Coming in 2012

Am hoping to lend a hand with some set design/construction for this project this Spring. My first foray into the world of theater and set design. Please pledge if you can, every little bit helps.

In conclusion

The three of us, Tofino 2011

Christmas eve, the year is winding down. We're watching videos from the first years Mark and I were together, almost a decade now, I am overwhelmed by the complicated feelings of what is now past and what must lay ahead. Pearl was little, my parents looked younger, my property looked more wild. Time marches on, so do I. Am thinking about the year ahead now and what I would like to accomplish or at least inch myself toward. More writing, less slacking. Better eating, more moving around. More reading, more learning, greater understanding. More time with those I love, less time worrying about the things I have no control over. Maybe some surfing, certainly more walking and bike riding, better knitting, more complicated sewing, greater ease.

2011 was fine. I met some goals, wrote more words, raised and butchered the chickens, let a few things go, welcomed a new life. It was all good, another year filled with good memories, small trips. It's an extraordinary life this and I have learned to be kind to myself and those around me, so I will continue to do as I have done and move incrementally toward the person I want to be.

Cheers to you and yours. See you on the flipside.

Saturday with the folks

I guess it's in the air. Everyone's parents are getting old, failing and decrepit. Our roles as parents and children are crossing over one another at the dividing line. We make suggestions and come up with solutions, shouting them from where we stand, our minds and bodies still keeping pace, mostly. Saturdays we visit Eddy first, now in care, it's depressing. We stay a shamefully short amount of time, but how long can you sit watching someone sleep? We move west to the city and see my dad, now 84 and his wife. My parents I say and pause, my mother is dead. My stepmother, now my only female parent has Alzheimers or some other dementia-like disease, and my father are the parents of record. They are one unit, bound tighter now that she is dependent on him entirely and he is more dependent on us, our open arms, palms raised up offering help with anything, everything. We eat lunch with them, bake cookies, clean up here and there. We are jovial and encouraging, helping her with the words she can no longer connect with, seeing that he is not becoming overwhelmed with this new position of care giving he has been thrust into. After a time we go outside with him discreetly and discuss things that need to be discussed while the dogs pull and sniff around the block that surrounds the house, circumnavigating the island of their despair. On the way home we stop to see Mark's mother who is the best off of all of them fiercely independent still and able to mother us a little which feels like a relief because we are not ready to cut loose that generational buffer between us and our own eventual demise. At night I dream again and again of my mother and relive her illness, she is well and then not well and then dead again and I forget how it happened but I am grateful she comes to visit me and I suppose it will be this way with all of them and then me and on and on.

Gift Ideas

I shamelessly encourage you to visit my Etsy site. Enjoy!

Day 81

I am not one for wallowing or whining. I have been unable to write because I have fallen into horrendous laziness. I mean to write and I wake up early to do it when the house is quiet but I refuse to leave my bed and then I decide I can write in bed, if that is what it takes, but I don't write much because I know inside that one needs to sit up properly or even stand if possible and somehow I convince myself to stay in bed and an hour passes and I think I need a little nap so I turn over and then I am done. When I wake up the next day and cannot reach the notebook I write in I decide that maybe I should be writing short pieces or god forbid finish the other 9 things I have on the go and the bed feels warm and I decide to get up and be a super mom for an hour and then go to work. Everyday the little emails come from the writing group and everyday they are right on. I don't know the whole the story yet and maybe I don't care but I do because the last time I wrote I discovered a love triangle that was not there before and that was interesting and I felt curious but then the bad me drank 4 glasses of wine and stoked the fire and got under the quilt and fell asleep until the middle of the night and went to bed and read the rest of "War of Art" and realized that my territory is my work, I am happiest there and I just happen to have a lot of it right now and so the story trudges on. It takes me a long time to do things, we know this. Many things I have done and finished and liked took me a long time to do. I might not finish the story in the prescribed remaining 9 days even though I keep telling myself I will suddenly begin to go hard and race to the finish line my pages flying around me. It won't happen that way. I will take a walk each day and find time here and there to write and rewrite and to think about the whole thing in pieces and I will not sling mud at myself and tell myself horrible things about my habits and tendencies, instead I will re read all the emails and be curious about the story and one day it will resolve itself and the whole experience will be framed as positive because it was the first time and I took it on and I kept going.