seen: red

Brr

I have been toting the blue blanket around with me all day so far. I was just watching Wilhelm Kempff play the first movement of Moonlight Sonata. Since recitals in the piano shop I have played it, but he doesn't play it. He is in it. You could see his own self in the music of it, and your self too when he sits you down and makes you feel all the beautiful sadness and pain of Beethoven. It's snowing again. Basically it's always snowing.

This was the moon at the frozen pond last night, before eclipse.

Full moon

It's quiet now except for soft whirring house noises. A quarter to midnight and everyone's abed but me, too full of whispers to sleep. The moon is coming out of the eclipse shadow. Dark red. Now silver. I am not sad for the moon. I am not sad that I can't sleep and won't be able to for a long time. The only thing that makes me sad tonight is that in this place I live we all once built little armies inside ourselves. We prepared to win against each other any way we knew how. And just in case we got defeated we put up soundproof places there too, to sleep in, to hush and tuck ourselves in. To hide: the only way to keep from loving too much. And so we are each defeated, whether we know it or not.

-

When it rains in the dark, I hold my pillows close and listen to solace. There has been so much time for this, to be quiet to lay still to stroke your hair.

How come you cannot let him go?

Our hearts are inexplicable and will always be.

-

Falling comes. If there is no place at home to fall, it will always be away, in far distant places.
Farther than we know.
Falling comes.

A day there was no music

I dreamed that I woke up and I sat at my piano. I dreamed it was a normal day. I touched a key happily where the sunlight was resting, and then played another and stopped, because it was wrong. I tried again. It was still wrong, and very swiftly it was all wrong. No two keys played together would sing and I couldn't remember their names, their sounds, or colors as if I had never known it at all. And I was finally alone. I was so filled with terror it was only half heartedly I noticed I couldn't speak either. But somehow it made perfect sense, that if my hands were silent so must I be.

**

I opened my eyes from this two hours ago and with the light the notes and chords and cadences and sharps and flats flooded me inside, filling all the abandoned spaces they'd left in my mind. You may understand that with all this relief and joy and joy and relief in my heart and head I don't think I will stop playing all day.

The dancing snow

I went walking today to forget a dream that imprints me terribly and deep every time it comes. Flash came too. He didn't have a nightmare but he had a raggedy dish towel in his jaws and pranced along with me like a prince. We went down the hill to where the creek is running under thin pearly ice and the cardinals were playing in the tall trees, where the ground is saturated with snow and rain and water and you could see the quiet places where the deer have stepped. It was snowing in the woods. Then the unlikely sun came through, and it was most magical to lift a face warmed in the light and see flakes swirling all around dancing through the air. It was cotton candy snow in little feathery clusters that vanished on a fingertip. The dog dropped his rag in forgetfulness in almost the same way I let go the pieces of my fear, we walked on to the barn and fell asleep in the hay bales. I don't know. It's sometimes very perfect out there away from everything and almost everyone.

Sorry for not writing more or more often, there truly is nothing very pressing to do the rest of the day but I am going to bake muffins soon and let the oven warm the whole house and then Pollyanna is on hallmark channel, hurrah.

happy birthday

to him

End of the week nigh / I confess

1) I did steal the cookies from the cookie jar
2) I will sometimes even doubt my doubts
3) I do love all most of the foulmouthed and disrespectful dropout children, with all the love in my grim and flinty heart

Valentine's day still

To love is what we knew

to be born and remember what we were born to do, to pick the sweet pale flowers, the forgotten gifts to say to them I love you and there is room here for you

right here for you and me and you and you too.

to learn to say soon to questions of when, and to love and love until we hardly can breathe;

||| if we began to live, what would that be like?


*

Was everyone's day sweet?


Mine was.


*

I do love you .

*

I think the world is marvelous.

*

Important Note:

It is possible I think the world is marvelous
because all I have eaten for one whole day is chocolate
and more chocolate and some almonds
which were (of course) in the chocolate.

*

In fact I am eating more chocolate right now.


*

I have excuses for this behavior besides it being Valentine's Day that I do not care to detail now, as they may detract from the warm comfortable effect I was going for here.
Also I am posting absentmindedly and in a great hurry because I have to go tutor my very favorite foulmouthed and disrespectful dropout children. Ta ta.

Valentine's day

So is the day after the day after

the day after your birthday,

a perfect
day to have
a nap.

18 years ago

I was born.

some things

It is 52° slight wind and in the southern blue half of the sky there is a great herd of slow plodding clouds, all different ages and coming from miles away

I went over to visit L this week and fell asleep on her bed waiting for her to come home from work and when she came in she said I looked like a little perfect angel there hugging a pillow

Tonight it is going down to 8°

Sometimes I look over at the door with my fingers paused on the keys, and see him there, watching me -

The love of sisters

Roberta: Do I have a nice butt?
Christina: Did you seriously just ask that?
R: Yeah, Abbey told me she and Carrie spent an hour deciding whether or not their butts are nice.
C: Oh. Well, OK... yours is alright, I guess... do I have a nice butt?
R: No
C: Thanks.
R: Well... it's a little small but I guess it does fit your personality.
C: Are you saying my personality is small?
R: No. Heavens, no.
C: Well, that comforts me.
R: I'm gorgeous.
C: I'm gorgeous.
R: I'm gorgeous!
C: I'm GORGEOUSER!
R: No, you're... fake!
C: Oh really, well, you're revolting!
R: I take it back, you can't be fake because if you WERE you'd look much BETTER than you do NOW!

[Cheerful pause]

C: Good night, Birdie.
R: Good night, Chris.

Dylan sings until I sleep

Then take me disappearing through the smoke rings of my mind down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves, the haunted frightened trees, out to the windy beach, far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow... to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free, silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands, with all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves, Let me forget about today until tomorrow.

Thank you

Cristian René, for Beethoven today.

such breakable girls and boys

There has been a fog for a while. The left side of my forehead is persistently and gently throbbing, deep in the very spot I dreamed in last night a weird dream about a tower, a man, a boy, snowy footprints and a great dead bird. I slept all night and have been tired all day again. I did get the refrigerator clean, finding all sorts of petrified things and then I fell asleep a few minutes ago sitting in Flash's favorite chair drifting in and out and then my eyes opened and I saw through the window the limbs of the tallest trees in the woods swaying against the snow white sky. In that moment for possibly the first time ever I didn't have a single thought in my mind.

Elsewhere, K is apparently sleepwalking now. Olivia's woken twice to find her standing by her bed with her pillow and possessions clutched close, ready to evacuate the house into the safety of night time. When you are a little one sometimes fright passes in an hour's time. Sometimes it doesn't.

I noticed yesterday that Blogger decided to eat my profile photo which I didn't find flattering, and then I noticed today it was back which is oddly not comforting. I also noticed it is Ash Wednesday. I think I could give up winter, snow and bad feelings for Lent. It'd be a sacrifice but I could do it.

Alright then

It has been raining or snowing or both since Monday night when it didn't snow, it only rained and rained hard, with thunder and lightning and dogs and cats and Montagues and Capulets too.

I felt like sticking my head out my open window that night and yelling THANK YOU EARTH AND HEAVENLY POWERS FOR THIS BLESSED GALE because it had been so long since it was warm and nighttime and raining all at the same time.

Of course I didn't do that because there are certain things that do and do not improve my status of fruity in this house, and shouting maniacally into the night is one of the latter sort.

But though I don't try to aggravate it, I don't mind my reputation much because it means I can neglect daily hairbrushing and/or dance in my underwear to Gershwin whenever I want and no one thinks more than twice about it.

Not that I do that.

Not that I don't do that.

So anyway....

It's Sunday morning

Do you know where your phone is

Oh my God where is it

"Sophie's been talking on it for seven hours", I thought and I woke up.
What is Mum in hysterics about? Not that it's rare but starting in a little early today aren't we, I contemplated and then my mind woke up a little more, my heart jumped and my breath flew to my Da in case he needed it, until I heard his voice through my doorway.

Guys get up, there's a fire.

To hear him afraid was like a kick in the chest and I got up, or down, or whichever way it is when you half fall out of bed. Not knowing what was on fire we went to the kitchen and we saw the weird flush on everything the glow from the window and I think I will never forget lifting an eerie blind to look out and see the shed we had built for the generators, tall with flames 15 feet from us and two feet from the white fuel tank. The tank didn't register at first with me.

It's gonna blow up, someone said simply

and then we got out.

It was dark and dense gray foggy as we drove the cars up the Hill, heads stuck out windows to see around the frost, Mum not even bothering as she tore up the drive taking out all the reflectors that marked the sides and narrowly missing a maple.

When the Men in trucks came we watched from the icy road, some of us standing out and some sitting in the warm cars. K cried because it was too much to be woken so early, to see flames in her window, to fear. We hugged her and the men put out the fire.

We walked down the drive when we could see just fog and smoke and the sun peering through, and the fuel tank standing over all the scorched things and the wooden stand that holds it, the stand that stood two feet from the fire that melted the house siding... scarcely charred.

*
This morning K and I were poking carefully among the ashes and metal and wire. What are you doing there? asked my brother. She told him exactly what I had asked her to come out and do with me.

We are looking for angel feathers

Will try to write

right now we are just a little under the Weather.