weekend: spring rain

I didn't think they'd climb all the way.  First, crossing our pastures then climbing over the woven wire fence into our neighbor's dryland hills.  They were wearing rain boots, had gone looking for puddles before spotting the silhouette of a herd of antelope at the top of the hill.  I watched them grow smaller as they waded the ocean of grass.  

I caught up with them just before they reached the top.  Thrilled with their solo climb, they pointed to the Pioneer Mountains, Lets do those next!

I spent hours in the hoop house, listening to soft rain on the roof.  The smell, the softness of the air was something I had nearly forgotten.  Rain.

I want to plant everything at once.  Today I settled for transplanting all 35 tomatoes and planting bean and summer squash seeds.  My hands feel like sandpaper and my muscles are tired and happy.

This weekend we built tents,

soaked up the heavy gray skies,

& took naps...among other things.

drought

The sky fills with water.  Violet clouds streak down toward the mountains.  The smell of rain thickens the air, then suddenly moves on.  We watch blue break the clouds apart with something like despair.

Trucks of cattle roll through town, heading south to the stockyard. We talk of snowpack, grazing allotments, headgates. I feel greedy for water, like a real westerner, proud that I finally understand this precarious balance we keep. 


I don't know when I've ever slept like this.  It goes beyond the sleep of sunlicked skin and tired muscles.  This sleep drives me from my body, wipes clean the slate of my mind, leaves me heavy and disoriented in the morning.  I sleep with intensity, dropping through mattress and floorboards into vibrant colors, complex storylines, aware only of vast depths below like someone adrift  on a still sea.

On my run - antelope tracks arch like lips in the dust of the trail.  I can tell we are moving in the same direction.  They veer to a low pocket of ground, a small depression that caught enough snowmelt to green the tough windblown grass that grows along the sagebrush.

When the sun hits a pivot's spray it looks like heaven.  Lush alfalfa tangles in a blur of new green beneath the spray.  All around the dryland fields are bleached nearly white.

I wake in the dark to the sound of water.  At first I think I've left a sprinkler running, but I haven't.  Rain.
The air is full of water.

32 things I love today

1. Dipping toes into the icy Big Hole River in the first week of April.

2. My trusty old red subaru.
3. Avacados
4. Being amazed each year at the utter force and brilliance of sudden spring in the mountains.
5. Sandhill cranes flying high over our house, calling to each other.
6. Today I talked to my mom, my dad, my sister and my brother.  All of them.
7. New friends, old friends, my wonderful community of awesome women.
8. Boots and skirts.

9. The harmonica.
10. Toting a flat of spindly, reaching seedlings into my warm hoophouse in the morning.
11. Coffee.  First Thing.
12. Realizing after the last two years, that I'm happier in my 30s than I was in my 20s.
13. The simultaneous heartache and pride I feel watching my girls climb trees, grow strong, and think for themselves.
14. Watching the sun rise this morning.

15. Washing my face with sugar.
16. Knowing that in a week, my schedule will drastically change, opening wide for summer.
17. Being with my man, who makes me happy.
18. Saturday mornings.
19. This girl.

20. The smell of rain.
21. Roadtrips, long or short.
22. Lilacs.
23. This girl, too.

24. My mother-in-law, who cleaned my entire hosue today, made my birthday dinner, and bought cupcakes.
25. Running the hogback with Ruby.
26. Dramatic spring skies.
27. Still eating tomatoes from last year's garden.
28. Poems.
29. Thrift stores.
30. Taking pictures.
31. Trusting myself- it sounds so simple.

32. This.

**Birthday list idea borrowed from the lovely Nici, over at digthischick.net

right now...

it finally feels like spring, despite the crispy brown grass underfoot.

*mid-leap*
I'm abandoning page 23 of the paper-from-hell for sunshine and IPA.

and my creative, wild scientist-princess is perfecting her balance
on the new swing she built
just now.

40 scenes - my day

1. wake alone, my snoring drove mike out of the bedroom.  damn tonsils.  this cold is hanging on.
2. the sky just starting to lighten
3. girls asking for warm milk
4. boil water for coffee
5. owl shirt, braids, yearbook order form (really, for kindergarten?)
6. dress, brush, feed amelia, send her out the door with mike
7. attempt to work on school work while the cutest three-year-old on the planet distracts me
8. make aven's lunch
9. realize that it is amelia's day to bring snack and she has already left
10. panic over the 22 kindergarteners that will be starving because of me
11. chop wood, stoke fires, pack my school bag
12. shower, dress, make tea for the road (coffee is long gone)
13. buckle aven into her carseat, drive off forgetting the mail
14. deliver creative-last-minute snack to amelia's school
15. drop aven and her lunch at preschool
16. park, walk, relax my shoulders
17. ask myself why the rush, what would happen if you just relax for a second?  Enjoy the blue sky, the wind, the nearness of spring

18. relax shoulders again as I walk into class
19. mind is blown by the guest presentation of an orthodox rabbi
20. contemplate giving more of my soulbrainmind to faith.  decide i cannever willnever be orthodox anything
21. race to pick aven up
22. race to get gas and get home before amelia's bus
23. haul aven's sleeping body out of her carseat.  strip her of shoes and nestle her into my bed
24. meet amelia's bus with seconds to spare
25. gather eggs, feed chickens, fill cow water tank, carry two five gallon buckets to the horse
26. watch thrown hay as it is caught by wind as it arcs into jack's pasture from my hands
27. watch as ruby chases a fox out of the windbreak, watch as she gains on the fox before looping around and returning to me as I shout her name into the wind
28. chop wood
29. scratch together enough leftovers for dinner
30. take aven's temperature as she sits at the dinner table with flushed cheeks.  102.1
31. efffffffff...
32. swap her dinner for a lime popsicle and tylenol
33. dishes, jammies, brush teeth
34. dance with amelia to wilco, the weepies...ipod is stuck on 'w' artists

35. read two chapters of the boxcar children and the guinea pig ABCs. 
36. mediate a quickhot fight over a seashell
37. haul blankets, water glasses and sleepy children up the stairs
38. tuck them in and kiss their sweet faces
39. stoke fires, finish a glass of wine, and realize my take-home test is due tomorrow
40. sit down and stare at the computer screen.  make this list.  hit publish.

**Here I am.  Another day.  And I am still standing.**

weekend: wild girls & dragons

"All good things are wild and free." ― Henry David Thoreau *just look at her face...

*am I ever stylish...


*liquid sunshine from the tips of tree branches to the tips of pigtails*

*waiting for a dragon* *still waiting* *The dragon emerges from the front doors of the Silver Bow County Court House * *It's good luck to make all the noise you can* *Happy Year of the Snake from Butte, America*

(early) morning notes

It's six-thirty on Friday morning and quiet.  Amelia is asleep in our bed after coming downstairs at five for more tylenol and cough drops.  Mike has left for work already and I've had this unexpected pocket of time fall in my lap.

Yesterday, my professor asked the women in my class to talk about how we feel we're different from our grandmothers and mothers.  He was looking for cultural, societal shifts, to demonstrate to us that the world is changing.  That what we are capable of and our expectations of our lives are much different now than they were for earlier generations.

I told him I was raised by feminist parents, that I was brought up to believe I could do everything.

Good, he said, good.  Next?

Wait, I said, that's not everything.

It's not real.  It's a basic tennent of physics.  We only have so much time, so much attentions, so much room in our lives.  We can't have EVERYTHING.  We have to choose.

Part of me loves being back in school.  I love the discussions, the thoughtfulness, the new ideas.  But as I'm hustling Aven out the door to preschool, grabbing mittens and backpacks and last-night's homework I am also utterly filled with longing.  Longing to put it all down, and just pick her up (while I still can).  To spend the afternoon walking along the Big Hole River while she collects rocks, or reading, or just listening to her talk, giving her my undivided attention. 

Everyone told us we could have it all, the family, the career, the free time to pursue our passions and balance it all out.  And I have moments where I really feel the balance.  There are times when this all feels possible and true.

But there are other truths.  Like I left a job I really loved to become a mother.  Like I juggled the management of the community garden I established, my babies, and time to take care of my own body and brain for years.  How nearly impossible it is to feel like you're giving the important things in your life the attention they deserve.  How something is almost always falling through the cracks.

Or that I'm not sure where to go from here.  My gut feeling is that something inside needs to shift.  I need to give up something, even if it is just my own preconcieved expectations of what my life should look like.  I want to get to a place where I give myself peace.  Where I feel those fleeting moments of balance more regularly. 

I'm thinking about it.
I'm working on it.
And the sky's getting light now
and I can hear the birds going wild
for morning
even with every window closed.