing over the vegetable garden, which I was too afraid to release and ran to my neighbor's for help. That night Stan came home and told us we were moving;
- a velvet pillow from my mother's long sofa, which we five sisters fought over each night watching TV, rushing to get there first and establish the dominance of lying full out with the runner-up wedged into a spot at the end;
- a snowglobe of real snow from the hill by the sporting club where my little son tried to teach himself to ski;
- blossoms of riotous color from bearded irises my husband planted;
- the Pepsi Cola light that hung over my parent's round picnic table on the screened porch where we lived all summer long;
- the lid of a fish tin from my grandfather's peddler truck, now used to make pizza;
- my sisters' lipsticks: raisin for Alicia; magenta for Mar; cherry red for Maria;
- the watercolor of forest animals my sister Carol made to mark the occasion of Jessica's birth;
- French fries from the diner where Stan and I had our first date;
- the walls of stencils I had painted during sleepless nights when my grandmother was dying;
- the little amethyst ring that cracked from the cold the day we skated in the falling snow; and lastly,
- a translucent lusterware teapot from which infinite cups of tea had been poured round my table, my mother's table, my grandmother's table, and my great-grandmother's table to a line of strong, loving women that stretched from Sicily to New York.

But that day I wore no magical velvet pourch around my my waist. As the black limousine rode up the big hill and stopped for the oncoming traffic, we all turned and craned our necks for the last glimpse of our home, but all we could see was the top of the spruce trees peeking out from the fog. And the only symbols I carried with me in the limousine that I could use to reassure them were my own hands, which I stretched out to them as the limousine made the turn and we emerged from the fog into the grey winter light. The pieces of our lives would travel within us.


Mapmaking

I write a lot about how to get from here to there in terms of my spiritual and creative journeys. I'm always looking for the one "thing" that will reframe my life, make me diligently productive each day, or at least nudge me into the art room at night after work. Lately I've been frozen up, matching the sub-zero temps that we awoke to this morning, Doing a lot of staring at the blank page, or screen as it is.

Pulling my old journals out last night was the jumpstart to a new journey. I found a book in the stack on my night table that I am very excited about. "You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination" by Katherine Harmon. (It's listed below on my books typelist and you can click on it there.) The back of the book intringuely asks: "Where are you?", the perfect foil for my thoughts these days. The book is filled with examples of maps made from personal journeys, whether real or imagined.

Harmon writes in her introduction:

" As a youngster, in the bedroom I shared with my sister, I came to know
intimately the ceiling of the room where I was supposed to be napping.
I stared upward for hours, making out forms of imagined countries
in the water-stained plaster. Why was I seeing international borders
even before I knew the meaning of the concept?
***
" Of course, part of what fascinates us when looking at a map
is inhabiting the mind of its maker, consider that particular
terrain of imagination overlaid with those unique
contour lines of experience. If had mapped that landscape,
we ask uorselves, what would I have chosen to show,
and how would I have shown it? The coded visual language
of maps is one we all know, but in making maps of our worlds,
we each have our own dialect.
" I map, therefore, I am: this could be the motto for the contributors to this book. "

It sends a shiver up my spine to think of mapping out my life's journey, or visualizing the little increments of change that resulted into an overnight transformation of five years' duration. I could begin with the physical, actual journeys I've taken, our move from the safe comfort of New York to wild California with its tumbling tumbleweeds and miles of blossom-filled orchards ripe with apples, figs, and almonds. And then our segue into the mid-South, the green trees, azaleas, hydrangeas, Southern hostesses, tea partie, and garden clubs that indulged us with our fantasy house and lifestyle, and then spit us out in a nightmare of sickness and job loss. Finally, the Sisyphean push back to the Northeast and family, career, winters, noise, museums, coldness, beaches, and grime. Or I could just focus on the center of longing that fills my soul, the craving for color, word, print, the feel of silk, the fragrance of patchouli, the whisper of my father's words as he lay dying, the cry of my babies at birth, The gold of the rings we exchanged on the altar, and the way my knees shook as we said our vows. Journeys into the sparks, the embers, and the ashes.

I'll be in my studio tonight, clipping out images, tearing down paper, opening pots of paint and preparing a canvas in order to plan a trip into the maps of my world that are spinning in my mind.

What cracks in the ceiling will fill your mind this evening as you stare into the fire, prepare dinner for your mate, or lay on your bed, exhausted by the week, yet filled with the bliss of remembered lives?


Baby, it's cold outside!

My boss shooed everyone home at 4:30 today because it is about 7 degrees and the roads are icing up. Last night into this morning, we had about 6 inches of snow fall. I drove to the courthouse (about 15 miles) with my heart in my mouth as I navigated the icy roads and unplowed streets. Thankfully, once I hit the highway, it was clear to the pavement and no back ups occurred.

When I left work tonight, the sun was a fireball low on the horizon. The orange burst was surrounded by swaths of smoky clouds that ranged from pink to lilac to amethyst. Daylight was noticeably brighter at 4:45 and my spirit s picked up at driving home in time to see the sunset.

In the busy spring and summer months, I look forward to the long winter hibernation as a time to write and make art. I plan all sorts of projects that I will finally get to after the holidays, from painting bedrooms, to making curtains, to do a new series of artists books.

But as in a true hibernation, all I want to do is eat and lay in my bed and read (ok, maybe hibernating animals don't read, but I bet they daydream a lot!). It is, however, the perfect time to journal. I've taken to my bed with my watercolor pencils, a bottle filled with water, PITT artist pens, and a new journal. Whiskers, my cat, is asleep on the extra blanket, so I can sketch him as I try to do several times a week.

While I'm journaling, I pull out the red brocade journal in which I record stuff about the holidays. I make an entry about who got what and what we ate and where. It's nice to close the book and know I have all this info for next year in one place.

I have a tiny journal covered in red and gold marbled paper from Rag and Bone bindery. It stays in the tray on my nightable. It's sort of my Book of Common Prayer. I copy in prayers and poetry that strike me, and I often write my prayers rather than "recite" them at night.
This is the prayer I wrote one night:

Lord, today let me live the questions.
Open my eyes to see the faces of those who love me.
Open my ears to hear the words they do not speak.
Open my nose to breathe in the scent of their longing.
Open my hand so as to guide them to my heart.
Close my mouth so as to not outspeak their fears.
Stay my feet to allow them to lead the way.



help wanted

I normally wouldn't use my blog to ask for help, but since I got the new laptop, I am being driven crazy with pop-up ads. I've downloaded pop up stopper and Zero Pop up and Spy Bot and I still get ads. In the course of writing the last sentence, I was interrupted four, make that five times. It's driving me off the net. I don't have this problem with my desktop. Any suggestions?????


Even in the dim January light, I can tell that the days are getting longer. It was not dark at six o'clock on Sunday evening when we were leaving my sister's house. Even not at 4:45, the sun is low in the horizon, but a low bank of clouds is lit up as though it were a summer day.

The day started in gloomy dampness, just a generalized dark morning. By the time I got to the office from court, a snow squall had blown in from the rest and blizzard conditions existed for about 15 minutes. The snow was coming sideways in great white sheets across the lawn where the wild turkeys and deer come out at dusk.

The complex is surrounded by old apple orchards, and we often hear the deer and turkey grousing in the woods. The city actually allows deer hunting with bow and arrow in the woods around our offices, despite the fact that there is a school and many offices on the perimeter of the woods. Several incidents have occurred where deer have bounded through the parking lot and been hit by cars, or trampled through the school yard, and it was obvious that they were in flight. Now the city is reconsidering the bow and arrow hunting because of the bad publicity. Really, what century are we living in?

I am tired after work these days. I know it is the lack of light and the cold. I am quiet and not posting much. I am on a reading binge and seem to be in bed with book and cup of tea by 9:00.

I will begin to wake up as the light returns.


Baby Steps

I received several emails from people wanting to know how I could put up with such a friendship after IC's bad behavior and potty mouth on Friday. I gently informed everyone that IC is a character, the personification of my Inner Critic (IC -get it). Interestingly, several people wrote to tell me that IC was a horrible person, but essentially right on. Of course she is! But I can't give all that power to my IC or I would never write another word.

Writing is as natural to me as breathing. I could never NOT write. But writing a sustained piece of work, over many months and years, and developing a plot, characters, and motivations, is something else again. Which blogger among us doesn't have at least two half-written novels in a manuscript box? Especially if they have another career, and attendant family demands.

So I take baby steps. Step, step, step, crawl, crawl, crawl. I'd say bird by bird, but someone better got there first.


Creativity Coaching

Towards the end of last year, I heard that Eric Maisel, the famous creativity coach, had a bunch of new coaches-in-training who needed creativity-stunted types to use as guinea pigs. "Me! Me!" I sent off an email with my hand frantically waving. After several months in which I'd forgotten all about it, I heard yesterday from a newbie coach who has been assigned to me. We're just setting up the framework of how it will work, but basically I get two hours per month of her time and we can communicate by email or phone.

She asked me to determine what projects or purposes I specifically want to focus on. (or she asked me if my goals were still the same, i.e. to unfreeze the right brain after a day of legal mumbo-jumbo and slip into the creativity mode when I come home.) Since I made a little headway on defining creativity goals for 2004 when I finally got some free time after New Year's, I wrote my goals as:

1. Research, develop and write the novel I have in progress, adding the new twist I discovered over the holidays;
2. Go back to keeping a visual journal and set up a website to feature it;
3. Continue to make artists books and submit them for publication.

As soon as I sent the email, I made the mistake of calling IC. It was only 8:00 a.m., but I knew she had a 9:00 class on Fridays. I wanted to know if she knew anyone at The British Museum. I had read about an acquisition they had that was a tie-in with my novel.

Her voice was hoarse, as if she'd been up all night shooting back jello shots of vodka.

"We're on semester break for god's sake and I've been up ALL night marking papers for these infantile libertines at this whorehouse of an institution. What IS IT?"

Hmm. Maybe not a good time to ask for a favor. I decided to fill her in on the coach in order to impress her with my new seriousness towards my alternative career. Then I read her my list of goals.

There was only silence at the other end, then a fit of hacking coughing after which I heard the sizzle of a match and the long, sensuous inhale of cigarette being lit.

"Quite a little list-maker, aren't you darling? What is this coach supposed to be, f-ing Santa Claus? Why not add star in the last episode of "Sex and the City" and steal Baryshnikov from Sarah Jessica Parker?

Your point, IC?

My point, if I had one at this ungodly hour after I've been up all night grading papers of trust-fund brats who have the world handed to them but can't right a fucking sentence, is that you have NO direction, NO focus. You're writing a novel; you're sketching; you're publishing a website; you want to do textile artist books about your family and heritage; you have a blog; you work full time; have 3 kids, a house and a husband! "

But that's why I need a coach!

No, you need to get real and get your f-ing head examined! YOU ARE ALMOST %) YEARS OLD! Get a grip! Do you know how hard it is to write a book? Do you have any understanding of the sacrifice, the dedication, the hours of isolation and the impact on all your relationships, no make that lack of relationshps? Do you? NO! Because you've always wanted it all and thought there was always time to get it. Give me a break! You should have put your head in the oven like Sylvia Plath, at least she's made a career out of being a dead poet!

With this she slammed down the phone.

Hmmpf. What the hell was I thinking of calling her first thing in the morning? I know it's her high anxiety time. She needs at least a handful of Xanax before she can get out of bed. I pictured her satin sleeping mask, the bottle of Pellegrino water next to the bed, and the Florentine journal and glass pen and ink sprawled next to her on the satin sheets.

You know what? Screw her. She's probably right, but who cares?

She's really a bitch when she sleeps alone.


Wednesday

How's that for a title? Only 2 days back at work and my right brain is frozen. Which is understandable since it was in the high-50's for several days and now is about 22 degrees. Oh, and someone slashed two of our tires on Sunday. The cruel part is that we'd only been to church and a diner that day. A disgruntled parishioner or overfed patron?


Cherubim & Seraphim

200 years ago today, the angels announced to the shepherds that a Lord was born who is Christ the King and the Magi visited with their trinity of gifts.

Today, the announcement of the Redemption has evolved into the day to take down all the Christmas finery, put away the extra folding chairs, and take the leaves out of the dining room table. The kitchen is sorely lacking in fruits and vegetables, and the refrigerator only holds a half-pint of sour cream, the dregs of a quart of eggnog, and shriveled up chestnuts that were never roasted. We've subsisted on take-out Chinese, deliveries of pizza, and bowls of cereal for supper. Real time is back and I'm resisting the black and white, second-hand sweep of its pull.

For Christmas, M. gave me a chubby, papier-mâché angel covered in old-fashioned glass glitter. She's a sturdy little thing, definitely more humble than grand. She is not from the same angelic choir as the Fortitudo Dei, in which belong the Archangel Michael, the dragon slayer; Raphael, the healer; and Gabriel, the Annunciator. Neither is she a Romanesque fantasy, all wings and flowing blonde hair and see-through skirts. No, she is young and not yet fully formed from the mouth of God. I believe she may be an angel-in-training. I started her off watching over my miniature crèches, but now that Epiphany is almost over, I am bringing her upstairs and installing her over my computer.

Who couldn’t use a tutelary Angel? There are nine kinds to choose from (even Angels have class distinctions it appears) and certainly there must be one that fits the peculiar needs of a Writer. Archangels are in the highest order and certainly there are times when an Archangel will come in handy to slay our dragons, to heal our pain, and to tell reveal the great truths.

On the next rung down on the celestial ladder are “Powers, Principalities, and Dominations” (duties murkily defined but sound like they’d make excellent agents). Last but not least are the Seraphims and Cherubims. What better for a writer than a host of Seraphim, whose purpose is to stand at your feet and adore? (I can name a few Writers who appear to have had their own choir of heavenly hosts installed many years ago.)

Other times, a writer may need a more practical celestial being, such a cherub, whose purpose is to veil God from the world and be heavenly throne-bearers. Such a being would come in handy when the kids are clamoring for clean clothes, the boss wants to know why you are late again, and the husband wants to know why it's his job to buy the groceries and pick up the dry cleaning. When the ephemeral urge to write is felt, a cherub can carry the Writer through the sticky mud of getting started, and into the evanescence of make believe.

According to official dogma on angels (who knew there was such a thing?), appearances of angels last only so long as the delivery of their messages requires.

So today I am listening carefully for the message. I need to hear the secret, the message that will shake me up, cover me with silvery flakes, and carry me back to make believe.

Or is that Tinkerbell?



(A)musing

Is one still considered a hypochondriac if one has a series of unexplained symptoms that never quite go away? Is it normal to have 1 to 2 viruses per week? Is it possible to have a pain in the gut/breast/left arm/head on a regular basis and not have it be related?

Could it all be stress?

And if so, what continguous nerve pathways are the stress using? Is there some super-body/brain highway to which my stress has an EZ-Pass, or do I really have the Dread Disease(s)?

Do other people go to bed at night reviewing their symptoms, rehashing old test results, and bargaining with themselves that it couldn't possibly be anything life threatening or they'd be dead by now?

Really, I wanna know.


Writing

Unlike many of my friends and relatives, I did not spend the first of the year cleaning, taking down decorations, and beginning all my new resolutions. No, I sat on my butt, blogged, and ate Chinese food and ice cream. Hey, New Year's Day is a HOLIDAY, and I treat it as such. And in my family lineage, that means eating. Plus, it was the first holiday I didn't have to do anything for, like entertain, clean, buy all the gifts, wrap, etc.

Today I intend to do a few little errands, stop at Starbucks and do artwork.

My confession is that I did spend the whole of yesterday surfing blogs. Now that I have the laptop, I can literally lay on the bed all day and do this. I have to stop. The DH says its just as bad as his fascination with reality shows. No way. I am not looking at the Bachelor and Bachelorette. No, the blogs I am looking at are all wonderful, creative, literary sites which inspire, entertain, provoke, and amuse. (OK I did spend a bit of time on Gawker looking at Rene Zelwigger's before and after photos re the weight she gained for the Bridget Jones sequel. I swear it's not the same person, I think they photoshopped it. )

I have to stop.

Instead of writing and making art, I am looking at sites where others write and make art.

But today I am going in to the art room and working on a series of painting I sketched out last week.

Or I'm going to Blockbuster to rent a bunch of movies.

Only 2 more days before work starts!!!


A New Year

Yeah, not one of my most brilliant titles, but the champagne consumed last night has fogged the synapses - NOT! We went to see Cheaper By The Dozen and then I dragged hubby to my sister's (it took all of my married for 23 years load o' guilt to accomplish this, beginning with "your mother lived with us for 7 years", to "we have no friends", and ending with the coup de grace "do you know how many events we've missed because of your back?".

Not that he has anything against going to my sister's house (Alicia if you are reading this, take note). He was just in his grumpy, albeit well-deserved grumpiness, that he only got one day off this holiday season and he's exhausted.

My son had my b.s. meter on overdrive last night as he came home at 12:30 with his friend and asked if he could spend the night there. Why didn't he just call? Because he had to get his "stuff". OK, this boy has been known to sleep and wear the same clothes until they are forcibly ripped off him. Could it have all been a ploy to allow his mother to see he had not been partying anywhere, and thus, the perfect ruse to allow him then to go out partying? I had to let him slide because the beauty of his plan, if it was a plan, was something worthy of my own subterfuges in high school.

The teen daughter was also very mysterious last night. Party plans fell through. Then a quick trip to a party with a girl she barely knows and then back home before we were. Haven't gotten a handle on that one yet, but noticeably, she didn't come down from the third floor to wish us happy new year when we got home.

God, thank you for college, where grown children can act out and mothers don't have to know. Really, screw the academics. God created college so I could sleep through the night without getting up and down fifty times to see if cars are in the driveway.

P.S. Yes, I liked Cheaper By the Dozen, all of its smarminess and updated for 00's. I LIKE Bonnie Hunt and I generally like Steve Martin.

And why do I get excited each year that we are going to watch The Rose Parade on New Year's Day? Is there anything more boring than watching a parade on TV? At least it doesn't have the stupid Broadway musical scenes that they've cut into The Thanksgiving Day Parade. And then again, The Rose Parade doesn't even have the stupid Broadway scenes, just giant floats that look like bugs.