Spring is always a vital time for birds around these parts. 

We are smack-dab in the middle of the migratory flyway and  even if you’re not a bird watcher, you can’t miss the songs and glimpses of vireos and orioles, blackbirds and grosbeaks, and many, many others.

This year, we’ve been more attuned than usual to the birds building nests in our workshop, stopping to rest on our roof and singing in our trees because we’ve done so much of our living outdoors. (It has been a lovely repercussion of having no inside kitchen, living room or dining room to speak of.)

So I dug up this old poem — it looks like I wrote it in 1994 or 5 — and thought I’d share it with you.

Happy Friday, friends…

Perch to Perch

Perch to perch, I cling to what peace one twig holds. – Tu Fu

A friend comes to visit with binoculars and bird books,

checkmarks by hundreds of varieties he’s seen

in Colorado, Appalachia, the Baja Peninsula,

Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi’s sand and sky, and to his joy

logs seven new species in my back yard.

I join him in the Adirondack chairs that were a wedding gift,

pointing at wagging, trilling trees for him to name since nothing’s

new or curious inside the house — my love and I nit-picking,

circling in a many-dayed quarrel, each collecting small bits of refuge

and defense, only opening our mouths to speak in different languages.

Carolina chickadee, my bird friend says, and Carolina wren.

Inca doves flock a tree like velvet, and down by the water

coots wade, lesser scaup swim. The titmouse sings

and even prattling grackles sound celebratory, 
auspicious to my shut eyes, delighted

to have found enough sustenance at our feet to stay awhile.

I really want to see a widgeon, says bird watcher, binoculars

trained on a trunk at the stream’s edge, as if the desired and elusive 
might suddenly land. And though I don’t think omens work 
that way, I open my eyes again. Looking. Hopeful.

— Liz Garton Scanlon

Last night we got walloped by storms.

We were all snuggled still in our beds when the wind began to roar like a freight train and the hail (did I mention there was hail) descended upon us like apples in an angry orchard. 

The dog whimpered. 

The cats whimpered. 

The kids… well, the kids slept through it. 
Seriously. 

So, my husband and I felt it was our duty to do their worrying for them. 

We worried about trees falling.
They didn’t, although hubby spent a good chunk of this evening on the roof with a chainsaw, dispatching of various limbs.

We worried about the windows blowing in.
They didn’t, although all the old ones leaked.

We worried about our makeshift outdoor kitchen coming crashing down around us.
It didn’t, although a number of boxes of tea (including my most favorite licorice) have devolved into soggy matter.

We worried about the power going out.
It did.

And then, this morning, things dried out a bit and the lights came on and neighbors pulled branches out of the street.
We got the kids to school. 
The pets curled up on various beds to sleep, a little muddy but none the worse for wear.
It was over.

Meanwhile, the aftershocks of the quake in China and the cyclone in Myanmar continue to reverberate.

Wildlife has been decimated, villages destroyed, infrastructures fractured.
Everyone is short on food, shelter and clean water. 
Many, many (tens of thousands, and probably well over 100,000) people are dead.

So much for our worries. 
It’s all a matter of perspective.

So today, we sit here soggy but safe, thinking about Myanmar and China and all the many places in the world in need of milk, medicines and a little hope. 

Do what you can, friends.

Be the change…

Mercy Corps

The American Red Cross 

Tzu Chi Foundation

A couple of folk have dropped me a line asking for an update on our remodel. 
So, here goes…

The good news: We have walls, windows and lights. 

The bad news: They are, apparently, boring. The walls, in particular.

I learned this last weekend in the paint aisle of the Home Depot, which is where our youngest had her most dramatic, all-out meltdown since toddlerhood. Seriously. People were skirting us like we might be contagious. I thought for a bit that the store manager might put up crime-scene tape. It was ugly.

It turns out that the paint color we chose (which is a very, very, very pale yellow — although she would insist that it is white) is horribly, appallingly, shockingly boring.

Why even DO the remodel?

Direct quotes, friends. Direct quotes.

Now can I just say in my defense that we have, currently, one turquoise bedroom, one red bedroom and one pale purple bathroom?
And that the new kitchen floor will be green and orange?
Green and orange!
I mean, people, do these facts count for nothing???

So, here we are in the paint aisle of the Home Depot and she is sobbing and thrusting paint chips toward me.
Paint chips of midnight blue, neon green, fuschia, rose.
I tell her that I love how much she cares about our house, and that I admire her bold sense of color.
I explain that these new walls will be serving as the backdrop to all the color we’ll add to the space.
I ask her if she will just have faith in me.

She’s having none of it.

She does not have faith.

She believes we’ve made a horrific mistake.

Which is how it is sometimes when you’re seven and somebody else is pretty much in charge of everything. 
Not just what’s for breakfast, but what color is in the air as you eat your breakfast. 

That kind of breaks my heart, but honestly — I don’t want my walls to be midnight blue. 
I really don’t.

So instead I sit here thinking of all the myriad ways I try to make space for her and for her voice.
I think of the stacks of paper and bins of pencils and pens on her desk. 
I think of the things she does choose for herself — from what to wear to what to play.
I think of the way we move around our dinner table, round-robin style, for each person’s take on their day.

Still, it’s got to be hard to be 7 and have parents who are so old & obtuse that they’d choose boring paint for the walls. 
It’s got to be hard.

And I’m thinking that my job, as a mom and as a writer, is to remember that.

Last night, I was invited to an amazing gathering of women, to celebrate, reflect upon and act out the many faces of mothering.

The event, called Mothering: The Act Of, was the brainchild of two Austin mamas with a background in interactive theater. It was an evening of altar building and embroidery* and cocktails and potlucking and spoken word and blogging.

Blogging?

Yep. 
We launched a Mothering: The Act Of blog.

There was a laptop station where people could sit and type.
And the blog was projected on the wall so when people added posts, they’d pop up as part of this dynamic, intimate, but virtual conversation. Sometimes I just love technology.

So now I want to invite you to jump on over and read some of the bits from last night but also add your own thoughts in the comments section of the top post. We’ll then pull the text out and give your stories posts of their own so the conversation can keep on growing…

* But before you go, I just have to tell you about the embroidery element of the evening. Picture a circle of chairs… a wide swath of soft organic cotton… numerous emroidery hoops. Picture each woman in each chair tracing her hand onto the fabric and then stitching the lines with her colored floss. Now, today, imagine all those hands being cut down into small, sweet circles and stitched onto soft flannel backing and given to mothers in the neonatal intensive care unit at the hospital. The mothers, then, can put the fabric against their skin until it holds the particular scent that will speak to their babies at the most sensual level. And that’s what happens next. The soft sweet circles are put in with the tiny babies as their lungs mature and their skin and bones and eyes strengthen and they grow. Don’t you just love that?

First off, thank you ever so much to my friends Shannon Lowry and Kathie Sever at their collaborative craft blog — Back and Forth Project.

Today, their Friend Friday post features our Crown Sonnet project!

You can find a re-telling of our story right up top, and then stay to explore the back posts. Back and Forth is a really exciting concept, borne of a children’s book project but exploded open into discussions of creativity and connecting with one another via art.

Thanks, gals, for including us!

Second, I just have to try to describe to you what it was like seeing my 3rd grader and her buddies performing scenes from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night yesterday. Let’s start with the presumption that there’s no way I can do it justice. 
I’m serious, folks. 

Here’s the deal.

At our school, the 3rd and 4th graders are lucky enough to study Shakespeare through performance, thanks to an amazing outreach program. (They’ve recently been working on Comedy of Errors and even I have some of Egeon’s lines memorized.)

The man who runs the program happens to be a dad at our school, so this year he developed an afterschool master class for those kids who just couldn’t get enough of fair William. Count my tall one among those. 

At first it was hard. Really hard.
“I love acting, but not memorizing,” my girl said.
The language was, well, rather foreign. 

But then, in spite of themselves, they started absorbing it. The whole lot of ’em.
And the results were stunning. 

As we gathered in the library yesterday afternoon, the kids donned their wigs and vests and velvet caps.
And then, began.

They knew all of their lines.
All. Of. Them.

And the ones that were supposed to be funny?
They were hilarious!

The ones that were meant to be sarcastic?
They were biting!

The ones that were written to be beautiful?
They were staggering!

I didn’t look to see but I’m pretty certain I’m not the only one who cried.

There was something so moving about our 9- & 10- & 11-year-olds holding this poetry in their mouths and in their bodies.
Actually, more than just hold. 
They held and truly felt. 
They embodied.

Today, I’m awash in gratitude for the UT Shakespeare at Winedale program, and their teacher — the beloved Mr. S. And for our school librarian and, oh heck, William Shakespeare for starting the whole darn thing…

So here, for your reading pleasure, is one of my daughter’s bits as Viola from Twelfth Night. 
Read it aloud, just for kicks:

Most radiant, exquisite, and unmatchable beauty,–I pray you,  
tell me if this be the lady of the house, for I never saw her: I
would be loath to cast away my speech; for, besides that it is
excellently well penned, I have taken great pains to con it. Good
beauties, let me sustain no scorn; I am very comptible, even to
the least sinister usage.

I’ve been thinking lately about the mysterious marriage of craft and intuition. 
Both for myself and for my students.

I think writing without intuition lacks heart, but writing without craft lacks an open door for the reader — no matter how magically intuitive the idea is. You need both, the way a firefighter needs a hose and a heat-proof suit. The problem is, the one that can be taught and practiced doesn’t seem to compel the budding writer as much as the other. 

Most folks would love to be visited by the muse — dressed in diaphanous gowns — and left with a story that just unwound itself on the page. Who wouldn’t? 

I have to say that the books I’ve sold have all been born of very gut-level, semiconscious tugs that took hold of me like freight trains in a melodrama. 

But. 

It was the next many weeks — spent taking words out, putting them back, cutting here, tightening there, reading aloud, reading aloud, reading aloud — that really took those tugs and turned them into books. 

And I wore leggings and old t-shirts. Not diaphanous gowns.

Still, I have a hunch that it’s the exhilarating taste of those tugs — like some sort of sublime confection — that keeps us nose to the grindstone, craft-wise. It’s not really that commas are that much fun (although somedays I cannot stop with the tweaking) but that we think we may be on the verge of true passion, any day, at any moment. That can sustain a person for a good long while. 

I know, because I’ve been in deadline and revision mode lately and it’s been kind of like cleaning the bathtub. 
Hard, repetitive work.
The occasional glint of futility.
Unappreciated.

But I kind of liked it anyway. 
Because maybe I’m on the verge. 
Right?

Meanwhile, I have students — some of whom say they’ve been waiting forever. (It really feels that way sometimes…)
Or that they’ve been visited for years, but as soon as they were asked  to write for a class, on deadline, it all dried up.
Or that their ideas can’t find their way to paper.

Tomorrow night is our last class and I want them to leave feeling inspired.
With the energy to carry on.

I want just a little bit of sweet confection to offer them….

Remember a few years back when the idea people came up with the Do Not Call Registry?

Remember the power and comfort in knowing that, once you said, “Please put me on your Do Not Call List,” they were never, ever supposed to call you again? 

Remember the peace and quiet?

And then it turned out that it didn’t apply to Clean Water Action or the Police Officers fund or Hillary or Barack.
Not that I’ve got anything against of those folk, but I’ve gotta say — a dinnertime call from any of them annoys me as much as one from the Home Shopping Network would. 

I shouldn’t complain. 

Our primary is long over, and I know it’s ya’ll in Indiana and North Carolina who have had to turn your ringers off recently. 
But honestly, these calls do not inspire love and loyalty in me. 
I understand the need to raise consciousness and money, and I know that marketing is a tricky balancing act — saturate but don’t irritate. 
Which is, apparently, easier said than done.

Last night I got a call at 8:05 from a city council campaign office.
8:05.
Hello?? Bathtime? Bedtime? Book time?
“Can our candidate count on your support?” the woman on the other end of the line asked me.
“No,” I said. “Nobody who calls me at 8:05 in the evening can count on my support.”

Which, granted, is a little sour. But can’t they reach out without reaching in?

This weekend, one of my multitudinous cousins was in town.
Technically, he’s my dad’s cousin but in my family we tend not to discern between 1st, 2nd or 3rd, 
once or twice removed.
There are too many of us and we all like each other too much for it to matter. 

He was here for a big Masters swimming event at UT, and we went to cheer him on.
Our daughters came armed with handmade signs and lots of spirit.
Tall one took one whiff of the air and uttered in ecstasy, “I love the smell of pool…”

One of the events Dan was swimming was a 500 meter freestyle. 
That’s 20 lengths, folks. At race pace. It makes you gasp for air just thinking about it.
So, needless to say, a guy’s got enough to do just pulling himself down the pool and back again without drowning.
Keeping track of mileage is too much to ask.

Which is where I came in. 
I got to be his official ‘lap counter’.
Standing at one end of the pool, I was given a long paddle with numbers at the bottom. I dipped it in each time he came my way so that he’d know how far he’d come and how much further he’d have to go. In between, he’d pound two more lengths at mock speed while I scurried to change the numbers on the paddle. I may not be going to Beijing this summer, but I got my own little smell of victory right then, I assure you.

But here’s the thing that really got to me.
Even more than my own moment in the sun, or Dan’s goal-shattering swim.
All these zillions of ordinary folks, swimming their hearts out, for fun.
For fun. 

I mean, nobody requires that they take their vacation days in Texas at a swim meet or that they let their hair turn slightly green in the chlorine or that they wake up everyday at 5am to swim laps. They do it on their own, for health and sanity and competition and comraderie and passion and, well, for fun. 

Some hold world records, others are cancer survivors. 
Some are fast, others are slow. 
Some are 26, others are 86. Seriously. 
And there they all are, in their Speedos and goggles, with their Gatorade and Gu, stickin’ to it and having fun.

I cannot be in the presence of that sort of people — whether they’re swimming or singing or writing or campaigning or dancing or teaching — without being brought to my knees. In admiration. And gratitude. For the entertainment and the inspiration. I may be a card-carrying sap, but I came home with a whole new oomph for the stuff that makes life better than good…

What’re you up to?

Lately, my tall one has been waking nightly, with growing pains and hunger.
Her jeans all barely skim her ankles and she’d eat two lunches if I’d pack them.

Meanwhile, here I sit with a crick in my neck and a slight headache.
I love my morning run but sometimes feel as if I’ll need a nap when I finish.

We are two bodies in a world full of bodies — brand new and aging, strong and tired, open and closed.

We are two bodies capable of, if you can believe it, breath. 
And when it comes right down to it, what else is there?

I’ve found a body poem by an old grad school friend of mine, the imaginative and luminescent Marlys West. 

Read. Hear. Sit. Breathe.
With your singular body on this singular Friday.

Namaste….

Here Is the Church

They had never spoken
to me before, save one, once, when a basketball jammed
its knuckle and for three days straight that finger

shouted and wept,
wept and shouted,
fat and purple, full of anger. This night

was different. I heard a tiny song from
deep inside the neat, white bones, unlike any melody I knew
and not unpleasant. 

Yesterday I sat in on a roundtable designed to get at the secrets behind excellent teaching.

The talk originated with a really thoughtful dean, who does things like this. 

(Peer reviews, retreats, roundtables.) 

Imagine — asking teachers what makes for excellent teaching.
I love it when notions are totally sensible and radical at the same time.

So here’s what struck me: 

How many smart, articulate, imaginative and totally devoted teachers there are — working everyday to make learning accessible, engaging, relevant and, ultimately, truly possible. 

It’s enough to make me want to cry. Or cheer. 
And it’s for sure enough to make me want to do an ever-more impassioned job myself.

I came home with a long list of ways my colleagues bring learning to life in their classrooms — 
using games and patience and examples and compassion. 

We talked about kids just out of high school, new immigrants, pregnant moms, and students overwhelmed by everyday roadblocks. And story after story was recounted of actually reaching these students. Of accomplishment. Empowerment. Humour. Joy.

And this was one intimate little group at one little community college.

Makes a gal kind of hopeful, y’know what I mean?