The truth of the matter is, I want to blog. But my MacAir has been on life support for two months and I can’t stand finding my way around Michael’s PC where only a smattering of my files live on the desktop. Fingers crossed that the geniuses at the Apple store can sort things out this week and I’ll be up and at ‘er soon.

This week Madeleine and I baked a big batch of ooey gooey oatmeal chocolate chip cookies for our neighbours and grandma and grandpa, who are coming to visit at the end of this week. While the rain continued to pour outside, we decided to also whip up a batch of play dough. Turns out it’s easy as pie. Easier, actually.

Play dough (recipe from Tracy at Bowen Island Family Place)

Mix: 2 cups flour, 1/2 cup salt and 2 teaspoons cream of tartar

Mix: 1 1/2 cups boiling water, food colouring and 2 tablespoons oil

Mix liquid into dry ingredients. Microwave on high for 30 seconds, let cool for 1 minute and then knead. Repeat microwave and knead. Keep in a plastic bag when not in use.

Red and yellow make orange. Madeleine’s pick. Her favourite thing is making playdough snowmen. Good thing too. We’ll have nothing but snow in a few short months…

Before bras and boys and periods
Oh the summers we would have,
Running everywhere with our shirts torn off,
Making all the neighbors mad
I was gangly like a corn stalk
With a monster list of plans,
And that was my life before seventeen
And I spun my wheels in the sand

But then the boys could suddenly wound you
Till you bled without trying
And the girls could suddenly wound you
Cause were experts at lying
And you found out how to act hard and
the secret spots to cry in and
my hips grew in
In the year of the seven deadly sins

These clever things that we learn when we get older
When every wicked thing we do can make us bolder
How to steer a conversation, how to swallow our libations
Till even warmer smiles can make us colder
So I drove south like a ghost into Georgia
Singing “Lonely One” with Mr. Gibbons, feeling
Always disappointed, though the word has been anointed,
My little faith feels always cut to ribbons

Cause the boys will suddenly wound you
Till you bleed without trying
And the girls will suddenly wound you
Cause they’re experts at lying
And you found out how to act hard and
the secret spots to cry in and
my lips begin
another year of the seven deadly sins

But today is going to be different
You can stop the leak when you know where the hole is
Cause a thousand yesterdays have kicked the crap right out of me
But today I’m going to throw a few of my own punches
I’m gonna drink from the living water
I’m gonna eat from the broken bread
And the day I finally get into heaven
Ends the war between my heart and my head

Cause the boys will suddenly sing
Till you see without trying
And the girls will suddenly bring
A little mercy for the dying
And you’ll find out how to give love
the secret spots to shine in and
my lips will grin and say goodbye
to the seven deadly sins
say goodbye to the seven deadly sins
the seven deadly sins

- Miranda Stone, Seven Deadly Sins. LISTEN HERE. Beauty. Beauty. beauty.

“Either we are at the mercy of life, or in the hands of God.”

- Dan MacDonald, Grace Toronto

I am looking forward to the launch of Kate Payne’s new book THE HIP GIRL’S GUIDE TO HOMEMAKING.

Monday, September 19, 7 – 9pm. The Drake Hotel, 1150 Queen Street West, Toronto. Hosted by Type Books.

In her own words:

“I’m a grant writer, half-assed domestic goddess, occasional nanny, after-hours poet, committed doodler, trash collector, big-time procrastinator, tea and toast and jam obsessed Austinite. I come from Swedish, German, Irish and British great grandparents. I collect old typewriters; some of them still work. I studied anthropology and sociology in the Sonoran Desert. I worked on an organic tomato farm once. I paper mached gigantic thumbs once, too.”

This is the kind of domestic I can get behind.

‎”I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable, beautiful and afraid of nothing, as though I had wings.”

- Mary Oliver (Starlings in Winter,) by way of Jocelyn Durston. Read my profile on Jocelyn, and her Farm for a Year adventures, here.

I met her in a farm house. Followed her through the wildflowers. Past the cross in yard — her husband’s grave I’d later learn — up the wooden stairs and through the doorway where the scent of fresh-baked bread embraced us like a hymn. We settled in the sitting room. Books, blankets, pottery — blazing raku, fresh from the kiln — scattering the windowsills, the shelves. I let my fifteen-year-old shoulders fall from the weight of holding my city-self together and kicked off my shoes.

We began to talk. She passed me the journal where here words lay stained on page. Grain. Like the Albertan butter fields clamouring all around us outside. Here, miles from Hythe, the closest one-street town, my adolescent heart held court with a real live poet.

Her name was Dymphny. A name that sings. The daughter of a potter friend of my mother’s we were visiting the summer between grades nine and ten. For 1,200 kilometres my brother and I enjoyed a private symphony from the upholstered back bench, a yellow sport walkman for each.

A steady stream of Frente!, Counting Crows, and Cranberries flooding my eardrums.

“Oh, my life is changing everyday… In every possible way”

Knees tucked uncomfortably against the grey minivan door, eyes set on foreign fields, my pen scratching instinctively along the lines of a dollar store notebook. Angst-filled love poems, prairie snapshots, fits of inspiration, filling the page.

And here, Dymphny. Her poem, a confession. Painting the starkness of afterbirth. The coolness of sheets. The blue of her dressing gown. The child aborted.

Without naming regret, painting the avalanche of devastation on a white paper page.

I took a copy of the work, creating next year’s final art project around an image of a child in womb — a black and white sketch — surrounded by a flurry of colour, children of all colours and ages flourishing around this loss child. I carefully copied Dymphny’s words on the back of the poster board. I kept that collage until well in my twenties.

Her words that day, words from a young widow, words from an artist child:

“Never stop writing.”

And the carry of her voice has never dwindled.

And two weeks ago the Literary Review of Canada notified me that my poem, days end, will be published in a future issue of this distinguished Canadian journal.

And today I am reminded that dreams can come true.

“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”

- Robert Frost

The days with a new son are blurring into one.

First, his birth: marvel, a rush, completely bowled me over. His face, an orbit, encircling us with new love. Then, his sister’s midnight scare. Stopped breath. Gasping: “Mommy, help. Mommy, help me.” Me a mess of tears, fears. Nursing to health a child drenched in sweat, her airway betraying her, mere days after her brother’s birth. Me, sitting on the couch nursing newborn as my husband braves the ambulance ride with our first baby. Sobbing for what might have happened had I not heard her: had the air conditioners been on, the doors closed, muffling her cries from bedroom next door. I’d woken to nurse babe and heard the stirrings I’d otherwise miss. This is our miracle.

Now, two children roaming these wooden floors, healthy. And me, sent to rest week after week. The bleeding keeps coming. Cabbing to emergency, waiting in rooms with a woman swallowing needles, man cursing at children. Full moon, they said. Husband at home laying toddler to bed, feeding infant by bottle. Slowly now, it is subsiding, but my world circles round a room, a house, a three block radius. I can’t walk further for the pain of it. And I am tears and laughter and more tears as I struggle to find moments with my sweet girl, my devoted man. And I hold a babe in arm all the day.

And today we had a party in our front yard to celebrate two years of life, of memory, of firsts — steps in the Bowen House, ice cream cone with Grandma, words, airplane rides — and over plates of cupcakes and gummy bears spilling on grass, the pain of it all slips away.

____________________

Joining with Emily, at imperfect prose, today.

______________________

I feel I should explain exactly what happened. Madeleine caught croup and a spiked fever in the middle of the night had her gasping for air. That was the cause of the 9-1-1 call and our midnight scare. I had complications with bleeding after Thomas’ birth and had to be on bed rest for a couple of weeks. In the end everything checked out and I didn’t need any surgery, thank God.

“Here’s a toast to everyone on this earth who’s ever been eager-no, desparate- for even the smallest sign that there exists something finer, larger, and more miraculous about our inner selves than we could ever have supposed. Here’s to all of us reaching out our hands to other people everywhere, reaching out to pull them from the iceburgs on which they stand frozen, to pull them through the burning hoops of fire that frighten them, to help them climb over the brick walls that block their paths. Let us reach out to shock and captivate people into new ways of thinking.”

- Douglas Coupland, Player One (via my friend Kathryn, thanks Kat!)

Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”

— Mary Oliver (by way of Sabrina Ward Harrison ♥)