Actual Unretouched Photo

I have always wanted to own a set of BOB books.  And, lucky me, now I do.  Click here to read my review.

There are 263 items in my email inbox, not counting those items which are linked together in one long Conga-line. My head aches because I need to eat and imbibe some caffeine. I haven’t even considered the urgency of the laundry pile. The Crock-Pot is full of shredded roast beef, but no sauce. The younger children are home from school already–the first of many half-days–but the teenagers didn’t drag their bodies from bed until after 11:00 a.m., so they are in the thick of schoolwork.

I have a cluttery pile of stuff near my desk, writing materials, items I’ve reviewed, a mini-library of diet books, old magazines, a “Tammy’s Family” doll from the 1950s or 1960s that someone gave my daughter at a garage sale, a couple of leather bags, and a few random toys . . . and I should deal with all this. I should also put all the sheet music back into the piano bench which I repaired a month or two ago. And I should hang up the curtain rods and new curtains in the kids’ bedrooms upstairs. (This will involve a power drill and a level and I can’t bear the thought today.)

On Saturday, I must attend a baby shower. Sunday is church, plus a funeral in the late afternoon.

At the moment, all these competing demands on my time and attention blast me like a fire hose. Run! Run away!

  I am participating in a blog tour for the new novel, The Splendor of Silence

• Immigrants (L.A. Dolce Vita) video

.  You can click over here for the complete review.

Also, can I just say that all your comments on the previous post meant so much to me?  I promise I was not fishing for compliments or cheers, either. . . so that was unexpected.  Thank you.  And just so you know, I can’t quit.  If I could, I would . . . but I can’t.

I am a fragile flower, a delicate spidery web, a candle flame barely burning. One little puff and out I go. Touch me with two fingers and I crumble. Leave me in the sun without adequate moisture and I shrivel. Or, easier still, send me a form letter rejecting my painstakingly written query letter and I will crawl under my desk, push aside the outlet strip and refuse to come out and write another sentence fragment (at least until it’s time to cook dinner.)

I say to myself, “Self, why must you insist on something more? Isn’t it enough to raise four children, two of them adopted through a process so arduous you cried on the bathroom floor more than once and questioned the very existence of the Almighty God, and two of them the most exquisite babies conceived against impossible odds and born into dimly lit bedrooms with midwives in attendance? Are these miracles not enough? Is your husband of twenty years, that hard-working, calm, funny man who laughs at your jokes and didn’t divorce you when you gained 75 pounds not enough?”

“Self,” I say, “You have a spacious house (nevermind the clutter and dust), a safe neighborhood, shelves full of good books to read, new highlights in your hair and hot pink sneakers . . . and yet, it is not enough? You grappled with your faith as a teenager, wrestled with God through college, had a fist-fight with Him in your twenties, decided to trust in Him even when He tried your patience . . . you believe, you trust, you feel the comfort of God’s presence in your life and receive the occasional touch of grace to remind you of His care and it’s not enough? Is all this not enough?”

I’m a giant castle built with blocks and when one teeters, they all crash to the ground. The teetering block, that thing I thought I’d discarded years ago in a fit of despair, it keeps reappearing, insisting I pick it up, incorporate it into the construction of my life. I never asked to be a writer. I never studied writing, never majored in writing, never dared to call msyelf an author . . . but I write. I can’t help myself. I cannot be silent. The words march in my head, keeping their own beat, pounding pounding pounding until I line them up in sentences and make them behave like paragraphs. Then, sometimes, for a moment, everything is still and ordered and quiet and I am satisfied that I have expressed something just as it appeared to me. I have written and I am at peace.

I wish I had an obsession with handbags or designer shoes or something that did not come attached to the occasional rejection letter. A hunger for leather could be appeased. But this desire for publication is mean. I come apart like a seam only basted, not stitched. Today, today I am coming apart, unraveling, verging on tears, prowling in the kitchen for something to feed the gaping hole that food cannot fill. Today is a bad day, a day when I think that something might be wrong with me. I want to write, to describe the world from my viewpoint. I want to be read, too, to know that someone catches the ball I’m throwing into the universe.

Yet, I fear that I am completely delusional. I recoil from the business aspect of writing, the pushing and shoving your way to the front of the line, the impossible locks you cannot undo without the secret combination. (For instance, in the form rejection letter I received today, the editor gave me a list of ten possible reasons my query was rejected. Ten. This is maddening.) I’m not a member of the secret club, but if I could get in the door, I know I am capable of writing what they are buying.

Or I’m completely insane. You decide.

I quit. I think I will devote myself to creating the perfect muffin recipe (moist, yet nutritious), getting the laundry even brighter and whiter and organizing my sock drawer. I will purge the storage room of excess stuff, paint frames black and hang up photographs, degrime the corners of the floor. I will repaint the family room (away with you, red stripes!), alphabetize the spices and sneak stuffed animals out of the my daughter’s room undetected.

Yes, it will be a very satisfying life, one free of rejection form letters and editors who overlook me in their search for the Next Best Thing. You win, Universe. I get the message. I quit.

I hope you’re happy.

I drove over the mountain pass yesterday.  I very rarely leave the Puget Sound and venture into the drier half of our state.  In fact, I’ve visited Eastern Washington only a handful of times in my whole life.   And I grew up in Western Washington, mere hours from Eastern Washington.  Anyway, why would I venture three hours from my home?  Why, to visit my friends Ann and Shelly, the girls I hung out with in high school.

The Memory Keeper’s Daughter divx

I last saw Shelly about 15 years ago.  I saw Ann ten years ago.

We met at Shelly’s house in Yakima in the early afternoon.  We stopped talking long enough to drive to a Mexican restaurant, where we resumed our conversation.  Then we drove back to her house where we chatted until 1:00 a.m.

By 9:30 a.m., we were talking again while eating breakfast, then continuing our discussion as we ate lunch at Applebee’s and shopped.  (Clearance racks, of course.  I bought a pair of black linen pants for $15.  They were originally priced $129.)  We talked our way through each store until I noticed it was already 4:00 p.m., time to think about going home.

I drove fast, singing along to Chicago’s Greatest Hits some of the time.

Three hours later, back home, I was shocked at the amount of laundry piled up.  I can’t stop yawning now.

I rarely see people who knew me when I was growing up, so it was delightful to share stories without having to explain the whole background.  These women knew me when I was thirteen years old, when I was fourteen, when I was seventeen and wondering what to do with my life.  Picking up the decades-old conversation where we left off was so satisfying.  The decades of near silence were nothing more than a comma in the paragraph of our lives.  I love that we are all happily married, doing well despite the normal human struggles everyone has.  We laughed a lot, nodded a lot, understood deeply.
I told them we’ll have to do it again in fifteen years.  Or maybe sooner.  (We will be almost 60 then, which blows my mind.)

Meanwhile, laundry beckons.

These books lined up on my bed were removed from my bookshelf. The bookshelf shows the books AFTER the books on the bed were removed. I was looking for my copy of Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. In order to do so, I had to remove the first layer of books to see what was behind. I found some old books that I put into a pile to read again soon, along with a few new ones I decided to read sooner rather than later.

This book reorganization did not result in finding my copy of Into the Wild. Alas. At some point, I must have passed it along to someone else to read and now I regret my generosity. In fact, I’m ordering myself a new one because I simply must read it again before I see the movie version, coming out soon. (Friday?) I read that book back when I’d never heard of the author, nor the story. I sort of feel like I personally discovered Jon Krakauer.

Oh, and just so you know . . . this is just one of my bookshelves. The matching one holds non-fiction and until I decide I simply must find a book I remember owning at some point in my life, that bookshelf will remain dusty and double-stacked.

(I put all the books back. I am going to read them all, even if I have to live to be 150.)

Today, my daughter walked into my room wearing a short-sleeved shirt (a “short-shirt”, according to her) and jeans.  She points to her shirt and demands, “Why did you put a short shirt in my long shirt drawer?”

Last week, we put a new dresser in her room and I explained where all the clothes would go.  Long sleeved shirts and long pants in separate drawers and short-sleeved shirts and shorts in another dresser altogether.

My boys have never, not once in their life, even noticed what clothes belong where.  But my daughter knows and cares.

This warms my heart.

I contemplated calling my walking partner this morning at 6:17 a.m. I dialed her number in my head and rehearsed the words, “I just can’t walk today. I’ve got to sleep.” And yet, a miracle propelled me out of bed at 6:19 a.m. I threw back the covers, stood and felt around in the gloom for my walking clothes. My daughter woke up as I was brushing my teeth and with great distress informed me, “I don’t want you to exercise!” and I said, “Yeah, well, I don’t have time to argue. Go get into my bed.”

Once I’m awake and in motion, I’m fine, although I did consider today that my life has been a long struggle to simply get enough sleep. I’m a night-owl who has always had early morning obligations. I returned home after walking, fixed my 9-year old’s school lunch, ate some oatmeal and showered in preparation for the arrival of the kindergarten boy. He’s supposed to arrive at 9 a.m. and at 8:40 a.m., his mother called to let me know he wasn’t coming.

And I did what any sane person who slept only five hours the night before would do: with a towel still like a turban on my wet hair, I laid down on the bed and slept in fits and starts until 10:00 a.m. (Interruptions: turning off daughter’s shower, opening a packaged Rice Krispie treat, hearing odd news-stories on the television, noticing boys coming upstairs to shower, thinking that I must get up . . . ).

* * *

I started this post hours ago . . . life interfered and now I’m heading to bed, after midnight . . . and I’ll have to talk myself into getting up again when the alarm rings in only six hours . . .

By the way, I must say that the high-school version of online school makes me want to stab myself with my red pencil. We just started on Monday. I’m doing my best to hide my hatred of the set-up.

Carrien, from She Laughs at the Days.

Here was her comment:

I read about the stroller giveaway the other day, and then I clicked on without thinking about it. I have a double jogging stroller that we affectionately call my car, (because I don’t actually have a car) I take it everywhere, I have patched gigantic holes in the seats with upholstery thread, I have used it to carry home 25 lbs of gravel for potted plants, and soil and groceries. MY children rode in it when we lived in Vancouver and walked everywhere as well. I have happy memories of hauling that thing up steep hills from the beach, convincing them that they needed to get out and walk the hills, and getting the Girl to fall asleep.

It’s a gigantic beast of a thing, I doesn’t fit through many single shop doors and I have to actually slide the side wheel off, hold it up with my shoulder and tilt it to get through the door and then slide the wheel back on, and then repeat when I leave the store, which is irritating, but I’ve been doing it so long that I barely notice and for our immediately close to home needs it’s quite adequate.

So why am I back to leave a comment?
Well, yesterday I took the bus, with my three children, my getting very heavy 8 month old strapped to me and three bags with everything we would need for our day. It got really heavy, really fast. There are many great places that I could take my children to this year that are too far to walk, but a relatively short bus ride away. Places like the beach, and lakes, and rivers and outdoor sanctuaries that are just outside of our concrete walking radius, or even to the library when it rains. Honestly, though, I’m not likely to do it without a stroller because of how it’s beginning to hurt to carry the Baby around and she’s only getting heavier.

I started fantasizing about the beautiful single stroller that I gave away before we left Canada to a single mom and her kids and kind of wishing I still had it, and then I remembered your giveaway, so here I am.

I can’t take the stroller I have on the bus, it’s way to big. The one you are giving away though would fit, and it looks sturdy enough to withstand many adventures.

This homeschooling year is likely to be much more interactive if we could have something cool like that so I am here giving it a shot.

Congratulations, Carrien!  Email me your address so I can give it to the Chicco folks.  Your stroller will be mailed directly to your house.

As for everyone else who entered, I’m sorry you couldn’t all have won!  Thank you for entering my contest and don’t forget to enter the Chicco contest at their website.

Sometime today (between taking the boys to P.E. at the YMCA, babysitting a kindergartener, watching a one-year old, going to the store for laundry detergent and a candy bar for my daughter, taking the kindergartener to school, and driving afternoon carpool) I will narrow down the entrants to five and then conduct a random drawing for the winner.

I promise to have this done by midnight today!  (Pacific Standard Time!)

Stuart Little 2 film

So, the suspense continues.  Meanwhile, go over and enter the drawing at the Chicco website.