The Colors Abound

Well, I'm here, back in the 'big city' and all of that. It's nice, too, being in Austin with friends that were fast becoming mere images from old films than actual flesh beings from my year living in Texas. "This is where I live," I whisper to myself, "this is my home now."

After being welcomed at the airport by H, J, Z and N I felt like nothing could touch this chapter in my life. That's what it feels like, too, a new phase. Sure, some of the same characters reappear in my life (some have been imprinted in my own flesh for decades) but there is still that smell of spring, that smell of wandering blossoms and wild lavender in the air that makes me think something's up. What will it be? I don't know, and oh! how I rejoice in the unknowing!

I had a very anchoring conversation, while on my summer hiatus, at a lovely coffee shop, sitting outdoors sipping an iced coffee with my spiritual equivalent of the Dalai Lama. She can be tough, downright brutal, really, but it is her ferocity for truth that reminds me that it isn't just that I seek answers with her, but that I seek them in myself. I think I can say, unabashedly, that this is one of my greatest qualities. Even when I smother truth with pillows filled with naivety, I still keep it alive, even if it's barely breathing beneath my weight. This can also be an obnoxious quality to have, one that is unrelenting and forces you to see far uglier things than you wish. But, in the end, I do believe it is truth that will set you free (and so I use cliches when they are epically appropriate).

When I think of truth I like to picture a photograph in black and white. It looks lovely enough, demure and classy, but if you look closer you see there is one part of it that shines with color. There is that one bright hue that lashes out, drawing you into it, and you know that is where the beauty is, in the realness of what you are. It is a blue door in a dull landscape, telling you that this is where the juicy opening of your life stems.

I am hoping that this next year will be lined in truth. Like the inside of a plant cell, I will guard my walls with impenetrable honesty about who I am and what I want. I will not let people make me less than that. I will teach as best I can, while quietly unraveling all the ways I can improve (while hopefully gently avoiding any emotional masochism). That I can love with everything inside of me, knowing I will get hurt badly, scraped across highways of human relationships, because that is the absolute only way to find the sum of what I am capable of.

Austin can be a very tricky place to find truth. At times it feels as though you are plucking petals from a flower, asking truth if it loves you or loves you not. Everywhere you look there are those that are lying about who they are and what they want. Their clothes alone remind you how desperately people hope you can not see through them. Perhaps a vest, from 1976, can make them look unique and worthy of film class, or that a tattoo weaving up an ivory back can be a shield against people claiming you're uninteresting. But we know better. And I can feel that flurry of city bringing me in already; the drinking, the partying, the men........It is a very vibrant call and I will remind myself what the truth is inside of me, for that is the gravest stance of all, not knowing one's self well enough to have conviction. If you can not fight for yourself, how can you expect victory?

I will read my own words, in months to come, (or this very same afternoon) so that I can at least try and make them true. For, as I write, I know that it is I that am most worried about being those dishonest things than anyone else.

So here's to a fresh start. A big white glob of paint stuck on my life, reminding me I must actively search for the colors that make my heart delight.

Never Let It Go

There is a movie I watched recently, starring Kiera Knightley and the lovely Carey Mulligan. Both of these actresses have a propensity for being in period flicks that leave me feeling distant from modernity and yearning for simpler times. This movie was different, though, being more sci-fi than romantical. The plot is that cloning is an acceptable action, and that with cloning life expectancies have jumped to 120 and there are no longer people suffering from disease. This sounds lovely, in theory, but as always there is something tilted when science becomes too strong. In the sad case of the three main characters, they grew up as clones, born and breed to be the harvesting vestiges for other 'real' humans. Something Heather kept saying, throughout the movie, stuck with me. The three characters grow up together in a boarding school, not knowing they are clones until later. They are still taught schoolwork, but they know nothing of any other world existing outside the brick and ivy walls of their isolation.

Heather kept saying, "But why don't they fight for more?"

Before I even took a breath, my reaction was, "Because they know nothing else."

Why didn't they fight the people that put them on a cold, silver table and took their organs out one by one? Why didn't they build a boat and try to cross over to America, even if they died somewhere over the Atlantic? And why, dear God why, did they for a moment think that they were inferior to their originals?

But I didn't think those things; not at first. I saw the movie as a classic example of not yearning for the ocean when you have never seen any body of water larger than a pond. How can you want that vastness? How can you dream in neon when everything around you is an abused hue? The truth is, I don't know. I come from a time and place where dreaming is so prevalent that often reality is disappointing. Where, seeing the Eiffel Tower is more like the mind confirming the glossy pictures in the magazine than accepting the building as something profound. That is why I loved the movie. That is why I can't stop thinking about it. I want to know why those three didn't fight, why they didn't try to run away or selfishly take their own lives to at least be in control of their bodies. But the things they did find, the things that could not be halted or harnessed, were love and disappointment of things that could never be.

While walking through the redwoods on a recent trip to the California coast, I thought about this movie a lot. Sure, the scenery is beautiful, as England always is, and the acting is raw and worthy of award, but there was more to it. In fact, all I could think about, looking out at the great rippled trunks of red trees before me, was how amazingly steadfast the human spirit is. That there are those out there that sacrifice everything for love, for family, for pride. That in Yemen, child marriages are quietly acceptable, even when they result in death for a twelve-year-old girl from internal bleeding. That there could be women whose husbands are twenty years older than them, and they must live their lives within their beautiful internal palace of spirit with all the doors and windows locked around them. But they do it. They watch their fathers give them to violent old men and they stop crying, eventually, at that betrayal.

It makes one wonder if the human spirit is made to want certain things, programmed to crave freedom, to cherish family, and to spill into other humans with affection and love. Do these things come in each of us, like a complex micro-chip? Or, do we merely seek what is within reach, what our environment has exposed us to? I don't know. All I know is that in Thailand, they wanted white skin so bad they bleached their arms, legs and faces just to look a certain way. I also know that I will never want to stop learning about people, geography and the environment. That, though I have never been a mother, I want to one day hold my child in my arms and know that love of a mother and her darling baby. Could the movies and media have implanted all these desires in me? Perhaps.....but I think there is something more, something so deep within my spirit that no matter how much the outside world hammered upon my skull I would still want the things I do. Even if I had been born in 1476, I would have yearned for the Pacific Ocean, and I would want a room of my own for my writing (as blasphemous as that would have been). So what comes first, the desire or the delusion?

It seems that the overwhelming spirit of humans demands that they can never let their truest desires go. They can never let it go, and I'm afraid nor can I, which is why, just like the characters in the movie, I will always be lost in the magnificence of love and the darkness of wanting things I can't express and know should not have been born in me.

Country of Mine Country of Thine

I teased before, of someone getting left behind, and there was such a person. It started with the arrival of my mother into Seattle. We swept her from the airport and then her and I went to an incredible dinner with my friends from Austin, Andrew and Christina. Andrew's house (parent's house) in Seattle is located high above a lake, so that when you look out all you see is forested perfection and the moving water below. We had the most delicious, and vegetarian-friendly, meal that ended with coconut-cream pie and left me wondering how mothers manage to bake homemade pies on top of everything else they do.

The morning after this spectacular dinner, we were on our way to Vancouver to cross the border and, just to pass the time, I opened my mom's passport. I was mostly trying to snoop at her international stamps, but unfortunately I stumbled upon an expiration date. It appeared that her ability to leave the US and return had rotted. So we left her in Washington, cruel as it sounds, in a larger effort to go pick up my grandparents in Vancouver.

Vancouver is a unique place. There is water and hills surrounding it in almost a San Francisco-esque manner. The buildings are tall and new and covered with so many windows they almost looks like sparking scales on a standing beast. I was, at first, upset that our hotel was so far away from the town center, where I was set to meet a dear friend, but found that taking the Sky Train into downtown brought back all the delicious freedom and unknowns of international travel. It was almost exactly the same as the Sky Train in Bangkok, except that when I got off, the air was not thick and sticky, smelling of various potent gases and banana peels. No, Vancouver is extremely clean and the people are outside biking, walking and laughing over over-priced pints near the water. As I walked down to the boat docks where the little water planes parked, I realized that I hadn't really been alone like that in a long time. Sure, in Austin I do things alone all the time; I go to coffee shops religiously, I run errands, go for runs, etc., but there is something different about the solitude of walking with no agenda and no knowledge of where you are or what will come. I find myself missing that spontaneity, that dependence on myself, where I want to hold my own hand and skip, but for the realization that I may look rather like a demented Shirley Temple than the independent goddess we all wish to be. I had lots of those freeing moments when I traveled, particularly in Ireland and Prague. In Prague I was famous for being the 'recluse' in our program and wandering to the castle and apple orchards at random intervals of time. Ireland found me in its countryside, wide-eyed and dragging a suitcase up monstrous hills where the sheep looked at me as though I were a complete arse. I even sat alone in a pub, beer touching my lips just to keep my busy, and I found I could do almost anything.

I think we all worry about dependence. That, we will meet someone and lose a bit of ourselves. Or, perhaps we have been with someone a while and worry that it has already happened. We may ask ourselves, when did I start liking college football? Why do I get excited about a hot dog stuffed with cheese when I am a vegetarian? I fear the answer is far too brutal to admit to ourselves. We fall into patterns, we like the feel of the crook of a neck while we sleep, and instead of holding our own hand we let our little palms fall into the stronger hand of a man. I wish I could decide if this loss of independence is normal, good even, or if it is the end of the brightest parts of yourself. Perhaps it is a little of both. I suppose it is natural to 'share' things with another and, to be honest, who would prefer to travel alone? As much as I adore walking across the Charles Bridge at sunset, I still wondered, what are these magnificent colors in the sky without someone there to reflect with you upon them? To smile and casually comment, "Look how the castle glows." I wish this weren't the case, but hey, Paris is kind of a bitchy city when you go there single. I don't need a chocolate croissant and white-lit streets romancing me when my hair is greasy and I just ate an entire Tolberone by myself in my hotel room.

Back to Vancouver......

So I met-up with Natalie. Natalie. My dearest Natalie! This will be our THIRD country to meet, starting with our initial introduction in Peru, a reunion for a festival in Edinburgh, Scotland, and then our Greek feast and clinking pints in Vancouver. I guess clinking pints has been a theme for us. We have drunk our way through many bars, houses and streets around this world and never thought twice about it because we had a greater backdrop of each other. She is never one I waste unworthy anecdotes or trivialities on. After our hugs and squeals when we meet, I must hear only the juiciest, most painful and real parts of her, as she does with me. We can talk for whole days at a time and never bat an eye. The only thing we dare pause for is food. And my, did we feast! We ordered all the food that you wish you could eat, and we dipped and dolloped and scarfed unabashedly. As we ate and talked outside as though only days had passed since we'd seen each other, not years, we watched a horse-sized dog lament and whimper for its owner, who happened to be about ten feet away and eating outside, too. The dog could see the owner but was nowhere near satisfied. It cried, the gut-wrenching tears of need, and was even as desperate as to stick its scone-sized paws on the railing to just get that much closer. Eventually they moved it so it was at their feet, and then it cried for joy, as though it were still devastated because the love was just too much to handle. Natalie and I both had our hands on our cheeks, watching every move, understanding perfectly how the dog felt, and wondering why it is acceptable only for canines to be so damned pathetic. When women, or men for that matter, behave as such, it is practically a convicted crime, worthy of a heart tar-and-feathering amongst your peers.

Moving on to the last parts of the visit. We went to a pub and I tried to compose myself when I saw the beer prices, $8 for a pint? Natalie informed me that that was normal, and that Vancouver was even more expensive than Dublin (which is really saying something). We eventually met a darling couple from Belfast, whose accents I knew immediately as being the same as many people I care dearly about. They were wonderful. Fresh to Vancouver, they had a newlywed kind of hope about them that almost floats off the corners of their smiles. We talked lots about travel, life, politics and, naturally, ended up on the topic of the United States. To be honest, I miss hearing peoples' views on my country. I also love to hear what comes out of my own mouth when I am put in a position to represent 310 million people. You often don't know the volume of your voice until you have the passion of speech. I won't go into details about my political or social beliefs, but there is nothing better than really discussing the things that matter, especially with a beer :-)

And so, the next morning, I awoke in Natalie's apartment, fresh from snore-free sleep (my father has some vocal nasal blockage) and we wandered back to the Sky Train to get me back to my dad and grandparents. We still had to go back over the border and meet my stranded mother. As we walked, she showed me all the boarded up windows from the riots in Vancouver, after Boston won the Stanley Cup. The city was in the news for its violence, something it truly has no business being linked with, and was shamed for the destruction of their downtown. Well, the people of Canada were appalled and, being the rather radiant country they are, the boarded up walls where glass once stood were written over in colorful pens with pictures and words of hope and apologies. The best part, the most uplifting part, was that there was a pancake breakfast happening right in the middle of the city. They were blasting oldies music and dancing while flipping pancakes and serving them to the homeless and anyone who wanted a fluffy morning snack. They were making something right, the way humans can, after something awful has occurred. They were the very example of why, in so much war and evil that you find yourself still believing in people, because at our very core we delight in goodness and community.I find I have to believe that, seeing what I've seen. I wanted to weep, I truly did, when I saw the swaying of arms to "Jump, for your love" and the way everyone sort of blended together, in all their colors and skins, so that they were just one place of peace, one entity of rebirth and rebuilding, and I was unwaveringly grateful to be a part. I knew I was going to be late, so I eventually had to hug Nat goodbye and walk away from music (a tragedy, always), but I loved that Vancouver showed me something extraordinary, and I won't forget it for that. I urge you to see what the city does for you, if you every find yourself hopelessly north and looking to be surprised.

More next time about the final days of my trip in the rugged Olympic Peninsula (though I sit now, in Chico, enjoying the hot weather, cold water and iced coffee that sweats in my hands).

Feast of Beauty: Part One

Well, I have now survived almost a week straight of family, more specifically my father, and I am still feeling good about things. It is amazing how you learn to know your parents, as you get older, and they stop being these blurred whisps that guide your life but instead become focused and still. I enjoy this, though the child in me wants to leave them more squished and ethereal, but it is a blessing indeed to get to an age when you really see the people who raised you.

I will spare you all the details of certain grumpy evenings or blistered feet, but I will tell you briefly about my time on my trip thus far. My father and I started with a seven hour drive (originally thought to be a brief five by our navigator, whose blood relation I won't go into) and both marveled at the way Shasta jets out from sea-level and rises like a white-hooded spirit toward the sky. Surrounded by the almost overflowing blueness of Lake Shasta, the drive through the Cascades almost veered us off the road several times.

*Note:While frightening, swerving can sometimes be a strange applause for beauty.

After a few hours we made our way through the high-altitude desert and I noted that sometimes, a lack of trees can open up the sky, and though I prefer trees to surround, nurture and be with me at all times, I must admit there is an awe in wondrous lengths of unabashed earth. We stopped at a diner in an unmemorable town about 40 miles from Bend, thinking it would be charming and at the very least filling. The strange part was that it was owned and run entirely by a Chinese family who, after serving us fish 'n chips and fried chicken, proceeded to serve their own daughter (the hostess and fill-in waitress, naturally) a bowl of Chinese noodles. Perhaps that diner was the epitome of the American experience, or perhaps it is the breakdown of cultural autonomy, I haven't decided which.

The next morning we awoke in Bend, which, in case you were curious, is named because it is located where the river bends (how I do enjoy intentional names). The air was crisp and the sky was cloudless so naturally my dad and I gorged on eggs and toast and were on the search for a bike shop. We ended up renting mountain bikes and blazed through town and around for almost two hours. Bend is one of those towns that you wonder, why doesn't everyone in the world live here? The river is perfect and wild when you want it to be and then serene and glass-like by the park, where the bushes and flowers are so bright you wonder if someone secretly spilled oil paints around the city in the middle of the night. There are adorable local shops all around and everyone seems to be laughing and smiling as though they have hooks in their cheeks. But truly, the biking was great, and I even got the mountain-bike-thrill of going over rocks and zipping around semi-dangerous corners. It is a strange kind of liveliness that makes your blood sort of salsa through your body.

Naturally, I needed a beer afterward, so my dad and I went to a downtown brewery and feasted, or decimated, several plates of food including a very nervous colony of sweet potato fries who had no idea their lives were in such danger when we arrived. After lunch, we drove up and over another set of mountains and very questionable mountain roads where we watched with wide-eyes as the temperature dropped further and further down until it wavered around 58. Thankfully, by the time we reached Hood River it was a little warmer and we checked into to our hotel with a great view of the massive Colombia River Gorge and stood on the balcony, silent, just wondering how all that water can stay in one place when it is capable of such greatness.

Hood River is an adorable town, too. I guess my dad knows that I like these kinds of kitschy places where you want to squeeze their cheeks and eat caramel apples and such. The big thing there is to kite-surf and windsurf in the baltic waters of a river that secretly thinks it's the Atlantic Ocean. I suppose when you grow up around that kind of strength you want to be a part of it or something. I am happy to report that I also had some Oregon berry pie while in Hood River and loved every morsel, the way people should, where the granules of sugar hover on your tongue. Enough about the food....why must I always focus on that? Anyways, the 'big hike' that has been one of the benchmarks of our trip was scheduled for the next morning. Per usual, we tanked up at breakfast and then waited for the rain to pass.....it didn't. We went anyway, though, on one of the most incredible hikes of my life. It was about 12.5 miles and had some of the most incredible waterfalls I've ever experienced, ending of course with Tunnel Falls, which is nothing short of sensational.

My favorite part of hiking with my dad is that he tells me colorful stories. He talks about what it was like when he enlisted and stood in great lines waiting to be punctured by a nurse and watching grown men fall like dominoes from whatever poison they injected in their arms. He tells me about his backpacking trips from years ago, when a skunk let loose on a tent, or when he played wiffle ball with his buddies and drank vodka and gatorade. My father, the accountant, did all of these amazing, crazy things! These are the kinds of anecdotal gems he won't divulge in real-time living. I don't know what it is, but he is like a punctured milk carton on hikes, he just spills all the good stuff right on out. But there is a a quiet that exists between us that is also important. He doesn't bother me (too much, except for the odd geography/history/horticultural comment) when we are trudging through the awesome greenery. I get to have peace. I need that smallness that comes with hiking and nature, being so inconsequential in a thriving ecosystem while at the same time never feeling so connected in your life. I am grateful that I can feel this, next to my father, and know he's experiencing the exact same thing.

A highlight of hilariousness on this hike was seeing my dad try and put on his absolutely abused poncho. I swear a that thing spent the night with a Bobcat or something. Hearing him curse while putting his pale arms through the hole where his head should go is an image I will gleefully carry with me for some time. Also, bless his heart, his limping from the car to the hotel in Portland just an hour after our trek was certainly worth a few blisters and battered toenails that I was experiencing.

I will end by saying this: I have been utterly spoiled to see these pockets of pure beauty that exist in this country, and even luckier to share it with a great man like my father. I am forever amazed by just how vast our land is, how diverse and how awe-struck I continue to be by the landscape.

I suppose that is all for now....stay tuned for Vancouver and Olympic National Park.....and TEASER ALERT: we have to leave someone in my family behind in the border crossing.

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.