May, 2009

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May

Sunday, May 31st, 2009

Taos smells like a thousand lilac bushes these days; sweet and purple – with rushing rivers smoothing silver stones, apple trees blooming tender pink and white,  the rackety racking of tractors behind latilla fences, calves nestled beneath their mothers in green fields, warm sunlight past bedtime. The world has exploded from brown and gray into technicolor.  Our little neighbor Mae Louise is two and a half weeks old.

On the day she was born, arriving in quite a hurry after stalling a week past her due date to make her grand entrance, I drove Jack and Liam and Mae’s four year old brother Oliver home from school.  Another family friend picked up Oliver from our house and drove him to the birth center to be with his parents and meet his new sibling.  Oliver’s parting advice that morning to his laboring mother, Beth,  had been to “push really hard.” Jack, Liam, Oban and I visited later, after Oliver had already had a chance to become acquainted with his baby sister.

When we arrived, Oliver was eager to go play in the courtyard with Jack and Liam.  Oban sat outside with them. Through the open window, we heard Oliver say something about wanting to kill someone.

“Did Oliver just say he wants to kill the baby?” his dad, Tom, asked. The nurse midwife, who had come in to check on Beth and Mae, explained that Oliver must be expressing that he did not want anyone to kill the baby, already feeling the protective instincts of an older brother.

“I want to hit the baby in the head with a rock,”   Oliver said, this time much more loudly and clearly, leaving no room for competing interpretations of his feelings.

Jack, Liam and Oliver had all been convinced that the new baby would be a boy. Jack had prepared for the baby’s birth with such eagerness and devotion that you would have thought he was a Magi preparing for the arrival of a king.  He “knit” a new hat for the baby which turned out to look more like a headband, and delivered gifts of dandelions and toys for days before her birth.  All three of them seemed to envision someone who would come out walking and talking and who would blend seamlessly into their neighborhood boy routine, which consists largely of riding bikes, climbing things, and wreaking havoc on red ant colonies.  Jack and Liam continued to refer to her as “he” for two days after meeting Mae.  The fact that the baby turned our to be a girl seemed to add insult to injury for Oliver, who was having enough of a time trying to accept that the fact his life had been so rudely interrupted by the arrival of a baby who his parents dared to love as much as him.

Our family has been going through its own, albeit smaller, transitions.  Spring was christened when Liam, after playing suspiciously peacefully outside for over an hour with Jack, raced into the house, crying and wailing, “I think you’re going to kill me, Mom!”

It took a few minutes to first examine him for blood, and then to calm him to the point where he was able to explain that he had climbed on top of my car and somehow shattered the entire sunroof with his rear end, miraculously without injury to himself or his brother.  I still haven’t managed to squeeze in a trip to Santa Fe to have the sunroof replaced, and find myself routinely picking shards of glass out of my hair while driving.

Jack and Liam will “graduate” from kindergarten in two days.  Liam appears nearly toothless, and inadvertently torments Jack by consistently losing his teeth first, acquiring quite a stash of tooth fairy dollars in the meantime,  and generally remaining a couple of months ahead of his brother in terms of his physical development.  I try to console Jack by reminding him that he was born first, but being born was about the last thing Jack did before Liam, which leaves Jack frustrated to the point of total exasperation.  On top of the teeth, Liam recently initiated the idea of falling asleep by himself in a different bedroom from Jack.   While I hoped Jack might be inspired to rise to the occasion, he instead asked, “So does this mean you’ll sleep with me, Mama?”

Jack seems to try to compensate by overachieving in other arenas.  Last week he quickly talked me into the idea of a spontaneous lemonade stand and true to his entrepreneurial spirit, ran from door to door inviting all of our neighbors, including one elderly friend who is very hearing impaired and who immediately drove over in his jeep to see what Jack was so excited about, fearing an emergency.  Jack has also taken it upon himself to reveal all of his worldly knowledge to Oliver, who, being a couple of years younger, tolerates and is sometimes even impressed by Jack’s lengthy explanations of how to best go down a slide, build a fort, play soccer or sell lemonade.

As spring moves along, though, there is evidence of things settling, germinating and taking root.  We finally braved dealing with the insurance company in order to schedule a  repair of the sunroof,  and they’re going to throw our windshield (which was cracked when a tractor spit up a stone) into the deal too.   Today, at school, Jack and Liam will have a Ride Away ceremony with their teachers and classmates.  The graduating kindergarten students will “ride” horses they have made over to the first grade classroom, symbolizing and celebrating their metamorphosis. Jack, who still sneaks into our bed in the middle of the night, is beginning to actually prefer falling asleep without Liam nearby.

And yesterday, I even overheard Oliver saying to Jack and Liam,  “Hey guys, have you seen my baby sister?  She has such pretty lips!”

Posted in Jack and Liam, Parenthood | 1 Response »

Summer, In Spring

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009
photo by Dorie Hagler

photo by Dorie Hagler

“Mid spring and everything knows it. Nest making, photosynthesizing, rush and tumble of green, even the light takes on that grassy hue. The earth gone soft and its odor’s indiscreet, cow shit and cottonwoods…
Cloud puff-in the pale blue and over the ridge a howl short of melody, like pain that can’t find words and comes out moan.
Up to my elbows in the smear of it.” ~ Summer Wood, Arroyo

Summer Wood looks like her name. A pixie, a faerie, a woodland sprite; she is a fine boned, ethereal looking creature. If translucent wings were to sprout from her back and she were to fly away, twinkling, at dusk, it would not seem entirely surprising. Paradoxically, her body language conjures images of a gangly and shy high school basketball player. Like the northern New Mexico spring she describes in her critically acclaimed novel Arroyo, Summer Wood is earthy, complicated, fiercely bright, magical, and entirely, unquestionably real.

Writer, teacher, mentor, and parent of three sons on the cusp of adulthood, Summer is also a licensed general contractor. Building houses trained her to “think three dimensionally, to look at the architecture of a story and to be able to see a story as a shaped thing.” “It taught me how to spend a lot of time making something,” she told me over coffee at Loka. “It takes time to write a novel. It takes time to build a house. And both take some audacity.”

“Being a builder fits into the hunter gatherer life of a writer. You do a project and then have some time off. You have a lot of flexibility to arrange your own time. And it’s a great counter balance to the sitting at a desk thing you do as a writer. It puts you out into the world and introduces you to so many stories you would never have a chance to hear otherwise.”

And hear them them, she does, with a pitch perfect sense. According to Summer, “Your ear is the most important part of writing.” In a post on her blog thewhereofit.com, which is devoted to readers and writers who “care about place,” Summer pays tribute to her idol Grace Paley: “Her ear was exquisitely tuned to the nuances of the heart as expressed in the music of our language, and her success at it capturing both takes my breath away.” When the late Paley’s daughter happened upon Summer’s post , she invited Summer to initiate a reading of Paley’s works in an effort to “help keep her words in the air.” Summer credits Paley with being one of the premiere writing stylists of the twentieth century. “Her work showed me that there were no rules, other than to listen to people.”

Summer’s writing has been described by author John Nichols as “full of sweet weather and tender mercies.” While her novel Arroyo was set in a tangibly familiar New Mexican mining town, her upcoming novel Wrecker takes place in San Francisco and Humboldt County, California.

“It is critical for me to place my writing somewhere,” Summer told me. “I think there is such a connection between who we are and where we’re from and where we live and the stories that inform that relationship. I’ve always been interested in place and land, both rural and urban. Writers pee on things. You mark your territory.” Summer will teach two classes entitled “The Where of It” as part of the 2009 Taos Writer’s Conference (unm.edu/~taosconf/) during July.

Summer has also been involved in applying for a community reading program sponsored by the National Endowment for The Arts entitled “The Big Read.” Taos Public Library and SOMOS have teamed up to apply for this grant funded program in the hopes of adopting Rudolfo Anaya’s novel Bless Me, Ultima, a coming-of-age story set in the 1940′s on the eastern plains of New Mexico, as the focal point for a month long celebration of reading in Taos during November of 2009. Additionally, Summer, who has participated in the SOMOS Young Writers Mentorship Program for years, is currently mentoring an eighth grade student at Country Day School who is in the midst of writing her own novel.

Throughout Summer’s work, themes of metamorphosis, and of love choosing us in unexpected ways reappear in different forms. Her sensitivity to her often adrift characters, as well as her empathy for their predicaments and personal struggles allow her readers to experience their transformations. During our conversation, Summer defined a hero as “someone who didn’t expect to do what they have been faced with and yet have risen to the challenge day after day, with nothing personal to gain – and yet who then gains everything through it.” She referred to a Fred Hughes adaptation of the works of the Roman poet, Ovid, whose writing she describes as astonishing, bawdy, ribald and erotic. According to Hughe’s translation in Tales from Ovid, Ovid wrote, “It is no crime to lose your way in a dark wood.”

“Isn’t that beautiful?” Summer asked me. “Ovid understood that, he got that, and was able to distill so much experience into his gorgeous poetry. Not to say that we’re not responsible for our choices, but it’s just that really, it is no crime to lose your way in a dark wood.”

Posted in Horsefly | 1 Response »