I think that's your plane?

Today is Monday. There are boxes and hot pink discount bins all over my room. I have gathered about a pound of blond hair from various corners of the room and realized once again that I have a book hoarding problem. I am packing, or clearing out, of my bedroom in Austin. Thursday I will get on a plane to Colorado, then Friday I will get back on a plane with sister, toddler, and bun (-in oven) to make our way to the West Coast. I will be gone two months. Eight weeks. Sixty days. I think about the days, as though each were dangling above me on a clothespin, and wonder which to pluck off first. I think many things, on my duvet-cover now stained with pizza sauce; it's just been one of those weekends.

Where to begin? Just thinking about this time last year, when I arrived sweating and enthralled by the downtown city lights of Austin and was just a little disappointed not to hear accents, I find myself getting that strange feeling of time lost. Has it been a year? Have I really taught as a middle school teacher and created a family with a bunch of smelly but darling twelve-year-old adolescents? The answer is, but of course, a resounding yes (especially the smelly part, as I learned this year the Spanish word for fart is 'pedo' and I have learned to move away quickly upon hearing it). I took so many pictures of my babies during our UT field trip that I almost scratched the lens with my clucking.

Now, a new TTF person is coming to live in my room for the summer. She keeps asking me all of these adorably naive questions and I don't have the heart to tell her just how ruthless it is out there to be a teacher. I want her to keep her faith, to think that she is different, because everyone deserves that. I just can't help but think of how much has changed since I did summer institute last year. I hadn't met Heather, my dearest Austin love, who has turned so many of my tears into bouncy bowls of laughter that I don't know what I would have done without her. She is like a fellow potato, that happened to grow up on a distant island, but we have the same tough kind of roots. We have gushed and bitched about all the parts of work or life that are possible with verbal communication, and beyond that, we've done a ridiculous number of hand gestures.
I also met a lovely man, who I had a movie-sized goodbye with on my porch when it was still sticky at 3am. I watched him, half ready to cry and half ready to be alone, get in his truck and drive away. He will be in China all summer while I gallivant the U.S. with no real agenda except letting myself be surprised over and over again.

I also have a new house. There is the cutest dwelling waiting for me August 1st, and I am giddy with anticipation to scoop and shlep all of my shit into it and nest like the feathery and particular bird that I am. The trees make this canopy above the roof and....sigh.....see how I lose focus so quickly? OK, so, I have made great friends and have a job that fulfills me in all those scary little pockets of soul that you were afraid may grow over with cobwebs but now, instead, the light pours into it and you think it may be a nice spot to paint after all. I like to think back to last May, about how nervous I was, how my hands shook when I threw those dice in California, betting that a life in Texas would maybe, just maybe, be that thing that my newly mid-twenty self was secretly trying to grab hold of. And, I think I may be bruised, but I still hold it, in my balmy hands.

This summer will not be a break, not in the truest sense. Though I can and will devour books like female teachers with free cupcakes, I vow that I will finish MY book. I mean, here I have been given over two months of undisturbed, child-free existence and if I were to throw it away on wheat beer and floating devices what kind of human would I be? Well, a chubby and well-tanned one, certainly, but I want to be more. Besides, didn't that seven months in Thailand remind me it is actually impossible for me to get any real kind of color? So, I will go to coffee shops and spend time in the bedroom I grew up in so as to restore that hidden well-water within me that sometimes, my arms don't have the strength to draw from. I want to go back to them, drink from them, baptize myself in each drop and remember that the whole point of my book is to make people feel like there is more to this world, more to themselves, than what they have ever dreamed.

Simple, right?? Well, we will see. I will still be blogging about all the mini-trips I go on and attempting to document the tornado of emotions that I usually smack into when returning to Chico. Hopefully people have developed some kind shelter for my arrivals, as I tend to not know I destroy as much as I do.

But it is a good thing to leave a place. It is a good thing to miss and be missed. It is good to look upon a time and know it is gone but still pointing your little feet toward the road because, at least you know you're going somewhere. So, here's to the brave souls who have picked my hitchhiking butt up throughout my life, loaded in me in their cars and helped me get somewhere amazing. I know there will be more to meet, and I love to stick my legs up on the dash and hear the world sing.

The City

You said the structures
were built around you
that the streets came from
slender parts of arm
you wrapped around downtown
all those times
'round me
That the freeways
were all the twirled truths
the mind played with you
taking you up and over
then spitting you out into I-35
This place was once home
your joyful bones
that you've compacted with scaled hands
peeling, you rose like ivy
a silent smothered skyscraper
that once pointed to Michigan
it now brings me here
the smell of soaked pavement
and a weak river
you were wise to build upon

This is Seventh Street
where I watch the city cry

And I
I hold the gavel
I grasp the heart
neatly zipped in my heart
of your waning metropolis

In the Eyes

I read somewhere that eyes never grow from birth to death. That, when you gaze upon that pinkness of newborn perfection, you see the same eyes that will decades later cry over a failed marriage, or mist at the sight of the Great Wall of China. It is true that when you see a baby, their eyes are the dominant force on their pudgy little faces, even my sky blues, that were once held up by the wall of chub that were my soft cheeks.

It makes one wonder, about the greatness of change we experience in ourselves. That we can be given these little round circles, placed neatly in sockets and protected by a skin-curtain, and while the rest of our body sprouts and stretches our way of seeing the world does not. Is this an argument for nature? Perhaps. Perhaps there is some meaning in the fact that the objects that flip the world upside down and view it remain unchanging no matter our years or experiences.

Sometimes, I look at pictures of myself. When I was young, and my smile nearly reached my temples and my ringlets were loose. My eyelashes were never caked with mascara and my lips were just as pleased with an otter pop as they are now with passion. I try to connect myself to the little girl, the one my parents say was so sweet and would lose entire afternoons playing Dollhouse. I find that the only real thing that brings me to her, are those eyes, for I know them, recognize them as though they are an ancestor from long ago that has returned to a dusty village, and I gravitate toward them. For in those eyes, those unabashed eyes, I can find who I once was. Some days this makes me weep. I must admit that I am much changed, and though I still ache over people's pain and try desperately to shine with any kind of incandescence, I fear I am no longer selfless.

But this is how it goes, is it not? The change is as constant as the ebb and flow of hope and darkness. But I do love looking at my nephew, my darling Carter, and thinking that one day he will stare back at me as a man. He probably will be taller than me, and I will have one of those short mom haircuts and a homemade macaroni necklace that my twins made me (gasp!), but I will forever recognize his angelic eyes.

Perhaps this is why parents can never let go of those precious early years. You will always be puffed with childhood delight to your parents. Like a lovely pastry, you will always be sweet and protected on a china dish. We should rejoice in it. There are so few people that will ever remember you so well.

As I leave for work, I gaze once more in the mirror, and my battle continues. Perhaps I will never connect Krissy, (my childhood name), and the woman I am now, but I may have many afternoons trying. I think the point is, all these little parts are me, and that is something I have to believe in.

That Was How the Rain Fell

We are in a drought. We are in a severe drought. That means that if Texas was a face, it's nose would be crackled and pointed fiercely downward. The eyes would glimpse this nose, from above, just slightly, and know that it's vanity was destroyed.

I remember I was sixteen. My family decided to go somewhere for Christmas, somewhere warm and strange, I suppose. And we did. We ended up in Arizona, a state not so far from California, but when we arrived I had to trace the sky with my pinky, to remember the lines of blue.

The ground was red. I remember thinking it strange, that the soil would not be dark, stained brown beneath my feet. When I touched it I recoiled, my hands could not dig beneath it's wrinkled edge. I would never delve within it and plant a snapdragon. Even at sixteen, this was a devastation of sorts.

As we drove by houses I noticed that trees were plucked from the landscape, gone altogether. Instead there were cacti. No one ever kissed beneath a cactus, I thought, and I was right. It was as though we were in a refugee camp; there were people everywhere but their most precious limbs were missing, the ones that stretched up and out and made them graceful. I could hardly rejoice in that loss.

"Spectacular," my father mumbled, as we made it to Sedona. There, the rocks were abundant and it looked much like what Mars had been woven into in my cinematic past. The winds slapped us as we walked on.

"But where are all the trees?" I asked.

"It's the desert," he replied, stretching his arm to show me the expanse, "there isn't water for all that."

No water.

It was impossible to think of. My town, in Northern California, was famous for floods that let people row down cul de sacs in canoes. At school, we would name the pockets of flooded area after great lakes, and lines would form to inch your way across the slim passageways between puddles.

But, after all that rain, spring erupted. It was almost violent, all that green. So much so that when I went to Ireland, I felt as though it were home. Our town relied on the rain. When we lacked it, the farmers went hungry and the people grew restless. We, too, had to be fed by the falling water, and when it didn't come people grew agitated. And then, on a cloudy afternoon, as the rain fell, you could see people sigh ever so slightly, as though an old friend had come back safely from a trip you never got a postcard from. We would complain a little, about the greyness of it, but secretly we twirled and spun to that grandiose cacophony. As a child I even fell to my knees, trying desperately to hear the grass drink.

I think that was one of my graces in Thailand. Even in the illness, the madness and unyielding heat, the rain always came. We would stand in the ocean, warm salt water up to our hips, and watch as the the water came down, as though coming home. It was one of the most enchanting things in the world, that return from sky to earth, and I knew that to be cradled in the ocean was something we both shared.

So, sitting here in Austin, during an extreme drought, is trying. There is moisture in the air, and trees to be sure, but there is a void. I must feel the rain, taste it upon my tongue and feel it drip into every follicle of hair before I am satisfied. I even make the rain, to my plants, from a big red watering can. But it not the same.

I see now that where I grew up, we didn't want the rain, we needed it. We could not survive without storms and brutality of water. We beckoned it, danced for it, sang endlessly to the strips of bark that lined our rivers until they flowed again, the mighty veins carrying our spirits and blood from one side of town to the next.

This is what I miss most: those days and days of unforgiving rain, when the earth opens its mighty jaw to drink from the pouring heavens.

Watch That Bird Go

Well, now that I have written (in the previous post) one of the most potentially depressing poems thus seen, I will try and be a little more upbeat. Also, I don't want my dear mother thinking that I need my darkness of spirit numbed by Zoloft, and after my last poem, I may be two-stanzas-involving-cutlery away from her flying out here and popping the pills into my mouth herself. The truth is that, at present, life is going bewitchingly well.

So, naturally, I am greatly concerned.

To begin, it seems that on my drive to work there have sprouted the most delightful tufts of purple and yellow flowers that make even my brooding heart liven. It is like one of those Little House on the Prairie scenes (minus the toll road) that make you want to frolic in a pettycoat or something. Also, the weather is warming at an alarming rate. I have brought out sandals and my Thai elephant dresses in order to avoid sweating like an ape while basking in the unreasonable Texas sun.

On Saturday, there was even that perfect smell of sunscreen that shivers into your nostrils and takes you back to the summer of 1992.....but I will not go there now. I will, however, relay that I have been 'verbally' offered a position for next year at the middle school I work at. Now, for those of you who either don't watch the news, talk to humans, or read my blog (teacher-bitch post was a few weeks ago) then, shame on you, it's bad out there for teachers and you should be buying us cookies or something! For the rest of you, thank you for your awkward smiles and sighs at how America's great educators continue to get snubbed. Boo. But, it seems that my school is just crazy enough to let me back and with a full-time position, so I won't have to continue to by WIC food products or be asked by students as to why I show up at school so late every day. It makes me feel perpetually like I am not a 'real' teacher, which sometimes is correct, like when they ask me about after-school specifics and I am left clicking wildly at my school inbox trying desperately to remember when soccer tryouts are. Awesome. But, now I will be there in full and surely will finally be forced to administer standardized testing!

There is also the addition of certain new people into my life. Some of these are friends that have surfaced in peculiar but perfect ways and that I now adore so much that I wonder at how I survived without their little adorable ways. They are the kind of people that stand, in a room-full of lying complacents, and you can't help feel their greatness of character. One in particular will be joining Heather and me contractually for next year. Of course, by this, I mean we will share a magical house with a garden worthy of any well-polished gnomes' attention (for the un-polished ones are quite ill-trained on such matters). With these new friends, I must boast that we have been gallivanting to trivia, restaurants, pools and other jolly activities that are enough to make me even more broke and slightly euphoric from all that beer. There may even be other new additions to my life but, I will stop here, and you will just have to wait for the footage from my reality TV show (please disregard this joke if you have not signed the waiver to appear on my show).

So, in case the addition is too jarring, we are now tallying a new job, perfect weather, wildflowers and being surrounded by new, enchanting people. Now, my parents being accountants and all, I can add things up pretty soundly and I say, "Kristen, just breathe, for this is a time in your life where things soar and you must keep your arms spread wide if you wish to take that wind for all it's got."

So here I am, in Texas (how did that happen?), somehow living a city life, and you know what? I think I just might be soaring.

The Sound of Silence

She had them
perfect little ears
that she cradled gently
through Iowa winters
with him
and she spent nights
tucked in feathers
feeling his breath on her
until one night
he ended her
them
with two little words
sounds she must smother
with the violence of a knife
so she carved carved away
all the things once loved
on her pretty little head
and all around her
blood
reminded her she was
more than what was said

And she wept she wept
but no sound came
and she was pleased in this
for her perfect little ears
were gone
and she had not the strength to miss

Has the City Mouse Trampled the Country Mouse?

Well, I hate to say it, but being in my small nesty town has made me somewhat antsy for big-city life. Can it be possible that, this girl raised beneath branches, has become entranced with skylines? Yes, at sunset, they rise above the ground so beautifully and cradle the pink of the sky with such grace that I fumble, but does this make me city-bound?

The city mouse, as the story goes, has gadgets, a car and lives at a faster pace. I wonder if indeed I have become one of these fidgety people who is always sniffing around for the next enticing activity. I have been serially-dating, going to tons of shows and events, and exploring the ambiance of various bars. Add all of these up, and you may find that the little mouse that I once was has acquired a nicer outfit. It's hard not to, though, when there is that energy pulsating down the one-way streets and the outdoor seating is so vibrant and free that you may smile at one hundred strangers before finishing your locally-brewed beer. I find it particularly fascinating that I could have dated the guys I have in Austin and really never see them again. In Chico, my beloved hometown of about 90,000, I would probably end up working with his mother, or would've befriended his younger sister when we were six and dabbling in jazz dance.

Austin. Urgh. I sort of hate you for making me miss you when I am nestled in the nook of Northern California. I am going to unfairly blame most of your charm on your unseasonable warm weather. It's like fishing with dynamite. In Chico right now, it is raining so hard that it looks like one long string falling from the sky. The only thing that gives its ferocity away is the noise, the constant pelting that rocks me to sleep. It is lovely to be rocked to sleep, usually, but not when the day is young and you feel an anxiousness to do, change, be spectacular (though I rarely accomplish any of these).

I will quickly tell about one thing that the country mouse within me smiled at, down-right beamed and gushed at, really. I was with my mother, father and my darling aunts, when we found the rain taking a breath to reload, so we packed the car and headed to Vina. Vina a lovely spot north of Chico, and when you drive there you see my most cherished orchards of walnut trees reaching towards the sky with gnarled limbs, as though stretching from ancient slumber. We picnicked on the Sacramento river, guacamole sandwiches and smiles, then landed in Vina. As you drive up, you see the most beautiful building residing beside rows of grapes and discarded tractors that could make even the most vacant person come alive. The story goes that stones were brought from a destroyed church in Spain to San Francisco. The Abbot of Vina, after twenty years, convinced the stones' owners and the city that he could do marvelous things with them and erect an exact replica of the edifice the once flourished in Spain. And so, construction began, and you can now see the Chapter House portion of the grander group of buildings to come. The Chapter House is where the monks gather to read one chapter a day from the Benedictine Bible. As we walked in this building, open and airy enough to exhale on angels, I knew that I need a juicier kind of beauty than the city to please me. I have to say that the subsequent wine tasting also reminded me that the soil, the life and space of the country, is what lines my truest of hearts and that softens the points of my soul.


But for now, being young and indulgent as I am, I think I will stay in the city. I will shelf my dreams of simple living and growing everything I eat in order to rejoice in musical triumphs, be part of a myriad of communities, and have spontaneity be served in grand proportions with my daily recommended cultural feasting.

So, has the city mouse trampled the country mouse? Perhaps not completely. But, I must say, the city mouse does have a rhythm in her that is tempting to me now, oh so tempting. I remember though, that I do have faith, a strong faith, that I will return to my walnut trees one day....one day.