Postcards

Smoky Mountains

I believe it began last Fall while we were hiking through the Indiana Dunes, conversing about our respective travels... where, when, with whom, all of our best memories, and almost always noted in time by how old our children were at the time.  We were talking about trees and oceans, calm and flexibility, when one of us said to the other, We could travel really well together.  It was true.  And so last week, after a good six months of anticipation, my friend Mardie and I packed up for a girlfriends' trip down to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee.

Yes, oh yes, oh yes.

We rented a quiet cabin for four days so that we could be directly in the mountains without any parking lots or Cracker Barrell's nearby, with thoughts of hiking and sitting outside any time we pleased.  And then as things sometimes go, we received a call five hours into our drive that the cabin we had chosen and paid for (and were only a few hours away from staying in) had a leak, and we would need to be moved.  Upgraded to a bigger cabin at the top of the mountain, even.  That was marvelous news!

Windows and decks, windows and decks, this place.

And this being the view, we indulged completely.  Our whole trip was exactly like a retreat.  Better than what I hoped for, exactly what I needed.  Great conversation, plenty of quiet time, a little exploration and adventure, and four days of running completely in my own flow.  We ate when we were hungry, slept when we were sleepy, did not sleep when there were squirrels, bats and lord knows what else creating a ruckus on the rooftop, and sang along with hours upon hours of music.

I spent most of my cabin time draped like royalty, in my soft, worn grey quilt from home.  I brought it, sure that I would miss Kevin and the kids, and indeed I did.  This was one of very few times that I've spent more than a day or evening away from my crew, and I experienced a strange balance of missing them and blissful immersion into our awesome days and nights.  Thankfully Kevin held down the fort so well at home (and is looking forward to his own grownups only Las Vegas adventure in a few months.  It's a trade!)

This was the view from the bottom of our road.  Smoky Mountain(top) indeed.  Hardly any cell phone, email, texting or Instagram abilities at the top of the mountain, we grabbed a handful of moments every afternoon when we drove down the three hundred feet of steep, swirling mountain roads to touch base with our people, and occasionally the Internets.  The quiet was amazing.  Have I mentioned this?

We spent an afternoon in Cade's Cove, with black bears and deer and horses, 

and we hiked for approximately four and a half minutes there.  First I realized we didn't bring any bear spray (that's twice now, friends!  Remember last summer up in Montana?!) and thankfully my creeps about bears in the woods were assuaged quickly enough with a downpour of rain.  I promise more hiking next time, maybe even a walking stick and a little sweat.  As long as I remember to plan for where I am hiking, which is the woods, versus our usual, mostly-harmless Dunes and canyons in the Midwest.

It didn't matter that we didn't get far in the cove.  This is happiness, baby.  I am even the proud owner of a real-deal rain coat these days.  I don't even recognize myself.  

Post-rain, back to the wooden deck swing, back to the blankets, back to the guacamole.

I totally look like I just woke up from a nap, here.  I probably did.

There were a few truly amazing moments, like this sweet baby resting on my fingers.  Twenty minutes earlier he had been dropped on our deck by a crow, half-dead.  We hung out together until he felt better and got his courage back.  And then off he flew, absolutely not created to be anyone's breakfast.

Marvelous Great Smoky Mountains National Park

Mountains covered in trees, sunlight resting on blankets of leaves...  I kept thinking the whole time that all of those rows and mountains were comprised of individual trees, standing together by the thousands, rooted deeply, supportively together in the ground.  You couldn't begin to count the vast number of trees that covered the mountains, and yet from far away it was just one giant mountain.  Amazing.

The misty smoke that came and went as it pleased was equally amazing.  

We each brought books to share on the trip, reading everything from novels to poetry to childrens books.  This was such a marvelous idea (not mine) that took me back to homeschool, reading half the day with my own kids, and being a classroom teacher, and back to college with my roommate Bree, when we would read to each other at night.  Talk about feeling cared for... curling up with a good friend and a book easily does that.

We explored and shared history, here at a graveyard dating back to pre-Revolutionary war.  I loved reading the dates, 1784-1840 and such, and the hand-carved headstones.  Creepy and so interesting, both. 

My one hiccup was where I packed my watercolor journal, paint brushes, tray and markers... and left my paints at home by accident.  Though not really a sketcher, I was so in the mood to create by the time I realized what I had done, a black marker and sketch paper was the best I could do at the time.  A Sunday morning with some kind, any kind, of art.

There was tree love,

equine love,

fog hanging over streams,

and evenings in the jacuzzi beside these giants.

I am so grateful to have had this fantastic opportunity.  Such a great trip.

The one about patience

I've been watching everything bloom this Spring- slowly, slowly, one tiny bud at a time.

It starts at the bottom, always.  I really don't know why that is.  First the grass and ground cover comes back, and then tiny buds on bushes, yellow daffodils followed closely by yellow dandelions (Marin's personal favorite, because those are the ones she is allowed to endlessly pick) and each thing in turn all the way to the top.  

Among the last of the trees to leaf out are the Oaks, who are like wise old grandfathers anyway, their bark twisty and rough with deep vertical trenches, enormous twists and knuckles throughout their lengthy branches.  They've stood long enough that they seem to have earned the right to wait as long as they will to produce their leaves. No apologies necessary.

And then what emerges is the most peculiar thing- leaves like babies.  Completely soft and delicate, out of these huge, gothic trees.  Nothing like the thick, plastic-like and pointy leaves you find at the end of the season, but very fine.

So earlier this month, on a Wednesday I had off work, my friend and I headed up to New Buffalo, Michigan after I dropped off the kids at school.  We parked the car and were headed down a wooden staircase to the sandy beach on Lake Michigan and I began investigating the growing leaves on either side of us.  So patient, I thought again. And this is the lesson that has come from the current season, for me:  I too am a grower, and I evolve at exactly the perfect pace.  There came a point for me, about seven years ago, when I became acutely aware at how much I was missing in life, how distressed and sad I often felt inside, even though I had already been a teacher and then a mom with a house where we hosted a few gatherings each year...  I started off by losing weight, and at the time imagined that mighty accomplishment to be the crux of my personal development, but it was so, so much bigger than that.  I've moved through ten million stages of personal growth now, and at the heart of my motivation is the certainty that I have the freedom to change anything in life at any time, and that there exist all sorts of options I hadn't considered before.  

In the last six months, for example, I dedicated an enormous amount of energy to working on my boundaries. Not only making a logical decision (or guilt-induced decision, as things sometimes go) for whether I should accept or decline an offer, an invitation or a plea for help in a given situation, but I have trained myself to get quiet and feel intuitively from my core, whether a resounding Yes is in line with me or not.  I am a helper, and I easily get caught in Overstepping and Doing Too Much, and this is always exhausting and overwhelming for me someplace in the experience.  And it probably is that at times for my unsuspecting victims- eh, recipients, as well.  I have now observed many times, since I began been paying attention, that help or enabling where it doesn't belong is no help at all, and I have also learned that I am not the perfect person to assist all people in all situations.  So I check myself quietly, now, to see what my intention is and whether something is really for me.

Except for those moments where I think I have checked, or I've half-checked.  Because I am still in practice.  Or my heart was bleeding for someone who was struggling when I was already so tired and over-committed in my own day but I offered and then I collapsed into a heap of exhausted and jumbled emotion by the end of the long night because I tried to cram too much into my day and ended up feeding my kids dinner from a drive thru and I've got better in me than this.  Followed immediately by a dumpster and a half of judgment, because I've been working on this, remember?  And I screwed it up this time.  When am I going to get it right, consistently? 

Those are the moments that I brought with me to the Michigan staircase, with the leaves emerging slowly and unapolagetically, all in their own time.  

The truth is about me, and probably you too, that if I know better, I always do better.  If I see a good option and a better one, forget even the bad ones, I will always choose better.  I know this about me.  And so no undue pressure, no apologies, I will do the best I can as a limey green Spring sprout, or even a mid-summer orange speckled lily, and be exactly where I am.  The blog header is still not updated and there are three baskets of unfolded laundry on my kitchen floor, but I baked with my kids tonight after football practice, which came after making dinner, which came after work all day, and I am exactly who and where I should be right now.  This is the kind of patience I can commit to.

The Follow-Up, and Maya

Everything I said last night was true, about having many projects in the works at the same time, and delighting in it.  That would also include blogging past midnight, another project, so to speak, knowing full well that I would be headed to school dropoffs and work at eight o'clock this morning, tired as can be, coffee in hand.  Lesson learned.  Love and passion aside, no midnight blogging on work nights.  (This is 10:56pm, post bath and Maya Angelou by candle.  You see how I am totally in the clear?)

A gift from my girlfriend last week

I mentioned last night that I am reading Maya's book, Mom & Me & Mom, the story of Maya's life that reads quickly and also speaks to my heart.  I have long loved Maya, and now even moreso.  I'd like to share a little bit as I close this quick entry.  Should you be looking for a good book, I highly recommend this one.

I thought about my mother and knew she was amazing.  She never made me feel as if I brought scandal to the family.  The baby had not been planned and I would have to rethink plans about education, but to Vivian Baxter that was life being life.  Having a baby while I was unmarried had not been wrong.  It was simply slightly inconvenient.

I found a job when my son was two months old.  I went to mother and told her, "Mother, I am going to move."

"You are going to leave my house?"  She was shocked that I would leave her fine home, with all its amenities.

I said, "Yes, I have found a job, and a room with cooking privliges down the hall, and the landlady will be the babysitter."

She looked at me half pityingly and half proud.  She said, "All right, you go, but remember this: When you cross my doorstep, you have already been raised.  With what you have learned from your Grandmother Henderson in Arkansas and what you have learned from me, you know the difference between right and wrong.  Do right.  Don't let anybody raise you from the way you have been raised.  Know you will always have to make adaptations, in love relationships, in friends, in society, in work, but don't let anybody change your mind.  And then remember this: You can always come home.

I walked away and was back in my bedroom before I heard my own words echoing in my mind.  I had called Lady "Mother."  I knew she had noticed but we never ever mentioned the incident.  I was aware that after the birth of my son and the decision to move and get a place for just the two of us, I thought of Vivian Baxter as my mother.  On the odd occasion and out of habit sometimes I called her Lady, but her treatment of me and her love for my baby earned her the right to be called Mother.  On the day we moved from her house, Mother liberated me by letting me know she was on my side.  I realized that I had grown close to her and that she had liberated me.  She liberated me from a society that would have had me think of myself as the lower of the low.  She liberated me to life.  And from that time to this time, I have taken life by the lapels and I have said, "I'm with you, kid." 

Confession Time

I have something to share with you, friends.  I realized this just today, as I sat with fabric sprawled across my kitchen floor, creating hems with straight pins:  I have some sort of Creative ADD.  As I sat beside my refrigerator, pinning, I looked up at one point and realized that in that very room were no fewer than seventeen thousand projects in the works.  I am reading three books at the moment, all piled atop our kitchen stereo. (Maya Angelou's new book Mom and Me and Mom is my super-favorite of the three, followed closely by Radical Acceptance, a Buddhist book about, well, radical acceptance.)  I was also working on curtains right then, sewing machine set atop my two card tables that we've been dining on for the last two weeks as I am just reaching the completion stage of refinishing our actual kitchen table (which is out drying in the garage, beside a second-hand oval shaped picture frame which I have dismantled and spray painted a deep ocean blue with sparkles.)

The scene of the current crime.  (Non-crime, really.)

Near all of the sewing, of course, table-tops now cleared from yesterday's creative mess, are the paintings I have in progress, which are nearly as fun Almost Finished as they will be once they have reached Finished.  I love the moment just before the moment we've all been waiting for.  I know what the end looks like for the two largest of these canvases and we will be there in no time, baby.  Look at all that rain down there...

I also have an afghan crochet project about a quarter of the way there, gallon of paint for my son's bedroom for the upcoming weekend and am prepping for the Mother-Son Dance, and then to go away for a girlfriend's trip to the Great Smoky Mountains next week.  None of this, thankfully, is about the glorification of busy.  I got that well under wraps in the last year (and we will call that a process, not a project.)  Rather, it is simply the enjoyment of all that surrounds my family and friends and I.  Everything feels so inviting, these days, and I am acutely aware of how blessed I am to enjoy and celebrate all of it.

Several years ago I had read an article by Martha Beck about creativity, and how when you reach a block you can always try what she called the Kitchen Sink Method.  Go get inspired-- try everything but the kitchen sink!  I grabbed hold of that idea and it has really become part of my process.  Before I paint I poke around Pinterest a little, maybe read a little, glance over the inspirational emails still bold in my inbox, and I blast music, sing and dance ninety percent of the time while I paint.  I can't say I get stuck that frequently, because more often than not I wait for inspiration to hit and then I roll for as long as I need to.  (Heh, I am blogging at midnight and need to be up for work in a handful of hours.)  But even more than the Kitchen Sink method, it's jumping from project to project as often as I need to that keeps me moving.  And thankfully I have enough OCD to balance my ADD, in that I am a finisher of all these undertakings.

Project Completion post, coming soon.

So true.

Oh yes, oh yes, it's Springtime

(That title would be a throwback to Disney's Little Einsteins, in which I am well versed.)  Every year as the long, grey winter ends, and we finally make it to the warmer weather in the Midwest, and the trees and flowers explode into color, I celebrate.  Heh, I've taught my kids to celebrate, too.  I have never been a fan of winter.  I miss the color and the contact with nature, and the energy of leaves, grass and flowers.  We are slowly coming back, now, to all that color, and we have been reveling in it!  Work and school by day, and then we burst through the doors to see what has grown and changed since morning.  It really does happen that fast, doesn't it?  A spring sampling, below, of our recent adventures:

A play, followed by a day of play downtown

I spy a Dogwood in there, and a few hints of green...

Rainy afternoon on Lake Michigan

Marin and I drove along the lakeshore for the longest time on this afternoon, and I taught her the song my great-gramma used to sing to us when we were kids... Rain, rain, go away.  Come again another day...

Rain is art, too.  I'll take it.  Or at least wait patiently through it.

Daffodils, repeatedly, and for weeks! from my dear friend Mardie.

Coffee mornings on my day off, with my girlfriend Diane.

On Earth Day the kids and I bought a fern.  We named her Fern. 

Always with the books.  Best of all I enjoy reading Mary Oliver's poetry in my salty bubble baths.

Love.

Daddy Daughter Dance!

I love this girl.

Bloom, babies!  Our sweet baby trees are such a delight.

Our kids are, too.

Who doesn't love getting silly on an enormous mound of sand?

We ran into our homeschool friends at the beach on this day, which was an awesome surprise!

KJ and I.  He is growing up so fast.

Our first sunset on the beach of the spring/summer season.  I could not have been happier (until, heh, I remembered that we have school and work now, and there was homework and showers and lunches to be made once we returned home from this fantastic evening.)  (Still worth it.)

And then one more beach day this week, in Southern Michigan.  I can hardly resist.

I hope Spring is happening in your neck of the woods, too.

I am blogging.

Hey look!  This entry has an actual title!  

Hi friends...

It has been seven months since I shut down my blog, and for seven months I puttered around and considered, wondered if I was ready again and tinkered a little more.  I couldn't let go of my website completely, so I didn't.  I created this space, Postcards, so I could still hang on just enough.  (It has been fun to lay low, here, all these months.)  But I've decided to dedicate myself to writing again.

Pull up a couch?  

Here, have a pillow.  

Yes, that's good.

The best part about deciding to write again is that it is happening tonight, when I had no plans for it an hour ago. Well, I've been strongly considering it for at least a few weeks, but I figured it would happen on a Sunday afternoon, once I had created a new header, freshened up my sidebar and authored an About page to introduce the next leg of the journey.  I could at least drag out the thesaurus for this first entry...

Nope, this is it.

Since I wrote late last summer we have been taking big, bold steps in our family.  Namely, all of our daytime activities.  KJ and Jack went to school!  After three wonderful years of homeschooling, and fighting the nagging premonition last summer, we made a quick leap when we all were sure.  They were craving more freedom, more time away from home, bus rides, lockers, friends all day and cafeteria lunches. I was craving a little space, and a new step.  We all were just ready.  So we put the boys in a private school that boasted small class sizes and that felt homey enough, and their first year has been great.  Everyone transitioned much more easily than I could have predicted, they made lots of new friends, brought home fantastic grades, and the big yellow school bus is still quite a hit.

Once that happened, I found myself standing at the front door of my empty house wondering what exactly I would do with two whole hours each day while Marin was in preschool.  So I worked out a little bit, read books, painted, drank a little girlfriend coffee, promised myself to never do household chores during my magical alone hours, volunteered at church, and so on. In the afternoons Marin and I buddied up for lunch, worked puzzles, ran errands and watched The Wizard of Oz at least three days a week, for a while.  And then one day, not too far into the new year, my little tiny baby asked if she could stay at school and have lunch with her friends. (It was exactly Steve Martin/Father of the Bride, where this child who just learned to walk forty-five minutes ago was proposing she go out into the world and spend six hours a day with her Montessori gal-pals snacking on fishy crackers and learning to add.  Preposterous.)  We said yes, of course we did, because this girl is independent, and again, there is simply something to be said for good timing.

I had two weeks of days alone, then, before a job presented itself to me.

Oh yes! 

Do you see how these things are rolling?  Marvelous.

I was not looking for a job, but right before me sat the opportunity for an office manager role at a holistic health business & counseling center... and to be honest, there was really no reason not to give it a whirl.  Left brain, organizing, creating, spreadsheeting! playing with office supplies! kind of work that reminds me what a cool grown-up I had forgotten that I was, and a business that I believe in, healing and empowering individuals who are braving their journeys.  I work when the kids are in school, and by four p.m. each day we congregate back at the house to have dinner and engage in everyone's extra curriculars.  

This has changed things at home, and very much for me, as one might imagine, but more on that later.

Beyond school there are new neighborhood friends from the bus, and independence, and plans for an upcoming family road trip (of course there's that!)  I have fallen in love with my own brand of art (watercolor and acrylics, specifically) and reading poetry, and taking life one step at a time.  Most of all I have spent the last seven months learning better to trust the process and see what happens.  Once waving my own white perfectionist flag many years ago at the start of this blog, I have since packed it away in a brown cardboard box and made peace with what is, because it all turns out better than I could have planned, even if the current header to this space fails to match my newborn intention.

So thanks for coming over, from your feed reader or Facebook.  You can like Lost A Sock on Facebook for entry updates as I write them, and you can also find me on Instagram every day (lostasock).  I have plugged in my Instagram feed to my Flickr account, in the sidebar to the right.  (I am in mad love with Instagram, friends.  Are you there too?)

It's great to be back, finishing up an entry post-midnight.  It's just like the old days.  

You must learn one thing. 
The world was made to be free in. 
Give up all the other worlds
Except the one in which you belong.

David Whyte

There are, it seems, two muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say "It is yet more difficult than you thought." This is the muse of form. It may be then that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction, to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.

-Wendell Berry

Finishing up this Winter season, here. 

The Pinewoods

This morning
two deer 
in the pinewoods
in the five A.M. mist,
 
in a silky agitation
went leaping
down into the shadows
of the bog
 
and together 
across the bog
and up the hill
and into the dense trees--
 
but once, 
years ago,
in some kind of rapturous mistake,
the deer did not run away
 
but walked toward me
and touched my hands--
and I have been, ever since,
separated from my old, comfortable life
 
of experience and deduction--
I have been, ever since,
exalted--
and even now,
 
though I miss the world 
I would not go back--
I would not be anywhere else
but stalled in the happiness
 
of the miracle--
every morning
I stroll out into the fields
I believe in everything--
 
I believe in anything--
even if the deer are wild again
I am still standing under the dark trees,
they are still walking toward me.
 

by Mary Oliver