I live by metaphors.  Really I do.  I need them.  When I am stalked by conundrums,and doldrums, angst and despair, frustration and deadends, I search for a metaphor.  Metaphors enable paradigm shifts. The need for self-discipline or self-talk diminishes.  Metaphors help me see and feel differently.

A lot of my metaphors are gardening metaphors.  I “dig” them.  I do.  I “sow” them.   I do.  It is because I live them in the garden of my backyard.

But sometimes gardening metaphors are too earth-bound , and I search for something to lift me beyond my ruminations.  For example, when we first moved to Hawaii.  I couldn’t find a gardening metaphor to work for me.  If I put in roots, then it would mean that I would be living far away from my beloved family for more than a season.  No, rooting couldn’t and wouldn’t work.   [continue reading…]

Do you remember the song “At Seventeen” by Janis Ian?  It’s a sad song.  It’s a sad song, and I knew, even as a little girl, that it was tragically relevant to life.  But I am happy to say that it is only marginally relevant to this post.  Hardly germane at all.  Don’t ask me why I mention it.

Ok fine, I’ll tell you:  Balance.  Or blessed dichotomy.  It is a minor reason (of the multitude) that I cry when I watch “Sense and Sensibility”— where Elinor can’t stop sobbing (in delicate snorts & hiccups) while Edward awkwardly (finally!) proposes.  It is the shadow that lies split behind Chris De Burgh’s “Lady in Red”.  It nuances why pulling off The Perfect Red Dress is such a thing to celebrate.

Thankfully, Maurya doesn’t have much in the way of  “At Seventeen” baggage.  For one thing, she’s still sixteen.  For another, she’s not one to pine for long; she makes her own way.  But still.  I don’t know; there was an element of catharsis for me as I sewed the Perfect Red Dress for her from fabrics and pattern that she had chosen for herself.  We shared the creation of the dress, as we share the bittersweet heritage of women.

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I’m not in Hawaii.  I could have been, but I’m not.  Frank is there right now on business.  I could have used some of his multitude of sky miles, could have sent the kids back to Oregon to stay with my parents, could have packed things that would be dreamy in the tropics.  I’ve never been tropical before.  But the kids are in school, and Oregon might as well be Bangladesh, for all the time and effort it would take to get them there.  Four days in Hawaii (plus two days travel) wasn’t worth the price.  At least that is what Frank and I agreed.  Now he’s there, having dinner with Cynthia and her family (South Shore burritos for last night’s dinner; I wonder what he’ll get tonight?), exclaiming over the lush green mountains and driving along the North Shore, and I am blogging after sending kids to bed.   [continue reading…]

I know I’ve said it somewhere before:  I run to cope.  Not that (in the global sense of things) I have anything gruesomely heavy to cope with;  my stuff is the ordinary, mundane stuff almost everyone faces at one time or another.  Loneliness for instance.  Discouragement.  Myopia.  Sticky Countertops.  Disorganizational Malaise (such as lost social security cards).  Heartache (which I’ve affectionately nicknamed a cracked sternum, fighting depression with humor).  Nothing really terrible.  (Though I am forty, and though random things like the turn of a newborn baby’s face or a farmer’s sepia-toned drawl make me want to either burst into tears, or beg to be invited to dinner, I refuse, REFUSE, to classify any of my stuff as “midlife crisis”). [continue reading…]

Note:  “Soul Sister” belongs to the kids and I.  Frank is warming up to it.  I am selfishly jealous when I hear it in public; I like to think of the song as just ours.  We crank it up and sing along and move with it when it shows up on one of our playlists, wherever we are.

Also note:  I wrote most of this blog entry a week ago.  School had just started, temperatures had dipped, and I was feeling nostalgic about summer.  I said trembly things like “Summer’s variance is a layered delight,” and talked about smelling fall in the light filtering through open windows.  Poetic, but a little incoherent.  What does that all mean, really?  I’m not sure.  Suffice it to say, I’m kind of sad that summer is on its way out.  I’m eyeing the sweaters stashed high in my closet woefully.  So, I’ll invite summer to linger.  I’ll talk about it, flatter it into staying.  And then I’ll ease inconspicuously and non-chronologically into an epic tale of how we squeezed most of our summer fun into nine summer days.

Summer’s heat can evoke anything from steam cookers and dry ovens to the slow, sweet caress of a lover.  And ah, the luxury of bare legs (and even feet) to traverse the stretched-out length of day with (am I waxing poetic again? Well).

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(this entry is dedicated to my niece Chandler, who loves this song and who I like to think of when I write silly things on my blog)

The North Ogden Art Festival is a little over two weeks behind me.  I started writing about it a week ago, while I waited in the Salt Lake City Airport (doesn’t that make me sound cosmopolitan?  I hope so).  Tried writing more of the story later in a hotel in San Antonio.  How romantic and writerly is that.  There was even a cricket under the bed, who came out to visit me while I took a break from my laptop and did a few pushups on the floor (that was me doing pushups, not the cricket).  We (he and I) could have been the new archy and mehitabel*, but sadly for him, his adventure ended in imprisonment and in the loss of one of his legs, rather than in unlimited access to my keyboard.  He sat for a day and a half in his transparent jail (a hotel glass), wishing he was a dragonfly (if he were, I’d have let him go—he knew that, because I told him).   All of which reminds me of Snow White’s fate, minus her universe-altering kiss.   I don’t know if she lay quietly dreaming about dragonfly escapades while she slept under glass; her dreams will forever remain mysterious, but with that kiss, it is certain she lost her head.  Who ever was happy living in a cloud castle?

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“A fish and a bird may love each other, but where would they live?”  I can’t remember whose line this is (or even if the line is straight on), but  it figures in a conversation with a fictional Leonardo Da Vinci.  Whose role (this is great) is both sage and fairy godmother in the Cinderella-with-a-twist movie “Ever After”.  Leonardo would be a good one to have this conversation with.  I’m not sure why.  But I like the sound of it.

So, it’s a great question.  We choose a mate (feathered friend or flashy fella), and then what.  Do we build a nest, or find a cubicle in the coral reef?  I cannot say.  Ask Leo.  I don’t have answers; I can only speak to the conundrum.

Frank is nearly a third (if not half) Scandinavian.  His ancestors hail from the far North, where, because of the long, dark, cold winters, people used to paint their home interiors in light colors to catch as much of the rare sunlight as they could.   Thick, insulated boots and woolen socks prevented frostbite.  Frank loves air conditioning.  A lot.  He languishes in the heat, and he prefers rooms cool and quiet with the shades down.  He hates sandals; he has a special relationship with socks.  Don’t mess with his socks. [continue reading…]