the busy heart

Honey Dewlicious Melon And then, one morning this past week, I felt settled. I cut up a melon for breakfast, and it was in the top five most delicious melons I've ever tasted. The three of us sat at the table, eating melon (or rejecting it wholeheartedly, in the case of Henrietta) and talking. The house was in good enough shape that I cleaned up easily, without stepping around enormous boxes or having to look at a baffling mess in the living room while I did it. We had all rested. We had things to do which didn't seem like pressing emergencies in order for us to live in this place. We could just be here, working out our days in this new house with the big, green trees out our windows. The view from our bedroom window I'm not sure why exactly, but so far Alabama--the place itself--hasn't been the difficult transition I expected. It is undeniably beautiful here, which I'm sure helps. On my way to Target I pass green fields full of horses and the most incre...

Small World The advantage of living much closer to family is that I could make a semi-spontaneous decision to go see my sister in California. Sam was desperate to finish his novel and Henrietta and I wanted to see her aunt and cousins, so off we went, the two of us making the eight hour drive together. She was remarkably well-behaved during that eight hour (okay, nine hour) drive, and once we were there we  went to the beach and ate fish tacos and went to a glorious California farmer's market and cooked good meals and stayed up late talking to my sister. And we went to Disneyland. I'm a bit of a Disneyland skeptic, as it turns out. I loved Disney when I was a kid, but I confess I don't much understand people who still love it as adults. So I was going mostly on my sister's word that we'd have a good time. Henrietta and I had terrible trouble actually getting to the park (long story), and it took a complicated hour getting from the parking structure to the ga...

Our bed is finally fixed. After a few failed attempts that made me cry and despair and blame Sam entirely (and unfairly), it's fixed. Even though Henrietta has been sick most of the week and Sam got sick this weekend, and I seem to be coming down with it too, last night we pulled the guts out of our four-poster, and dropped a metal bedframe inside ( this one --which I can recommend), and it worked like gangbusters. The baby was crying in her crib most of time we worked, since it was clearly bedtime to everyone involved except for her, and there were screws and shards of wood scattered everywhere. Once we finally had it set up, I went and got her, and she clung to me gratefully, resting her head against my shoulder. She was in a little plain white onesie, since it's full-blown summer here now, and her nose was running. I set her down between us and we lay there on either side of the bed like lumps, while she crawled back and forth between us, ricocheting like a pinball. She was ...

Henrietta tries out the Pacific, and finds it bafflingly cold.  Well, we've learned an important lesson: when I'm on vacation with my family, blogging doesn't happen. Henrietta and I were in California, visiting my parents and my sisters and their families. It was basically heaven: warm and sunny and Henrietta giggled profusely. I hope to get back to regularly scheduled programming soon, but in the meantime, here's a guest post that went up last week at Doves and Serpents . It's another part of my "Of Jobs and Motherhood"  story. In short, when I was pregnant I applied and got accepted to Divinity School at Harvard and Boston College. It was heady and exciting, and then confusing. Check out the post to read more.

My grandparents, gorgeous, in 1940. This week I found out that one of my father's grandfathers was Catholic. He was Catholic (though lapsed) and his wife was Mormon. This was, I think understandably, very fascinating news for me. All week I've been begging my father for whatever he remembers about them, and asking my aunts for the same, and boy have they come back with some fantastic details. All week I've been swimming in these stories, working on an essay about what it's like to be married for nearly five years and find out your great-grandparents sort of had a similar thing going. Maybe I'll write more about it all here, fill you in on some of these details. But right now, now that I've finished writing the essay, there's a story about my grandmother (the one in the picture up above) that I keep thinking about. It's a story my Aunt Dawn told me, illustrating the easy-going, let-it-go style of my dad's side of the family. When my aunt was a...

Usually the mean voice in my head shows up in the evening, when it's almost time for bed. And I start to despair and say really hopeless things, and Sam has to practice remembering that I don't actually think they're true , I'm just exhausted. And exhaustion manifests so much like sadness, for me. But today she showed up much earlier, while I was getting dressed for the day. I went to get a dress from my wardrobe, and I told Sam, "The mean voice in my head came out early today." "Did she? What's she saying?" he said. "Do you really want to know? Like, what she's actually trying to tell me?" "Sure," he said. "In the last two minutes, she's said the following: My thighs are disgusting. I'm a worthless human because I haven't vacuumed yet. I should stop blogging because it doesn't matter anyway, it's not really writing. I have neglected to mail x and scan and email y and write to z, and I...

I plowed through my undergraduate degree in three years, my Master's in two, and I finished my PhD by the time I was 26. This didn't feel odd or particularly ambitious. I just did the next thing that made sense, sometimes kicking and screaming along the way for various reasons, but keeping on anyway. While I was in school, I wondered on and off if I was doing the right thing. School was expensive; Mississippi was lonely; I felt like I should already be having babies, like my friends. Sometimes all that got me through were quotes from Gordon B. Hinckley  (president of the Mormon Church at the time) saying that women should get all of the education they could get. I was doing that. I was getting all the education I could. I had these quotes taped all over my house. I didn't know how it would work exactly to have a family and a career, but I had this vision of myself, sitting in my office on an academic campus, rocking a sleeping baby in a car seat while I discussed poetry...

I've gotten questions about Henrietta's name, and I thought I'd officially answer. Her name is Henrietta Plum Ruddick, and we'll start with the last name, which is indeed Ruddick, not Plum, as some have assumed. I wouldn't have put it past us to give her an entirely original last name--one neither of us share--but the truth is that we're more traditional than we seem. Though I've toyed with going back to my maiden name (and I do publish under it), now that she's here I rather like that we're all Ruddicks, and I doubt I'll ever bother to go back. On Plum. This is honestly a product of dozens of very lengthy (and fun (bordering on tedious)) conversations between Sam and I while I was pregnant, trying to settle on her name. We'd suggest whatever would pop into our heads, whatever we'd see out the window or put our finger to in a book: Me: "Stopsign Ruddick. Stop Ruddick. Spot Ruddick. Hester Spot Ruddick." Sam: "Book R...

Greetings, Earthlings. We're developing a routine, the lady and I. Would you like to hear a slice of it? Though she wakes up at various earlier points, she's generally ready to join the world around eight, and she cries to say so, and I creep into her bedroom and peer over the side of her crib, where she's flopping around like a green fish in her green swaddle. And at some point in her flopping and wailing she'll see me standing there, and she'll stop, and she'll look up at me and grin and flex her legs in joy--the full-body smile, my dad calls it. Obviously this is the most significant world event of the morning, this smile. I scoop her up and feed her and change her and pick out her outfit--another favorite task--and bring her down to the kitchen. She kicks and talks to me (so to speak) from her throne--a baby seat I put up on the kitchen island--and I tell her about the day ahead, talking her through the ingredients of my green smoothie and details o...

I have a slight obsession going with modern-looking quilts. (Don't believe me? Check out my Pinterest Board . And follow me , why don't you?) When I saw a gorgeous zig-zag quilt last November, the wheels starting turning, and suddenly I had committed myself to making three of them for Sam's family for Christmas. One for his mother, one for his aunt, and one for our sister-in-law. And hey, why not another one for our little niece, thought me. Let me tell you, making four quilts in a month is not easy. I'm not really sure what I was thinking. I think I was looking for some distraction, but I got a bit more than I bargained for. I was working on them after Sam went to bed, in the mornings before I went to work. I found myself trying to sneak a few seams in while I waited for water to boil, while I waited for Sam to put his shoes on, before I dashed out the door for this and that. And still, closing in on our departure date, I was far from done and discouraged. Luckily, ...

Last night I dreamed I met Felix. Felix was the name we had for the baby, had it been a boy (which we found out it would have been, rather than a girl, some weeks after the miscarriage, but that's another story). The dream woke me up, and I came out and stood in the hall. Sam was still awake, and he held me, pressed my head against his chest very gently, and I said, "I met Felix." And he said, "Felix the former?" And I said, "No, I think Felix the soon." I dreamed we were in the hospital and it was clear I was ready to have a baby. And that dream delivery was a total a breeze, as they are free to be. One moment I was sitting up in bed and I mentioned to Sam we should maybe find the doctor and the next moment I was holding this baby. And oh, this baby. He had so much hair and he looked like a young Sam and he had these incredible eyes. They reminded me of my dad's eyes in baby pictures and my nephews' eyes but also Sam's eyes. And I held t...

[the pools and view from the condo.  zihuatenejo, mexico.] Sam and I went to Zihuatanejo, Mexico for a week at the beginning of October, just after we moved.  We visited his parents, who rented a condo down there for six months, and are generous souls.  They treated us well.  It was a whirlwind of swimming in the pool, reading books in lounge chairs, eating fresh-fresh seafood, fishing, eating more fresh-fresh seafood, swimming with dolphins, drinking limonada, nursing sunburns, practicing my (meager) Spanish skills, and taking very long naps.  Can strenous relaxation even be considered a whirlwind?  Anyway, it was grand. [i love this one.  gosh it was gorgeous there.] I'll cover other material in a few more posts (swimming with dolphins!  fishing (and seasickness)! glamorous book reading by the pool and sea!) but I must first tell you about La-La the porcupine, whom we met at a animal rescue type place called ...

[family, draper temple] I went to Utah last weekend, took hundreds of pictures of the nieces and nephews, went out to eat with friends, took a long walk with my parents and sister and her kids, had a sister/mama sleepover, and just generally soaked up the sweet home feeling.  Arriving, when the plane came into the Salt Lake Valley, I could feel my body relax.  It's so green now, so lovely and familiar.  I could pick out all of the temples and my parents' neighborhood, and I could hardly breathe, I was so glad to be there. [Ari, jumping] I don't have a cohesive story about being there aside from that.  But here's something I want to remember.  My niece, Ari, loves Sam.  When Sam comes to visit at Christmas, she shouts "SAM!!" and runs up and hugs him.  He's not exactly used to this sort of attention, and he likes her for it.  Everyone likes Ari for this: she's spunky, and she's good at making people feel...

Yesterday was my sister Amara's birthday, and all day I remembered and reminded myself to call her, call her, call her. And still ... I forgot. I'm a failure at life. So happy (late) birthday, Ammie! In the middle of the night, when I remembered my failure, I was thinking about Amara. She's twelve years older than I (right?), the oldest of the six kids in our family, and it's been really something to watch how those twelve years have seemed to shrink and shrink. When I was 8/9, she was in college, see, and so I didn't really get to know her well until we became grownups (whatever that means), and Amara has really taught me what it means to be a grownup. Or no, that's not it. Teaching me how to be a grownup sounds like she's boring, and she's far from boring. Really what she's taught me, what she continues to teach me, is how to be a woman (can I say that?), a woman who gracefully does what she loves and takes care of those she loves with more e...

As I've mentioned, just before Sam and I married, depression really sunk me, made me suspicious of everything good, easily broken, easily frightened, hard to reach. I continue to feel like I’m surfacing, but disappearing from planet earth for several years makes it hard to get to know anyone, to establish connection. I think my in-laws have thought Sam married an alien. He sort of did. They visited recently, and one night we went out for Italian. On the way home, rounding the glitter of Boston’s night skyline, my mother-in-law and I shared the backseat, our husbands sitting in the front. My seat belt hadn’t been working, and we finally figured out I could plug the silver clasp into the buckle near her, meant for the middle, which made me sort of lean over to her side of the car. In the back while Sam steered us over a bridge, we felt like friends, like I finally wasn’t too submerged in my own skin to have a conversation. Mint tea on my breath, an after- dinner cappuccino on ...

Since this new job involves reading all day (I mean, literally, all day. Finding stuff to put in anthologies. It's not a bad life, I tell you.), I've been posting things on the other blog that catch my eye/heart. But somehow, this belongs here. Maybe because of subject matter. Anyway, my dad loves this book, Eternal Man , by Truman G Madsen, and he got me reading it. It's short, but fathoms deep, and I feel like I'll have to read it seven more times to "get it." But this part, I think I get. On freedom and commitment: "We talk as if freedom consisted in having the greatest variety of options and that a 'once-and-for-all' decision coerces our initiative. But is freedom increased by every new flavor of ice cream? "Actually, it is only when we rise above trivial options and ask ourselves in the depths, 'What do I want to be ?' that we emerge from the bondage of a flitting and faceless mode of life. The most majestic wonder of our fr...

We went to the Forest Hills Cemetary yesterday, the same place that did the lantern festival. It's huge and full of trees and sculptures and they let you drive around and park wherever you want and have a picnic. We didn't picnic, but we did drive around looking for the contemporary art stuff. I'm not sure that Sam liked it as well as I did, but I certainly fell hard for a few pieces, for the whole place really. I made a mosaic of my pictures in Picasa, so that's what you're seeing here. I had too many pictures I was in love with to just post them one by one, and as it is this represents a severe butchering of all the others I wanted to show you. My favorite was probably the one that looks like the trees are wearing dresses. In fact, the trees are wearing dresses, delicate-ish wire ones. I think you only see the mama dress here, but there was a whole family--one for mother and father, an older sister, and a child. Man, they're spooky and gorgeous. While...

Several years ago, I watched Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress . It doesn't happen in the book, but there's a scene in the movie where these villagers write the names of people they love on little paper boats and send them out onto a lake. The movie is good. That scene was incredible. I thought maybe the boat thing was just in the movie. But I'm ignorant. Turns out it's a Buddhist ritual to remember the dead. It also turns out that a nearby cemetery participates. Sam and I went tonight. We had no idea what to expect. As Sam said, "When it's called a Lantern Festival we should have expected a festival." There were hundreds of people gathered around this lake, eating picnics, listening to traditional music, surrounded by lanterns they had decorated for their loved ones. Sam and I neglected to bring a blanket, so we perched by a tree and ate our dinner--falafel wrap for me, cod wrap for Sam--from our favorite little healthy food place. We got a lanter...

Short Post Today. We heard that taking the bus might take hours and hours, so we opted to stay around here. Here being the same neighborhood as the BYU London Centre, near Kensington Gardens. I know and love this area already, so I really adored showing Sam my favorite places: Embassy Row, the Round Pond in Hyde Park, Bayswater and Queensway and Whiteley's, etc. It was low-key. We read books and strolled about, and, and, the highlight: Eating a light lunch at the Orangery Restaurant at Kensington Palace. I'm pretty sure this is the most beautiful place I've ever eaten a meal. It's at least in the top ten. When you walk in, it looks like this. Those are small orange trees on each side, and a display of all of their lovely sweets. We started off with tea. This is what our table looked like. Isn't it perfect? We had our own mini orange tree. (Although ours didn't have any oranges. bummer.) It made me feel princessy. I ordered the Tulsi Mint tea, which ...