A Library of Dresses

would be nice, but I don't think this is a thing. At least not where I live. What some people may not know is that there are all kinds of items--in addition to books, movies and music--available at their local library. 

At my library in Columbus, Ohio, for example, you can borrow a mobile hotspot, a tape recorder, and a light therapy lamp (the kind that helps you combat seasonal depression). At other libraries in our system there are jigsaw puzzles, boardgames, headphones, and a set of orange parallel parking cones. 

And at the lovely library in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, a place I visited a few weeks ago on my vacation, I found a delightful assortment of items ready for checkout, including a sewing machine, a tortilla press, a telescope, a ukulele, and a Halloween Monster cake pop pan, just in case you ever find yourself in need of one of those.  

I mean, LOOK AT THIS fun brochure:

But unfortunately, the Woods Hole Public Library does not offer dresses, specifically, a Mother of the Bride dress. 

Which is a giant bummer, because I could really use one of those right now. Instead, I trekked it out to the expansive outdoor mall in our area, accompanied by my husband, who is the best sport ever, the two of us dodging the crowd, the crowd itself, the main topic of our conversation. Who are all these people? I would say, or my husband would say. And then I would add, or he would add, 

And why are they here?

Why are WE here? was the follow-up question. But that answer was easy. Because the library does not offer Mother of the Bride dresses in the catalog and our daughter's wedding is in (gulp) eight weeks. 

Here is the thing about me and shopping: I don't like it. The rummaging through racks. The trying on of clothes. The part where you squint at the three-way mirror and realize that while the sorta okay dress looked sorta okay hanging on the hanger, it sorta does not look okay when it's hanging on you. 

Everyone and their mother is in this store right now, I text to my best friend and my daughter, who are both very kindly (virtually) nudging me along. And then after a beat, Wait, everyone and their mother really IS in this store right now. 

Turns out these dress shops are crowded with daughters shopping with their moms for homecoming dresses. There's a line to get into the dressing room. Crowds of teenagers traipsing past the fancy mother-of-the-bride-ish looking dresses toward the younger, more sparkly Homecoming-ish style.

Suddenly, I am flashing back to shopping trips with my daughter when she was in high school, the flinging of different sized dresses over the dressing room door, the oohs and ahs at my darling little girl turned lovely grown up young woman, the trip we took less than a year ago when she tried on her wedding dress, that dress not sorta okay at all, 

but stunning on the hanger, on her, a radiant soon-to-be-bride in eight short weeks! And Oh my gosh 

what am I doing, whining about trying on a dress (well, truthfully, A LOT of dresses) when I know one of them will turn out to be completely fine, and anyway, who even cares what I'm wearing, as long as it's hanging on me somewhat comfortably, my hand in my husband's hand, our daughter and son-in-law, our gathered family and friends, each of us in our bought/rented/borrowed clothing, so happy to be here

and all of us together. 

Frances hit the tree again (and other stories I heard on my vacation)

We were walking in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, my husband and I, a stroll over a bridge, a harbor, the boats bobbing along, and as an elderly man and his wife passed by, the man stopped and pointed over his shoulder. "Frances hit the tree again," he said, and I nodded, as if I knew Frances, as if I knew what tree he was talking about. 

"It's a mess," the man said. "All over the road. But if you stay on this side of the street, you'll be okay." I nodded again and smiled. I was thinking What a nice place this is, where strangers issue warnings about fallen trees, where the gossip about Frances, whoever she is, whatever problems she's suffering from (crashing into trees! Oh my God!) is the gentle, informative kind of gossip, and not the mean, disparaging kind. 

Who's Frances? my husband said. 

I started spinning out theories. Frances the town goofball, the concerned chatter about her increasingly shaky driving abilities. My husband thought maybe Frances had been riding a bike. But would that knock a tree down, we wondered. We'd reached the corner and turned, and there was the tree ahead, a large piece of it lying across the road, and suddenly it occurred to me that what the man had actually said was not "Frances hit the tree again," but,

something more like "Branch fell from the tree up there." (For the record, I like my version of this story better.) 

And then there were the women walking on the beach as my husband was angling to take a selfie with me and our son. Our son was the reason we were visiting Woods Hole. Spoiler alert: he and his longtime girlfriend were going to propose to each other that night! Her parents have a house in Woods Hole, and the family, and our son and his girlfriend had invited us to stay nearby, show us the town, be there for the big moment. The women on the beach stopped,

and one of them offered to take a picture of the three of us. "Life is short," she added, and I thought she'd said, "Like your shirt," and I was already spinning out theories about why she might like my husband's shirt, or my shirt, or maybe she was talking about our son's? This miscommunication was cleared up more quickly than the Frances saga 

because the woman helpfully repeated herself and we all agreed that life IS short and we let her take our picture and then offered to take hers and her partner's, and after the picture-taking we chatted like old friends, saying Life is short to each other because it really and truly is.

My future daughter-in-law's parents live on the water and at night they served us dinner out on the porch and I couldn't get over the place, the people, the sailboats drifting by, the hoot every forty-five minutes of the nearby ferry going back and forth to Martha's Vineyard, which all of the Woods Hole-ians simply call "The Vineyard," the flowery tablecloth that I decided was not fancy but festive, and why couldn't I have a tablecloth like that if I wanted it? 

Answer: I could. I do now. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Every morning my husband and I waded out into the cold water and watched our son and his girlfriend swim laps out to a buoy and my husband kept saying, This water is so cold! And I would say, I know! and then we would dare each other to dunk in, egging each other on by repeating our new favorite mantra: Life is short. 

What do you think Frances is up to now, my husband asked me as we shivered together, our son and future daughter-in-law small blips against the horizon.  

Only yesterday, it seemed, we were dropping our son off at college, one of the many times we dropped him off at college, and he said, I want you to meet my new girlfriend, and later, on the drive home, my husband said, Do you think she is the one? 

And only the yesterday before that, our son was in high school whacking lacrosse balls in the backyard, in middle school building hovercrafts out of leaf-blowers with his best friend, a ten-year-old riding a bike ahead of me on the Cape Cod Rail Trail, the last time we visited this part of the country, and now--

The same night Frances hit the tree and the woman complimented our shirts, we all walked out on the beach as the sun was setting, my husband and me and our son's girlfriend's parents, the four of us hanging back, watching, as our son and their daughter walked ahead, out along a jetty, stopping at the tip, a sparkle of sunlight on the water. 

Our son got down on one knee and after a few moments, he stood, and she got down on one knee. 

And then it was over. 

The sun had set. The ferry hooted as it made its way out of the harbor or into it. We drank champagne and made toasts and I didn't say it but I was thinking it: this place, these people, 

this moment

Masks Off

except in DC when my husband and I were helping our daughter move into her apartment, and

also, in San Francisco two weeks later, where we were visiting our son and his lovely girlfriend after not setting in-real-life eyes on them since January 2, 2020, but who is keeping track. The people in San Francisco wear their masks outside, and so, we do too, except when you’re eating in a restaurant, and then it’s okay, also,

in the airport, where you must keep your mask on while checking in, except when you have to take it off so the gate checker-inner can match your bare face with your ID. We don’t wear masks at Yosemite, except when we go into public restrooms. Meanwhile, back home in Ohio, the masks are off and then on again, and now, maybe off, 

but we aren’t thinking about Ohio. Our son hasn’t changed a bit after 17 months of not setting actual eyeballs on him, and yet, he is entirely changed. He and his girlfriend have their routines and favorite meals and nightly walks, and for a few days we are part of his life, marveling at the house styles in his neighborhood, the roses in the front yards, here and there a redwood tree, and amazing hellstrip gardens, those slices of land between the sidewalk and the street where Ohio people usually grow boring grass, but why not something fun like

cactus or an enormous rosemary bush? My son takes us on a bike ride around a bay and I laugh because I have not been on a bike in years, but these bikes are electric and whenever you pedal, you can feel a super charge kicking in and propelling you forward. We drive up to Napa and there’s more laughs at how much wine comes with the wine-tasting. (28 glasses! Which is nuts! But we do our best to drink them!)  

Everything about this trip is equally awesome, from the walk to the farmer’s market to buy cherries to the view at Yosemite, the enormous faces of granite and how can it be that one of these rocks is the size of three empire state buildings stacked on top of each other and our son climbed one of these massive domes and thank God you were not there to see it! We are old. He wants to take us up 600 steps to see a waterfall. 

But first you have to hike nearly a mile uphill and we can’t do it. Instead we drive up to a lookout and my husband nods off and I tell my son stories and he keeps interrupting to tell me he’s heard all of these stories before, so we listen to music. 

I keep saying, This air is so fresh! Until my husband says, How many times are you going to say that? Our son’s face is so familiar and unfamiliar, the little boy he was and the man he’s become, picking out the cherries at the farmer’s market and asking questions about wine varieties at the vineyard and stopping to crack-climb a giant boulder, wedging his hands inside a split in the rock and shimmying up, swinging across, the next day making us breakfast. 

At Yosemite he points out something he keeps calling a boot flake and I have no idea what he’s talking about, the wall of rock is so massive, but then he shows me on the picture on my phone and there it is, 

the boot-shaped bit of rock, and nearby, tiny specks scurrying around. Climbers! At night the lights on their headlamps are pinpricks like faraway stars. Dear Lord, please don’t ever go up there, I am thinking, but what I say is, Wow! That is so cool! 

And then, all too soon, the visit is over and my husband and I are back in the airport, masks on,

heading home, where there are no mountains to climb, no random redwoods in front yards, our kids settled on opposite coasts, the world we are returning to

entirely the same, all together different. 

What I don't know about candles

or driving a UHaul truck through the streets of Washington DC, or driving a small compact car for that matter, for one thing:

Where do you park? How in God's name will you unload the UHaul? 

There's an alleyway behind my daughter's new apartment. She's on the ground floor of a four story building and something I didn't know: the below-ground floor is fancily called an "English Basement." The stairs leading down toward the hobbit-sized front door that won't fit a chair are steep. We will have to use the back entrance for the couch, the mattress, the kitchen table. Essentially, we are re-assembling furniture from all of our past houses into this apartment, excuse me, into this English Basement. 

Our kitchen table with crayon marks scrawled inside a drawer. Our daughter's name, written when she was in pre-school. The mattress my husband and I splurged on and paid off in monthly installments for three years. A plant. Will it get enough light in this place? The alleyway is very narrow. Too narrow, to be honest, but my husband is a patient and brave man. 

He pulls through achingly slow, attempts a turn, so we can start to unload, all of us realizing too late that the angle is too sharp. The truck won't make it through. He will have to back up. Avoid brushing the sides of the other apartments, the drain pipes jutting out, the corner of someone's living room, with only millimeters to spare. Who has time to feel nostalgia or sadness about daughters leaving home to live in English basements in faraway cities at a dangerous moment like this?

More like 30 excruciating minutes of dangerous moments 

as my husband inches his way back out. Once, his brave mask slips from his face and my heart bangs crazily. In the end, he double parks in the street. The boyfriend and his helpful friend lug the couch around the block, the mattress, the tables, down the alley way, down the back steps, while my daughter and her lovely friend tote the smaller things through the hobbit door in the front. 

Later we all flop out on our old couch and our daughter lights a new candle. I am sweating so much under my mask, my heart still hammering wildly from watching the UHaul nightmare, from driving myself through the busy streets so my husband can drop off the damn truck. "I had to drive through a parade!" he says, half laughing, half looking like he might burst into tears. 

It wasn't a parade. Just a Saturday night in this hopping trendy neighborhood. To settle myself, I put my daughter's books away, arranging them alphabetically by author and then doing my version of Dewey with the non-fiction collection, an activity that immediately calms me. I move the candle, blow it out, and my daughter rushes over, upset. 

Didn't I know that when you first burn a candle, it has to burn long enough to melt the wax all the way to the rim? 

No, I did not know that. 

While she bustles around unpacking the kitchen, she asks me to fix the candle. There's a way, she says. You can find it online. Something to do with tinfoil. 

I think she's joking, but sure enough, I find a complicated-seeming process for fixing a "tunneled candle" on a Better Homes and Gardens site. There's even a helpful Youtube video included. 

But my brain feels too tired to learn new things. How to fix candle problems that I've never heard of before. How to watch a brave patient man back up a fifteen foot truck. How to smile and wave from the safety of our small car, drive away from the English basement and the fun busy streets, set our daughter back on the path she would always have been on, if not for a global pandemic,

and us, back to our quiet old house, filled with--I realize now--an assortment of tunneled candles, just waiting for me to fix them. 

You can't go back of course

but sometimes you want to, which actually is funny when you think about it, because back then, a lot of the time, you didn't want to BE there. The sippy cups and strewn toys and how many little shoes can one little person own? More than you, which is another funny thing. 

The summer before she went to kindergarten, she trailed after you everywhere, sometimes even following you into the bathroom, sucking her thumb, clutching her dolly, that absurdly-loved thing that she literally sucked the face off. One night when she was sleeping, you slid it out from under her arm and did a face transplant

taking another lookalike doll and carefully scissoring the clean, unsucked face around the edges and attaching it over the gross, chewed on one. The end result, a horrifying frankenstein mish-mash, but she didn't seem to notice. Every night before she went to bed she spread out her next day clothes on the floor beside her bed, 

a little girl self. Dress, leggings, socks, whichever pair of her million little shoes, and then she crept into your bedroom and made one for you 

out of the rarely to never-worn-again items in your closet. An old bridesmaid dress, for example, and tottering high heels. A little mommy out of clothes, she said, but you were only taking her to pre-school or doing a grocery trip and so you never wore her carefully assembled outfits.

Who knows, you were probably still wearing your old maternity pants back then, counting the days down to kindergarten and she would leave, dolly tucked in her backpack, just in case, and you would have the house alone for a few precious hours

and weren't you surprised when the day finally came how very quiet the house was. 

Even then you knew you couldn't go back. And that was just the beginning of the goings-away. You're such a pro now, you. Summer camps, college, studies abroad, a year overseas, cut off abruptly and scarily by the pandemic, and now another going-away,

the final one, maybe, 

probably, 

rightly, and you are rooting for her to go, really, despite how quiet the house will be. A friend tells you it's okay to say "And." As in, "I'm glad she's leaving, restarting her adult life AND I wish she could stay." 

You can't go back, and you want so badly some days to do that, 

if only to whisper to a long ago self: in the morning when you find she's made for you a little mommy out of clothes--no matter how silly it is--  

Wear it. 

My dolly with her dolly

This is not about the election

But it's about a different election, 20 million years ago when I was a young mom, home with my two little kids and we didn't have cable TV and of course there was no social media to be addicted to, but still, I somewhat followed the news, and the news was that on election night, there would be a winner declared. 

I told my son this news very confidently and he believed me because my word was gospel to him and the only time he even came close to doubting me was that time he ran across the backyard barefoot and got stung by a bee and screamed at the top of his lungs, in pain, but more, I think, because he was enraged at me because I'd told him not to be afraid of bees, that bees would only hurt you if you hurt them.

While I tried to treat the bee sting, he screamed that I'd lied to him and he DID NOT HURT THAT BEE! And I told him that Okay, true, he hadn't hurt the bee on purpose, but he had, in fact, stepped on the bee and even if that was by accident, the bee didn't know it and was now dead. 

Which probably really hurt.

All was forgiven at that point and I was back in my son's good graces and a fount of trust and wisdom for him again, until--

Election Night. 

That night my son's first grade teacher had given the class a US Map so they could color the states red or blue and an assignment to create an election booklet, which would include pictures of each candidate and a little write up about each one, with the last page showing a picture of the winner.  

My son stayed up watching TV long after his bedtime and most of the states were colored in, but Florida was looking iffy, with some TV stations calling it for one candidate but then backtracking, which was all very confusing and my son was getting upset about what to do with his blue and red crayons.

We sent him to bed and he was a wreck about it. HOW WAS HE GOING TO FINISH HIS HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT? WAS FLORIDA RED OR BLUE? and WHICH MAN WAS THE PRESIDENT? 

I promised him he would know in the morning. 

Dear reader, do I need to tell you that the tears of outrage and betrayal the next day greatly surpassed those of the Bee Sting Incident? 

That problem was fairly easy for me to solve for my son: Put both of the candidate's pictures on the last page.  

But it was not easy for everyone else and twenty million years later, with many of the same people in THIS election involved in THAT election (SEE KAVANAUGH. SEE AMY CONEY BARRETT, both lawyers advising Bush's team when his BROTHER the governor of Florida and the Supreme Court stopped the recount with Bush 537 votes ahead--giving him the state and therefore the election) which at the time I wasn't as outraged about as I should've been,

probably because I was a young mom with little kids at home and it was simpler and infinitely more comforting for me to believe that the people in charge had our country's best interests at heart and would never knowingly deceive us by putting power and party over country,

but yeah, 

So I was wrong.

 

We dropped our daughter off at the airport

and did the whole goodbye thing. Hugs and pictures. Multiple wavings as she stood in line to go through security. And more waves as she turned to head toward her gate. We watched her walk down the hall until we couldn't see her anymore, and then there was nothing to do but go home. But we didn't want to go home yet.

There was too much traffic and we turned into the first restaurant we found off the highway.

I was thinking about the day we dropped our son off, his freshmen year. The college was close-ish to where I'd grown up and I remembered there being a clam shack on the beach, but we couldn't find it. I told my husband to keep driving while I craned my neck looking down the side streets. Everything was unfamiliar, the streets all dead-ending at the ocean, but no clam shack. Not far away our son was settling into his dorm room.

I knew he was excited and I knew he was where he was supposed to be and I knew it was all going to be okay, but still, I felt like crying. Finally, we found the clam shack. We got a table with an ocean view and stuffed ourselves with fried clams and shared a pitcher of sangria and told each other we were fine.

I relayed to my husband what my wise friend Margaret had told me about your kids going away to college. She said, When they go away to college, they're not really gone. Your home is still their home base. They'll keep coming back for holidays and over the summer. When they graduate from college, that's when they're really gone.

Whew, because we had tons of time. The night of sangrias at the clam shack we had a college freshman. We had a daughter who was only a sophomore in high school for crying out loud.

The restaurant off the highway does not serve fried clams. The view from the outdoor patio is of the shopping center parking lot. Our son has lived in San Francisco for three years. Our daughter is at the gate waiting for her flight. Soon, she'll be jetting across the ocean. She's going to graduate school in London. She'll be gone for a year.

I know they're both where they're supposed to be and I know it's all going to be okay, but still.

My husband orders us a pitcher of sangria and we tell each other we'll be fine.

Noon Protest

I should've brought my NO! sign, but at the last minute, I chicken out and leave it in the car.

What? my daughter says, when she notices I'm not carrying it. This is her first protest with me. I think she expects me to be more militant.

Mostly, I'm annoyed and tired. I can't find a parking space. And then we can't figure out how to use the Pay-for-the-Parking app. We walk fast toward what looks like, at first, to be a small crowd across the street from the Ohio Statehouse. The governor just signed a bill that will outlaw abortion after 6 weeks.

I am not pro-abortion, by the way.

I am pro-believer-that-humans-should-be-able-to-decide-what's-best-for-themselves-when-it-comes-to-their-bodies-families-lives. I don't know how to explain this any better than that.

On the way to the protest I tell my daughter the story of the girl I knew when I was in tenth grade who almost died from pre-eclampsia giving birth to her baby boy. I tell her about how I went to Planned Parenthood for birth control pills, in high school, in college, in grad school. I tell her about how a couple of years ago I told my story to a legislator in the statehouse, a Republican, who in all likelihood, voted for this new bill, but who, when I spoke to him, listened and seemed to agree with me that it was a good idea for girls to be able to make their own reproductive decisions.

The crowd grows bigger. It's the usual group-- mostly women, mostly older, but some young women, a few men. Someone starts a chant We Won't Go Back. 

I hold up my phone to record it and my daughter elbows me and whispers that my phone's not on. We both laugh. Cars driving by honk and the crowd claps. Off the top of my head I could tell you the names of dozens of girls I know who were raped. Several so battered they ended up hospitalized. Only two of these girls brought charges against the rapist. In one of the cases, the guy got off. The other is still making its way slowly through the system.

A man with a megaphone tries to drown out the speaker, a woman from Planned Parenthood who is explaining what actions they are taking to fight these new restrictive laws. I can't hear what the man is yelling. Something to do with killing babies.

Another chant starts. My body! My choice! My daughter holds my hand and shouts too. When I was pregnant with her, I started bleeding at 20 weeks. Freaked out, I called my doctor. She said, if you keep bleeding, head to hospital. We'll try to stop the labor but if we can't, we'll have to deliver. And I'm so sorry but babies can't survive at 20 weeks. Do I need to explain to you that the doctor was talking about performing an abortion? There are new bills making their way through state legislatures now that will penalize women (and/or doctors) faced with this heartbreaking situation.

A woman in the crowd wears a red robe straight out of The Handmaid's Tale, a book I once thought was science fiction. The speaker thanks us for being here, but next time, she says, Bring a man with you. The few men in the crowd say Hey! And everyone laughs. But the speaker is right. We need more men standing with us. We start another chant. Women's rights are human rights. 

A friend of mine nearly died from an ectopic pregnancy. If she wasn't at the hospital when the fallopian tube burst, she could've bled to death. There'a state rep in our legislature who believes that what happened to my friend should be criminalized. Apparently, he doesn't understand that ectopic pregnancies don't lead to babies. Ever.

The man with the megaphone will not shut up. He stands with a handful of counter-protesters. They carry huge signs with photos of what look like chopped up limbs. I suspect these are the same people who stand outside Planned Parenthood clinics and scream at girls and women who have appointments to get breast screenings and birth control, and, some, yes, abortions.

I know a mom whose 19 year old daughter got pregnant and did not want to have the child. The mom dropped everything and took her daughter to get an abortion without hesitation. She did not tell her husband. I know a woman who got pregnant when she was 16 by a much older man. She did not tell her dad she got an abortion.

Our group, numbering in the hundreds now, marches across the street toward the statehouse, the man on the megaphone still bellowing.

My daughter is teary-eyed and I squeeze her hand. Next time, I tell her, I'm bringing my damn sign.

Next time, she says, Let's bring a megaphone.

One day,

one night really,

tucked between our visiting Christmas and New Year's guests, we found ourselves in the house alone, the four of us, my husband and I and our two home-for-the-holidays grown-up kids,

just like old times,

except, not exactly like old times because in old times we were the harried parents, and they were the babies, and then they were the non-stop talking children, and then they were the retreat-to-their-rooms teenagers.

We used to play a game at dinner called High/Low where each person said what the high point of their day was and the low point, but it got a little stale over the years because each person always said similar things about their days, stuff about what was going on at work, at school,

stuff I can't quite remember now, but back then was apparently repeating itself after a while, because one night my son suggested that we say each other's High/Lows, since we knew them so well, and we did that, thinking it was hilarious, and then the game petered out and somewhere along the way we stopped playing it.

The other night when we ate dinner together, we didn't play High/Low, but we did catch each other up on what's going on in our lives. We had a surprising amount to share.

This year will be a year of big changes. Graduation. New jobs and new residences. Not just for the kids but for us too.

It occurs to me that next year at this time, when we eat dinner just the four of us, if we eat a dinner just the four of us, (we might have some new additions at the table, wink wink), we will likely be sitting at a table in an unknown-to-us now place, sharing unknown-to-us-now news.  

This is kind of scary. 

Much easier to curl up on the couch together and watch old home movies. Because it was so lovely back then, when everyone was young and the kids were portable and living under our roof and we knew so well what everyone's day was like that we could recite it to each other. 

News flash: Only old people like this game. The kids think it is boring and silly. 

Did you ever notice that one of the signs of a stale, possibly dying friendship is how all you can do when you get together is reminisce about the fun times you had with each other in the past?

So, let's stop doing that, people.

Okay, okay. Wallow in the home movies one more time, linger on each other's young darling faces, remember the smell of your baby's hair after a bath and hum the lullabies you used to sing to him at bedtime.

But then, let that old game peter out.

Enjoy each other's company in the present and make new memories, such good ones that some day, far far into the future, even the grown-up kids will want to curl up on the couch together and linger there for a while.

Best Gifts

There was the typewriter, of course, the Christmas, I was thirteen.

This was a manual one, with ribbon you had to change and keys that stuck together if you typed too fast, but I loved it immediately, typing out stories and books and even my daily diary, two-fingered, until I took a typing class in high school and learned the proper method.

A stereo and albums I had my heart set on. Don't tell anyone but I was a huge Van Halen fan, once skipping school with a friend to stand out all night in line outside the Hartford, Connecticut Civic Center, a night so cold the radio DJs over the radio were making fun of us and joking about sending us hot chocolate so we wouldn't freeze to death. Side note: the concert was awesome, although I was mostly slack-jawed, watching the lead singer prance around in leather pants with the butt cheeks cut out. (google "David Lee Roth butt cheek pants" if you want a good laugh)

But I digress.

Mostly, I can't remember gifts, things I once longed for, the packages I tore into. What I always liked when I was a kid was the lead-up to Christmas, the anticipation, when time seemed to crawl and practically freeze, those first steps down the stairs and the peek into the room with the tree, the floor bare the night before, now magically piled with presents,

and then a seemingly endless day playing and eating and visiting relatives while Sing-Along-with-Mitch blasted from the record player.

This year my husband has been converting old home movies--the ones originally on videotape cassettes and then converted to dvds-- to computer files. A good 25 hours+ of movies, some we have never watched before, many of Christmases past,

our own children stepping downstairs and peeking into the room with the tree, the first surprised glimpse of the mound of presents. And then the obligatory million shots of unwrapping packages, the holding up of new clothes, the demonstration of longed for toys. A parade of Legoes and American girl dolls, motorized cars and Barbies, plastic food kitchens and sports equipment.

Here's something funny: my husband and I have been fast-forwarding through those bits and instead have found ourselves lingering over the smaller moments

our four-year-old son dancing through the kitchen while I baste the turkey, his baby sister toddling around eating cheerios. They were so little and darling and I want to believe that we saw it, we knew it at the time, but there I am in the videos, a blur at the edge of the screen, scooping up crumpled tossed wrapping paper because I was annoyed by the mess, my husband not shown at all (he was holding the video camera)

while our very best gifts were growing up fast right in front of us.

The roof is higher than it was the last time

I was up here. I have a thing about ladders. Going up isn't so bad, throwing your leg up and over. It's the climbing down that gets me. I have to brace myself. Look straight ahead. Imagine myself already on the ground.

In the meantime I stay low, inch my way up to the roof peak and down the other side, keeping in the narrow strip of shade. Did I mention we've picked the hottest weekend of the year to paint the house? Why did we decide to do this again? my husband asks.

(Because we never hire people to do things we can do ourselves)
(Because we're cheap)
(Because we're idiots)

I like this paint color. Brownish gray. Once I get over my initial terror on the roof, I settle into a rhythm. Dip the brush into the can, scrape off the excess, smear it onto the house. I can see all of my drippy mistakes from the last time I was up here ten years ago,

when we'd only recently moved here and the house was royal blue. We went for a more muted tan color, priding ourselves on wrapping up the entire project over Labor Day weekend. This year, I can already tell we won't hit that goal. Ten years from now...

yeah. We're probably going to hire out.

I can see my garden from up here. The asparagus plants I planted on a drizzly cold spring day, my son watching from the porch, laughing when I told him that it might be seven years before we'd have a good crop of asparagus. But I'll be in college by then, he said. I don't know about him, but I couldn't imagine that. Now

he's been through college and out. He lives on the opposite side of the country, not here to eat the asparagus, which truth be told, never took root or spread how it was supposed to. I planted sixteen plants and today there's only two left.

Recently, I cut one perfect stalk and ate it standing right where I'd plucked it. Stretched out around me were the raised beds planted with food that grows way better than asparagus. Lettuce, for example, which is set in rows, now hiding the spot where my daughter once practiced hitting a tetherball.

The spring I planted the asparagus she was obsessed, wanting to master the game the kids at her new school were playing. But it was a brief obsession. By fall, when she started middle school, my husband took down the tetherball pole and built the raised garden beds. I do this a lot

flip back and forth in time

see myself digging asparagus holes in raw drizzle, hear my son's laugh and my daughter's smack of a ball, and me, on a roof, painting over the past, bracing myself for the climb down.

Last week I drove my daughter to college

well, okay, she did all of the driving. It was her car and I had an awful head cold, basically plunked in the seat beside her and blowing my nose through an entire box of kleenex.

It's a nine-hour drive to Memphis where she goes to school, and where I went to school once, and I was feeling foggy and discombobulated about the trip, wanting to be there for my daughter as she moved into her dorm her senior year, but also reeling a little, to be honest, at how fast the time had flown by since my husband and I had driven her down to start college, at how fast time had flown by

since she'd started high school
and middle school
and elementary school
and preschool for crying out loud,

and if we're being honest here, since before she was born, because I'd spent the nine months of my pregnancy with her in Memphis, and I have vivid memories of myself waddling around downtown when some random guy walked up and asked if I was about to give birth any moment because it was painful to look at me.

Sorry, random guy for being pregnant and out in public. But I digress. My point is that the passage of time was hitting me, possibly compounded by my head cold, but I was trying to rally, keenly aware of the precious time ticking away, those hours, in the car, chatting with my daughter

about her plans for the upcoming school year and her friends and her boyfriend, all the while blowing my nose, my daughter's playlist playing in the background, an interesting blend of music I'd never heard in my life interspersed with songs I loved when I was in college thirty years ago.

That night my daughter and I uncharacteristically indulged ourselves by staying at a touristy overpriced hotel downtown, the Peabody, an institution in Memphis, a place I'd been many times for parties and to do the touristy thing there, which is to see The Ducks. (These are real ducks that live on the roof of the hotel, and every morning they come down the elevator and march up a red carpet and swim around in the fancy fountain in the hotel lobby.)

Twelve years living in Memphis and I had seen the ducks march and swim many times, but I had never before stayed the night in the hotel or sat in the lobby and had an over-priced drink. But that is exactly what my daughter and I did on the night before she started school, me, with a clump of kleenex in my hand and her, just-turned-21 and suddenly so grown-up.

We perused the menu and ordered frou frou drinks and feeling loopy on cold meds, I asked the waitress to throw in an order of a two-dollar plastic duck, which was served, looking very adorable, on a nest of bar snacks.

The next day, I helped my daughter move into her dorm and it was pretty clear she didn't really need me there. She and her roommate knew how they wanted to arrange things, and later when we went grocery shopping and to Target, I ambled along beside her, a strange feeling coming over me that some kind of transformation had occurred in our relationship,

still mother and daughter, because we will always be that, but what is it when your child becomes an adult in the blink of an eye, and in the next blink becomes

a friend?

Moments of Serendipitous Flower Arranging

Last weekend I went to a wedding.

I haven't been to a wedding in a while. There was a point a long time ago when I was just out of college that all of my friends were getting married, one after another, and my new husband and I attended what seemed like a bazillion ceremonies and partied at the various receptions, snarfing down the free hors d'oeuvres and clinking our champagne glasses and laughing on the dance floor as we did the Electric Slide with our friends' goofy middle-aged parents. 

This particular wedding was a new milestone for my husband and me because it wasn't our friends getting married, it was our friends' son, a boy-- 

okay, a man-- we've known since he was four years old when he played with our son at preschool. Our son-- also, apparently, a man now-- was one of the groomsmen. 

He flew cross country with his girlfriend to attend the wedding, and our daughter and her boyfriend flew in from out of state, and my husband and I drove in from our neck of the woods, and for a too brief, two-day period, our family was all together, celebrating the wedding of this boy, now man, we've known forever, and his new lovely bride, and our dear friends,

partying at the reception and snarfing down hors d'oeuvres and clinking our champagne glasses and laughing on the dance floor as we did the Electric Slide with

(gulp)

each other.

This could make me tear up if I think about it too much. How time moves faster and faster. How only yesterday I was picking up my son from pre-school while his baby sister toddled around my legs and I struck up a conversation with another young mom, also waiting with a little girl toddling around her legs. The two little boys playing on the floor with Legoes somehow morphed into the two men standing side by side on a church altar. The little girls tearing every single outfit of the closet to play dress-up, now the young women gracefully walking in insanely high heels and laughing as they leapt for the thrown bouquet. 

But I didn't think about any of this last weekend.

I was there, days early, to help my friend prepare for the wedding. I told her that I would do whatever was needed and what was needed was setting up tables for a rehearsal dinner and making a grooms cake shaped like a sailboat and buying plants at Lowes and baking garlic bread.

It also meant assisting her sister, a professional florist, as she created elaborate flower arrangements and corsages and boutonnieres.

I have never made an elaborate flower arrangement or a corsage or a boutonniere in my life. I don't even know the names of most flowers. I stood pretty much in awe the entire time as the sister florist built these creations, trying to be of help but most likely getting in her way. She would ask for a Something Something kind of a flower and I would tell her I had no idea what that kind of flower was and she'd point it out and I'd laugh and say, "Oh! the one that looks like a Horton Hears a Who flower?" And she'd look at me like I was a weirdo.

But later, when the clock was ticking down and there were still many more corsages to assemble, she'd call out, "Hand me a couple of those Horton Hears a Who flowers" and I'd get right to it. 

There is a task in the Artist's Way -- (Yes, I am reading the Artist's Way again because the joy of writing has once more slipped away and I am depleted and my creativity is sapped, probably due to the hellish political landscape we're all living in that has made writing feel pointless) but anyway, 

the task is to list, without thinking about it, five imaginary lives--five alternate reality choices for yourself if you could go back and start everything over. 

I wrote without thinking: Florist. 

The next task was to do something related to that Imaginary Life, and I chuckled to myself, because when in the world would I have the opportunity to be a florist? 

Several days later surrounded by flowers that I didn't know the names of, in service to a friend who was about to watch her only son marry, as I searched for greenery and poked stems in foam and pressed a spray of baby's breath against a white rose and pierced it with a pin, I remembered. 

The next moment the arranged flowers were on the altar, the boutonnieres on the groom's tux, on my son's tux...

Another moment and the ceremony was over, the hors d'oeuvres were eaten, the Electric Slide notes faded, the wedding guests departed, the flowers

already a memory. 

Displanted

The day before Mother's Day my daughter left home to head back to school, a nine-hour drive, alone, one she's done several times before, but still sets my mom-nerves on edge. I dug around in my garden to keep my mind busy, poking green bean seeds in the ground and transplanting seedlings, every hour or so, my husband calling out updates of our daughter's progress.

He's got some tracking thingy on his phone, and yeah, I know, there's a creepy/stalker-y element to this, but we can't help it. We want to picture our child in the driver's seat, coasting along on her journey, the closest we will get to being in the car with her

she's crossing the bridge in Cincinnati 
she's approaching Louisville
she's an hour outside Mammoth Cave

I go back to my digging and poking and mulching, relieved for the moment that she's safe and that much nearer to her destination. For the last few years I've been planning my garden ahead of time, drawing the plots out on graph paper, no longer content to randomly throw things in the ground.

There's a weird comfort in setting the borders, arranging the plants. Each year my plans are more elaborate, more structured. One large bed grown into two, and then grown into four. And now I've got side beds filled with herbs, a rock garden, corners stuffed with potted plants. In winter I checked out a stack of garden design books from the library and read them like they were novels.

Something cool I learned: my four square garden pattern can be traced all the way back to monastery gardens in Medieval times. What is it about this particular structure, about any structure--

she's nearing the Tennessee border
she's on the other side of Nashville

Something sad I learned: My daughter has been away at school for two years now, and even though I am fully adjusted to empty-nester life, each time she comes back and then leaves again, it's a fresh loss.

I draw a line in the dirt for my marigolds, trying to envision them blooming like a flowery fence in front of my tomato plants.

she's outside the city
she's there, she's home

The dog trots out to bask in the sun as I nudge the seeds into the ground. I know how it goes. Mid summer and these bare beds will be dense with plants, the reality different, despite all of my planning, from what I can imagine today. Plants tangled up with other plants, some overgrown, some drooping. Weeds working there way through despite all of my mulching.

A pumpkin (did I even plant a pumpkin?) poking up in an unexpected place, hopping over the perfectly drawn border into the grass beyond.  

When We Were Four

Today begins the last week of my two kids living at home. 

I am trying to wrap my head around it. How time moves, at once, both so slowly and so quickly. 

When the kids were little and my life centered around theirs, a wise friend told me The days are long and the years are short. 

I thought I understand what she was saying then. But then, I was stuck on the days are long part of the equation, when the days began before the crack of dawn, or even before, with babies wailing and dropped pacifiers and bleary-eyed diaper changes

and early morning nursings and drooly bibs and mixing up pasty cereal and smushy cheerios

and then the kids became little people, with their own wills and interests, and their interests became my interests

trucks and insects and catapults built in the backyard and Blues Clues notebooks and bracelets and Trading Spaces

Scooby Doo and Stars Wars, Harry Potter-themed birthday parties

Piano lessons and soccer practices, Spanish Immersion and ski clubs, lacrosse games and orchestra concerts, 

slumber parties and car pools and college searches--

Now the Legoes and the American Girl dolls are packed away.

In a few days our children jet off to opposite ends of the world, the boy who once followed the exterminator around asking in a chirpy voice about queen ants 

and the girl who once had stage fright.

Now the boy scales mountains and the girl writes briefs against the death penalty.

Once upon a time my husband and I were two

and then we were three

and then we were four...

Repeat after me: 

The years are short

The years are short

The years are short

The years are short

The years are short

My Life in Drafts

I wrote the first draft of my tenth book in the winter of 2012. 

That year my son was graduating from high school and I was on the verge of a book deal but wasn't sure if the deal would ever actually go through. This particular first draft was weirdly fun to write. Book number 10! and up to that point, none of the other nine had been published! 

So mostly I was just writing for myself, month after gray wintery month, playing around with a meandery, blathery plot, a mostly stream of consciousness narrative, something I knew even then, when I "finished" it, would need a ton of work. 

But then the book deal came through, and I spent the summer editing, and in the fall I started reworking another manuscript, and then another manuscript, and meanwhile, I was promoting and traveling and teaching like crazy, and that draft from the winter of 2012 stayed tucked in a computer file, undisturbed and unread and unremembered--

--until this past fall, when I metaphorically dusted it off, took a seriously look at it, and decided it was worth a second round.

Thus began Draft 2, the bulk of it reworked during the winter of 2016. I "finished" it a couple of weeks ago, 

a few days before my son graduated from college. 

Which says something about something about time flying and wasn't it just yesterday that I was stressing about his college acceptances and word count goals and what's with this stream of conscious style anyway and how many people are coming to the high school graduation party 

and

how many people are coming to the college graduation party and does this crazy stream of consciousness style work or not and why is it taking me a week to write one scene and when exactly is my son moving across country to start his job?

I think it was T.S. Eliot who said he measured out his life in coffee spoons.

Apparently, I measure out my life in drafts. 

 

Moving Day

When you move to a new place, everything feels strange.

It takes a while to get your bearings. To find your way. Each time you walk out the front door, you have to think: How do I get where I want to go? 

A map helps. Where is the post office? The hair salon? The nearest grocery store? But a map can only take you so far. You may have to... gulp... introduce yourself to the next door neighbors. Ask strangers how the carpool line works at your kid's school. Who sells the best pizza. What night do we roll out the garbage bins. 

You knew all that in your old town. Ten years there and you had it all figured out. The short cuts to take during rush hour. The gas station where gas was 3 cents cheaper. The best park to hang out on Sunday afternoon with the kids. You were on auto-pilot in that place and it was nice.

Ah well. You know you'll figure it out in this new town too. As someone who's moved before, you know that leaving one world behind to settle in another, can be scary. But you can do it.

Anyway, it's not like you have a choice. Moves happen. You purposely seek a new place out. Or it seeks you out. Whether you see it coming or not, one day you may find yourself standing in your living room surrounded by moving boxes.

Just yesterday the carpet was covered with toys.

You were forever stepping on legos. Scooping up wooden blocks. Peering under the couch for microscopic polly pocket fashion accessories.

Your life was a baby crying in the middle of the night. Formula bottles and jars of mushy carrots. Diaper changes and pullups and potty accidents. Cartoons and sippy cups of chocolate milk. Endless chatter and tantrums and WHY WHY WHY.

Confession: sometimes you locked yourself in the bathroom to escape the whining and the noodle-y-os and the spit-up and the chewed up binkies. You dreamed of the day when you could stroll out of the house without a two ton diaper bag and a baby carrier.

But then you'd rally. Open the bathroom door and the day would go on. Scooby Doo and bath-times and story-times turned into homework and field trip forms and piano lessons. Carpools to soccer practices morphed into carpools to middle school dances.

Sleepovers. Birthday parties. Blaring music and screeching kids in the backseat of the mini van. Summer camp. College trips--

Until suddenly everything stopped.

The house wasn't for sale. But you realized you've moved. Everything is different in this place. You can't get your bearings. There is no map.

You wander around the quiet and stunningly clean rooms, not sure where you want to go, hoping you will find your way.

Back to School with a Monogrammed Towel Set

Kids are heading back to school.

The signs are everywhere. Three for a dollar notebooks. Sales on scissors and index cards and crayons. Somehow this still adds up to 80 or a hundred bucks. It's the calculators that used to push me over the edge. And the teacher requests for expensive lotion-infused tissues. I don't buy that kind of tissues for my own home.

[side note: someone told me that teachers request lotion-y tissues because said tissue is better at cleaning whiteboards than the cheapo tissue. I don't know if this is true but it made me feel less resentful about springing for the multiple boxes on the school supply list--but not less resentful that parents have to purchase this stuff in the first place. In my day, schools didn't expect parents to buy packages of loose leaf paper and scissors and glue. In my day bluh bluh bluh. Yeah. I know. I sound like a crochety old fogie.]

Anyway, what was I talking about?

Oh. Right. Back to school.

So, for the first time in sixteen years I don't have a kid going back to school.

I have a son who's been away at college and a daughter about to go. She and I are not shopping for erasers and binders and pricey Kleenex. We are shopping for shower caddys and sheets and microwaves.

Fun fact: thirty years ago I was heading off to college.

I packed up a couple of suitcases and a trunk of winter clothes that I didn't end up digging into that much. Turned out that the Connecticut girl in Tennessee discovered little use for her winter coat and hat and mittens.

Before I moved into my dorm room, my mother and I went shopping. She bought me a small rug. A bedside lamp. A framed picture that I thought was artsy and sophisticated. A phone. (Which I used as much as my winter coat. It cost money to dial anywhere outside the college.)

My 18-year-old self was terrified and excited. Anxious and eager. Shy and confident.

The first week or two I was homesick. Not for home exactly. But for something--anything--familiar. I was a Northerner (people actually referred to me as a Yankee) at a Southern school. A poor girl surrounded by mostly wealthy kids. I was a fish out of water.

But I quickly morphed into a new fish, a new self. Maybe the self I was always meant to be. Going away turned out to be the best thing I ever did and set me off on a path I'd never have discovered if I hadn't had the courage--and privilege--to go.

I met my husband at that school. Twelve years later we had a baby girl.

Next week we'll pack up the car and take this darling girl to that same college. --I promise my husband and I did not pressure her!! -- She has tons more clothes than I ever did. She's smarter. Prettier. She's got a lovely set of monogrammed towels.

She is terrified and anxious and shy.

She is excited and eager and confident.

Me, on the other hand...

Um.

How I Spent My 30th Birthday

The year I turned 29, I had something of an early mid-life crisis. From the outside I might've seemed put together. A stable contributing member of society. Wife. Mother. Homeowner. Teacher. 

But on the inside, I felt like a fraud. I liked teaching, but it was a pretend career, something I was doing "for now"-- until I figured out what I really wanted to do. I loved being a wife and mom, but those felt like playing dress up too. I had so few positive role models for wife-dom and mother-dom. Most days I was winging it, and then falling into bed and angstily analyzing all of my actions and choices. 

As my 29th birthday approached, I remember thinking: Yikes. I can't keep playing around. Time to get serious. Next year I WILL BE 30!!

But a funny thing happened the day I turned 30: I didn't think at all about turning 30.

I had too many other things on my mind. 

My husband's company had recently transferred him to another state. I'd stayed behind for a few weeks with our three year old son, to sell our house and wrap up my teaching job. I also got called up for jury duty.

Oh, did I mention I was eight months pregnant? 

We moved into our new house at the beginning of July and for the next few days I tore around like a manic unpacking (my husband teased me because I spent time arranging all of our books into the bookcase in alphabetical order. Just put them away, he said. To ME. A former bookstore employee. Ha ha)  

The only room I didn't touch was the nursery. I shoved the unpacked boxes into that room and told myself I'd get to it later. The baby wasn't due until the end of the month. 

The morning of the big Three-Oh, I slept. All of that racing around had finally caught up with me. I collapsed on the couch, waking only to pop another Scooby Doo video into the VCR for my three year old. 

Lunch was fun. I spent it in line at the DMV getting my driver's license renewed. Weight? the clerk asked, and I patted my engorged stomach miserably. It's okay, she said, just write down what you think you'll weigh after.

I still love that woman. 

And then it was back to the couch and Scooby Doo videos. 

My husband brought home dinner and I ate like I hadn't eaten in years. Half of a pepperoni pizza. A liter of coke. A quarter of a carrot cake. And I don't even like carrot cake. I was diabetic during my pregnancy. I wasn't supposed to be eating this way. But, whatever. 

I went into labor a few hours later. 

I called the only person I knew in the new city to come stay with our three year old son (a decision that still apparently haunts the poor kid. 18 years later). My husband had to get directions to the hospital from the OBGYN. Before we left, he dug around in boxes to try to find the sweet little dress we'd planned to have our daughter wear. 

All he could find was an old hand-me-down undershirt of our son's. 

The anesthesiologist laughed and laughed when I told her what I'd last eaten. Half of a pizza? Well, it's my birthday, I said. And it hit me. Who cared how old I was? Who cared if I ate half of a pizza every once in a while or if my kid watched six hours of Scooby Doo videos or...um... if the books weren't arranged perfectly in the bookshelf. 

This was one day in my one life. 

Our baby girl was born the next day. She looked darling in her undershirt. 

Interview with Patti Edmon

A few years ago-- okay, it was more like ten years ago-- I was living in Lexington, Kentucky, and I was (sorta) pursuing my writing--working on a novel, collecting rejections for another novel, but mostly NOT writing. Mostly, I was driving around Lexington with my kids, taking them to piano lessons and viola lessons and watching them practice soccer and attending school board meetings and being the mom who went on field trips and made cupcakes for school functions.

The other moms I met along the way were just like me--on the surface--carting the cupcakes into the classroom and sitting on the soccer field sidelines, alternating between sweating our butts off and shivering with cold. We'd talk about what teachers we wanted our kids to have and how to throw together decent crockpot meals or we'd complain about the weather and the crazy Lexington traffic.

Very rarely the talk would turn to something else. Work. Or work we used to have before we quit or went part-time to raise our kids. Hobbies. Goals.

Dreams.

I always felt really weird talking about my writing. It was personal. Private. My writing dream felt silly/pathetic/selfish. It wasn't something I went around blabbering about.

One day I was dropping my daughter off on a play-date. My plan was to take the two hour break of time and drive downtown to the main library and work on a revision. Somehow I got to talking to my daughter's friend's mom about what I was doing and she told me she liked to write too and she was also working on some art and suddenly we were talking about the creative process and the work and time involved, and before I left, she was thrusting the book Escaping into the Open: The Art of Writing True by Elizabeth Berg into my hands.

The book was illuminating, and I realized I'd found a fellow creative companion in this mom. But our daughters didn't have any more play-dates and then my family moved from Lexington, and we lost track of each other (except for brief moments on Facebook). But once in a while I'd think of her and wonder how she was doing, what she might be working on, if anything.

Until one day a few months ago, BOOM, suddenly, this woman -- her name is Patti Edmon -- began sharing her art on Facebook, and I was entranced and excited. She's an artist, I thought. Look at that!

So I wrote to her and asked if I could interview her and she very kindly agreed...

Me: Patti, I've been looking at your paintings and I am totally in awe of your work. Can you tell me a bit about it? --the medium you use, the subject matter you're drawn to?

Patti: Lately I've been working with bright colors and lots of detail – flowers, angels, abstracts. The base of every piece is acrylic paint – on canvas, board, paper, whatever’s handy. I love to layer – in most every painting there are layers of papers– tissue paper, scraps, old book paper, along with found objects and ‘stuff’, along with pencil, pens, markers, chalk and pastels.

Over the past few years I've done a lot of assemblage, collage and painting, but I paint entirely from a place of intuition rather than reality. I greatly admire those who can capture a setting or person but I’m too impatient and I like for my work to come from my imagination.

Me: I like that: "a place of intuition, rather than reality." I always ask writers where they get their ideas. We like to think there's some logic behind it, as if we choose--well, maybe some writers do.

They say, I want to write about this particular subject or whatever. But most of the time, it seems like the idea or ideas just pop up. Is that how it is for you?

Patti: I often do a series, such as The Sistahs and Angels… one recent painting was based on song lyrics, but I usually start out putting color down and seeing where it goes. That’s a primary difference, I think, between writing and art. When I was writing fiction I had a character in mind and capsule idea of the story. When I paint I can literally just pick a technique, substrate or color palette.

Me: Maybe we're not so different. I like to free-write. Put the pen on the page or start typing. Worry about revising later. Do you approach a painting that way too? Or at some point do you plan out where you're going with a piece?

Patti: I haven’t yet painted from a sketch, but I think regular doodling, like journaling, keeps the creativity active. The times I have tried to achieve an idea or end result I end up so far away that I usually just jump in and play. I’m happiest when I’m in a state of ‘flow’ described as total immersion, i.e., unaware of time, surroundings, thought, etc. And, editing in art is adding something to see if it works, or putting in the recycled bin.

Me: It's interesting --that editing in art is about adding. In writing it's more about cutting. The similarity is how a lot ends up in the recycle bin. So many drafts that didn't end up working. I like how you approach what you do as play. It has a much nicer ring to it than work.

I always ask writers how many books they wrote before their first book deal, and how many rejections they received along the way-- do you have many paintings "in a drawer"-- early attempts that you now would not display? Or projects you worked on that went nowhere?

Patti: I have a great deal of work – the entire evolution – in my studio, pieces I did in workshops, experimental pieces and art I didn't produce with the intention of sharing. I believe that art is similar to writing in that we don’t usually share our journals and a lot of the work is, well, part of the journey.

Me: That's the key-- trying not to think about those earlier efforts as time wasted but as necessary practice.

What kind of work schedule do you have every day?

Patti: I try to get to the studio every day, but that doesn't always happen. I like to paint in the morning, before the distraction of all the below! I spend anywhere from an hour to three or four, depending upon the project.

Me: When we met, we were young moms with the carpooling and PTA stuff, but now the kids are older and somehow there are still tons of things to do (or tons of things we think we have to do) and it's a struggle to let that stuff go so we can work play. Is that how it is for you? How do you balance your creative time with your other obligations?

Patti: I used to view doing the dishes, dusting, laundry, meal prep, and other household chores as obligations. Now I am obligated to paint first and use whatever time/energy left over to make it appear as though I’m on top of everything! I started making art in 2006 after I ‘retired’ from our marketing/advertising business due to a chronic illness that still claims time and energy and it’s frustrating but I don’t watch television, read the newspaper or have much ‘idle’ time, which I think some call it relaxing.

Me: I like this attitude!

You're selling paintings now. Has that changed how you work? I guess what I'm asking here too, is if you--as an artist--have changed now that your work is getting attention commercially? Do you have to use time that would have gone into painting, to promote?

Patti: I've had pieces in several shows over the past few years and sold here and there but now it is different. I don’t have a gallery – yet – and I worked on a marketing plan during the holidays and have entered several juried competitions. The business end of art - pricing, marketing, keeping up with my blog, shipping – is a challenge, but it doesn't interfere with painting time and it hasn't changed my approach to art!

Me: I like this attitude too!! Art first. Everything else, second.

What are you working on now?

Patti: I’m working on a series of angels, notecards, and incorporating new supplies and techniques. I need to be working on my studio, as it’s a disaster after my recent creative bender. After the holidays I plan lots of experimentation.

Me: I am so excited to see what you create next. Thanks so much, Patti, for chatting with me today.

Readers, if you are interested in seeing more of Patti's art -- it is available for sale -- check out her website www.pattiedmon.blogspot.com for more details.

Patti Edmon