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...

We're moving to Alabama. Sam landed a job teaching at a University there. This one. The move came as a shock. I hadn't planned on moving back to the South. We'd felt inclined to move all the way out here, from Boston to Arizona, and now we were going to move back across the country? And why, exactly, had we come out here? Nothing has really worked out the way we'd hoped. In fact, many of our ideas for surviving here have outright failed. Sam began to say, "You know when I found that five-leaf clover  just before we moved? I'm thinking I found it so I'd know I was already lucky. I wish I'd known I was already lucky."  He also began to suggest we name our next child Equity Dwindle, which is rather a beautiful name, right? (No, I'm not pregnant.) If nothing else, we've learned this year. We've grown up this year. We've enjoyed being close to family. And the two of us have had time to hang with Henrietta constantly for the first ...

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...

The ultrasound last Friday was lovely--one of the loveliest. We saw her hands and arms, her profile, her cute nose, her brain, and the beating chambers of her heart. And the ultrasound tech showed us how confident she was that that the baby was a girl. A girl. A girl! I felt pretty and motherly, wearing a polka dot blouse and vintage skirt. And then everything got very dramatic. The tech told me to wait there, that she needed to show something to the radiologist, that after that the midwife would probably want to speak with me. She asked if I'd had any cramping, and I remembered the evening we had spent at the MFA the night before, how I had clutched my stomach as we walked down corridors and through large, beautiful rooms, and I told her, "Yes, actually." I waited, we waited, wondering what it could be, but not concerned yet, not really. And she came back, and invited me into an office where people were entering information into computers, talking about what they...

Remember the friend who made the miraculous quilt ? She's teaching me to quilt, too.  I thought I was just going to learn to use the sewing machine I got for Christmas, that maybe we'd make a skirt or something equally simple, but when we got to fabric store, E had a plan.  "A quilt," she said, "is the best way to learn to sew. All straight lines."  And so we picked out fabric, went back to my house, and while the husbands played guitars and talked about music, and sweet potatoes roasted in the oven, we cut out little squares and spread them out according to a chart that E drew up in about ten seconds.  This is what it looked like, spread out (with cat). (This is the thing about cats: they seem to get quilts.  When you even suggest you might make one, they know we're dealing with a potential blanket right off, and commence utilizing it.) I found something fascinating once I got the hang of putting those rows toget...

                                                              [cats, rug] Finding rugs was hard.  We knew we needed them, that our living room(s) wouldn't be warm and living room-esque without them.  But finding ones we both liked proved harder than we thought.  Sam and I don't always see eye to eye, but when it comes to how we want things to look, we generally align nicely.  Or so I thought ...  Until we went to Home Depot and stood outside in a big white Rug Tent, and discovered we completely disagreed.  Then we went inside Home Depot, and disagreed some more.  Then to Target, disagreeing.  And out to Home Goods (a half hour drive), where we ne...

Well, we didn't move last week.  At the last minute on Friday, I called our realtor and he said it was looking less "100%."  And so we decided to stay for another week.  Our cats hadn't finished destroying the furniture anyway. And now, we're finally, really moving in.  We have the keys.  Some of our stuff is even inside.  And I have to say, I've been worried that when we got inside I wouldn't still love it, but oh I do.  I walked from room to room, turning on lights, reminding myself, and it was seriously one of the most beautiful experiences to know we were buying it, that it was ours.  It felt, well, like home.  And thennnnn we bickered.  We are moving, after all.  Deciding where to put the cat litter will take a good two months of intense negociation. But the reason why I gathered you all here wasn't really to tell you that.  I wanted to record my three part method of emotionally/mentally processing this moving mes...

Today marks three weeks we've been living in a hotel room.  While we've been here, the weather has turned to a delicious Autumn theme, which would be so much more charming if we had packed our sweaters and coats and rainboots.  Three weeks was not the plan, but it's how it turned out.  Tomorrow, hopefully, maybe, possibly, we'll actually move into our new place.  Maybe.  Possibly.  I feel like the girl who cried house.  I'm trying not to get my hopes up about it, but this morning my brain woke me up at four and immediately commenced imagining every room of that house, everything I'm excited to unpack and put somewhere, the shopping trips we'll need to take to get a few rugs and pieces of furniture.  Can you blame me for being excited?  It's been a long haul with a fair amount of hopelessness and the most absurd collection of absurd happenings I've ever experienced in a three week stretch.  Observe ...

I'm still not eating treats, and the world is a better place for it. Treats and I don't get along: I love them; they hate me. And so, I drink tea. This makes me feel like something special happens, which is all I'm really looking for when I have a treat. On Saturday we watched "The Fantastic Mr. Fox" (which we LOVED), and I decided to amp up the specialness by cleaning out a decorative teapot and using a pretty cup. One of Sam's students gave him a set of these cups as a gift for writing a letter of recommendation (nice kid, no?). While I like them, I decided I need/want a really fancy teacup. Maybe I'll hit up the thrift store? [cat, teapot] [teapot, husband] [i like this one because he looks like he's pontificating. i think he was telling the cats not to fight.] [girl, tea, a quiet world]