Dear 2903 Davidson,

No one needs twelve rosebushes. No one. You bled heat in the winter and in the summer you clutched it so tight that it felt as though you were built on a vent of Hell, itself. Your windows were stupid and in all the wrong places. Your backyard was eternally unruly and unmanageable, and I think that secretly you laughed at our pitiful efforts to tame it.

I held a memorial for my father within a month of moving in. I placed my mother’s ashes next to his 9 months before moving out. In between my children grew mostly up, we marked their progress on your kitchen wall. I grew mostly up there, too, my progress was marked in subtler ways – an endless number of sleepless nights, of watching the world dawn morning through your kitchen window, of occasional refuge taken in your back bathroom. Sometimes it was the only place in the world where I felt safe.

We went from homeschoolers to public schoolers to unschoolers, mostly in your dining room. The Easter Bunny, Santa Claus and even the Great Pumpkin were frequent visitors, until they weren’t anymore. I spent one summer sending the kids out front to play so I could sneak cigarettes around back. Every May people would stop their cars out front to take pictures of the clematis vine. (It was fucking gorgeous.)

Nicky got a fork stuck in the bottom of his foot once, while carrying his dinner dish from living room to kitchen. (“Stick a fork in it, it’s done” will never have quite the same meaning.) Khy grew up across the street from his best friend. Stormy never wanted to live there in the first place, but she eventually came around.

They all three gave up their training wheels, eventually.

Your deck was the perfect place for that above ground pool we finally bought, and in that way we made our truce, you and I, over the summer heat. I miss your soft carpet. I miss the Lazy Susan style cupboard for canned goods. I miss the black linoleum in the kitchen that never, ever looked dirty. I miss the smell and feel of home.

But I won’t miss the rosebushes. Not at all.

All right, all right. A few eagle-eyed commenters that don’t like to play by the rules have revealed the true meaning behind the clues. And while traveling to exotic locales, zombie hunting and selling hippie children to fund world saving endeavors were all very, very close, the truth is that we’re moving across town. (Kind of anticlimactic, huh? Wait ’til I break the news that I don’t actually have the right to give away Paris.)

Well, it might not be world ending or life changing for you, but for me it’s been a pretty big dealio. Our current house and I have had our disagreements from time to time, but this has been my kids’ childhood home. They were 6, 4 and 2 when we moved in here, and now they’re 15, 12 and 10. Sure, they still have some growing to do, but no one is toddling about anymore. This was it, this was the place where all that happened. Lost teeth, bicycles without training wheels, summers swimming in the backyard, scribbles on the walls when Mom wasn’t looking, birthday parties and memorials, too – we did eight years of growing here. Leaving it behind is breaking my heart a little.

I’m going to continue to be a bit sketchy with the details because (for a blogger) I know how to be discreet, but you can’t really know how this all came down inside my head without knowing that less than a month ago moving was the farthest thing from our minds. This was an entirely unexpected turn of events, and also, I need to add, not due to anything we’ve done. We are rockstar renters. You wish you could be as good as we are at renting. But circumstances did what they sometimes do, and we had to make some changes accordingly. And rather quickly.

Luckily we did, however, almost immediately stumble across something that feels like a perfect fit. In fact, the new place has even more living space than our current house does, and in an arrangement that feels like it will suit our needs much better. Like anything, there are trade-offs, but luckily it seems like everything we’re having to give up are things that I didn’t really like having all that much anyway.

Once we have the keys and I can take some real pictures I’m sure I’ll be talking new apartment here very soon. Right now, though, all is chaos and boxes. I’m actually crazy proud of us and what we’ve accomplished around here in such a short period of time. Even in a rush we’ve sorted through everything – and that is 2 car garage worth of everything, tucked away by a husband whose super power is getting a ton of things to fit in places where, by all that is natural and holy, they should never be able to fit.

This is the corner where everything that we’re taking with us goes.

This is the corner for all the things that will go into the garage sale.

It’s been difficult, though, the worst by far being the several nights I spent sorting through boxes of things that belonged to my father. Things we tucked away 8 years ago in anticipation of a day when I would feel strong enough to deal with them. The irony is that a year ago I could’ve sorted through all of it pretty easily, but now that Mom is gone, too, it’s all become poignant and painful and terribly heavy again. The love letters and greeting cards were hard to take, of course (Dad, hoarder at heart, kept every single greeting card he ever received. I, child of a hoarder, was compelled to sort through every last one.) But probably the most painful of all was a completely random post-it note pad. Half-used, the top-most sheet had a note in my mother’s handwriting promising a quick return from a jaunt to Safeway. Something about just how ordinary everyday it is seems to be what makes it so sad.

This is another thing that marks this house, our time here has been book-ended by deaths. Dad died two months after we moved in, Mom died 10 months before we left. Our new apartment will be the first place I’ll live that neither will see.

I’m 38 years old today, and continuing to do the best that I can. I think this fresh start will be a beautiful thing, and I’m excited to begin the next stage of my life. But, like any change that’s worthwhile, it hurts like hell, too. I would probably curl up in a little ball if I thought about it too much, but right now? I have too much packing to do.

“Do your work for six years; but in the seventh, go into solitude or among strangers, so that the memory of your friends does not hinder you from being what you have become.”
- Leo Szilard

2009 was a time of deep reflection for me, a year of turning inward. My winter blues lasted a very long time, but when I emerged from it I was looking at the seven year anniversary of my Dad’s death, planting flowers and feeling a deeper peace with that loss than I’d ever known. Which was lucky timing, because after a very sunny and enlightening summer with my husband and kids that included an amazing 37th birthday, a new understanding of family, and an even deeper commitment to our radical unschooling path and pursuing a better relationship with my children, my mother died. Beginning the work of coming to terms with that and struggling through those first months of grief took up the rest of the year pretty completely.

January

November Was White, December Was Grey – Say Hi to Your Mom
“Well, someday soon
When the spring brings the sun
I’ll finally sleep, I’ll finally
feel better when the winter’s gone”

Your Ex-Lover is Dead – Stars
“I’m not sorry I met you
I’m not sorry it’s over
I’m not sorry there’s nothing to say”

February

Après Moi – Regina Spektor
“Fevral dostat chernil i plakat,
Pisat o Fevrale navzryd,
Poka grohochushaya slyakot
Vesnoyu chornoyu gorit.”

From a poem by Boris Pasternak, a rough translation:
“February. Get ink, shed tears.
Write of it, sob your heart out, sing,
While torrential slush that roars
Burns in the blackness of the spring.”

March

Dear Prudence – The Beatles
“Dear Prudence open up your eyes
Dear Prudence see the sunny skies”

April

Daddy’s Gone – Glasvegas
“I won’t be the lonely one
sitting on my own and sad
forget your Da, he’s gone”

The Big Bang Theory – Barenaked Ladies
“Math, science, history, unraveling the mysteries,
That all started with the big bang!”

May

Fake It – Seether
“And just fake it, if you’re out of direction.
Fake it, if you don’t belong here.”

Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 2 – Pink Floyd
“We don’t need no education
We don’t need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!
All in all it’s just another brick in the wall.”

June

Be OK – Ingrid Michaelson
“Open me up and you will see
I’m a gallery of broken hearts
I’m beyond repair, let me be
And give me back my broken parts”

July

Birthday – The Beatles
“You say it’s your birthday
Well it’s my birthday too, yeah
You say it’s your birthday
We’re gonna have a good time”

C is for Cookie – The Cookie Monster
“Cookie, cookie, cookie starts with C.”

August

Bad Things – Jace Everett
“I don’t know what you’ve done to me,
But I know this much is true:
I wanna do bad things with you.”

Teeth – Lady Gaga
“The truth is sexy.”

The Flowers – Regina Spektor
“The flowers you gave me are rotting and still I refuse to throw them away.
Some of the bulbs never opened quite fully
They might so I’m waiting and staying awake.
Things I have loved I’m allowed to keep
I’ll never know if I go to sleep.”

September

Mamma Mia – Meryl Streep
“Mamma Mia
Here I go again
My, my, how can I resist ya?”

No Surprises – Radiohead
“No alarms and no surprises,
Silent”

October

Never is a Promise – Fiona Apple
“You’ll say you understand
You’ll never understand
I’ll say I’ll never wake up knowing how or why
I don’t know what
To believe in
You won’t know who I am
You’ll say I need appeasing when I start to cry
But never is a promise
And I’ll never need a lie”

Circle of Friends – Edie Brickell
“And being alone
is the best way to be.
When I’m by myself it’s
the best way to be.
When I’m all alone it’s
the best way to be.
When I’m by myself
nobody else can say goodbye.”

November

Why Do They Leave? – Ryan Adams
“Oh, why do they leave?
On the day that you needed them the most”

(Don’t Fear) The Reaper – Alana Davis
“We’ll be able to fly…don’t fear the reaper
Baby I’m your man…
Valentine is done”

December

Breathe Me – Sia
“I have lost myself again
Lost myself and I am nowhere to be found,
Yeah I think that I might break
Lost myself again and I feel unsafe
Be my friend
Hold me, wrap me up
Unfold me
I am small
and needy
Warm me up
And breathe me”

Grey Room – Damien Rice
“Because nothing is lost
It’s just frozen in frost.”

Cover design by Kelly Buchholz. Photographs also by Kelly: spiderweb outside the front door and random house from the window of the car passing by on I-5. Title “Searching for Spock” is a play off of the third Star Trek movie as a celebration of spirituality, science and long term geekdom. “You know I live to be seen through” is a lyric from the song “Here is a Heart” by Jenny Owen Youngs. “Live through this and you won’t look back” is a lyric from the song “Your Ex-Lover is Dead” by Stars.

I have a tradition of creating a music mix to represent my life for each year as it passes, songs carefully chosen for important events or the specific moods of each month. I like this habit, this looking back and assessing from such an unusual angle. I skim through old emails, blog posts and calendar entries to jar my memory, and I’ve been at this for long enough now that I also try to keep a running list throughout the year as I live it of songs that I think might fit in somewhere.

Unfortunately I was a little distracted by other projects in early ’09, so I didn’t get around to doing the mix for 2008 until now. (2009 will be posted later in the week.)

So this is the musical soundtrack for my life in 2008. (That’s two years ago, kids – some of you have a hard time following it when I make jumps that far into the past.) 2008 was a big year for me, filled with a hell of a lot of growth and revelation in directions both inward and outward. There were big changes for me spiritually, and our homelife and the way we approached the education of our children shifted in a really big way. I also met a lot of people that year, all of whom influenced me greatly in one way or another, and some became very dear friends. My marriage deepened in a profound way, and I watched my kids begin to try their wings out in the world. I felt a lot of peace in 2008, a lot of quiet interspersed with upheaval, but always of a productive kind.

Zora Neale Hurston wrote that “there are years that ask questions and years that answer.” 2008 was an answer to a million questions I’d been asking for years.

January

Across the Universe – Fiona Apple
“Nothing’s gonna change my world.”

February

Eet – Regina Spektor
“You spend half of your life trying to fall behind.
You’re using your headphones to drown out your mind.”

Amy Hit the Atmosphere – Counting Crows
“If I could make it rain today
And wash away this sunny day down to the gutter, I would”

March

Shine – Anna Nalick
“Isn’t it time you got over how fragile you are?”

April

Lost? – Coldplay
“I just got lost
Every river that I tried to cross
Every door I ever tried was locked
Oh and I’m just waiting ’til the shine wears off.”

One More Time With Feeling – Regina Spektor
“You thought by now you’d be
So much better than you are
You thought by now they’d see
That you have come so far
And the pride inside their eyes
Would synchronize into a love you’ve never known
So much more than you’ve been shown.”

May

I See Spiders When I Close My Eyes – Boy Least Likely To
“I’ve got nothing to worry about,
So I worry about nothing.
I think I’ve got fleas or
some tropical disease
And my spider-sense is tingling.”

Exactly – Amy Steinberg
“When I try to fight or run
I only wind up back at square one
When I think I know what’s best for me
fate, she takes me back
to exactly where I need to be.”

June

At the Bottom of Everything – Bright Eyes
“Oh my morning’s coming back
The whole world’s waking up
All the city buses swimming past
I’m happy just because
I found out I am really no one.”

July

Super Trooper – Abba
“Super Trouper beams are gonna blind me
But I won’t feel blue
Like I always do
‘Cause somewhere in the crowd there’s you.”

Teenagers – My Chemical Romance
“They say: those teenagers scare the living shit out of me”

August

Boats and Birds – Gregory and the Hawk
“If you be my star
I’ll be your sky
you can hide underneath me and come out at night
when I turn jet black and you show off your light
I live to let you shine
I live to let you shine.”

Hazy – Rosi Golan (featuring William Fitzsimmons)
“What if I fall and hurt myself?
Would you know how to fix me
What if I went and lost myself?
Would you know where to find me
If I forgot who I am,
Would you please remind me, oh?
Cause without you things go hazy.”

Closer – Nine Inch Nails
“Help me; I broke apart my insides
Help me; I’ve got no soul to sell
Help me; the only thing that works for me
Help me get away from myself.”

September

Dear God – XTC
“And all the people that you made in your image, see them fighting
In the street ’cause they can’t make opinions meet about God,
I can’t believe in you.”

Blue Lips – Regina Spektor
“He stumbled into faith and thought,
‘God, this is all there is?’
The pictures in his mind arose,
And began to breathe.
And no one saw, and no one heard.
They just followed the lead.
The pictures in his mind arose,
And began to breed.”

October

I’m So Special – Amy Steinberg
“I’m so special, just like everyone else
and I’m centered so perfectly around myself
get me out of me, I’m such a fuckin’ pain in my ass.”

San Francisco – Me First and the Gimme Gimmes
“If you’re going to San Francisco
Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.”

November

Creep – Ingrid Michaelson
“But I’m a creep,
I’m a weirdo
What the hell am I doin’ here?
I don’t belong here.”

Frankenstein – Aimee Mann
“And when later we find that the thing we devised
Has the villagers clamouring for it’s demise
We will have to admit the futility of
Trying to make something more of this jerry-built love
And you’ll notice it bears a resemblance to
Everything I imagined I wanted from you
But at least it’s my own creation
And it’s better than real
It’s a real imitation”

Runs in the Family – Amanda Palmer
“Me? Well, I’m well. Well, I mean I’m in hell. Well, I still have my health
(at least that’s what they tell me)
If wellness is this, what in hell’s name is sickness?
But business is business
and business
runs in the family, we tend to bruise easily
bad in the blood. I’m telling you ‘cause
I just want you to know me
know me and my family
we’re wonderful folks but
don’t get too close to me ‘cause you might knock me up”

December

Incomplete – Alanis Morisette
“I have been running so sweaty my whole life
Urgent for a finish line
And I have been missing the rapture this whole time of being forever incomplete.”

How Far We’ve Come – Matchbox Twenty
“I believe the world is burning to the ground
Oh well I guess we’re gonna find out
Let’s see how far we’ve come.”

cover design by Kelly Buchholz, photograph taken by Kelly Buchholz out the window of a boat passing by Alcatraz. Title “You Are Here” from a famous t-shirt worn by John Lennon, chosen for a general feeling of Zen. “Not waving but drowning” comes from a poem by Stevie Smith. “Not all those who wander are lost” comes from a poem by J.R.R. Tolkien that features in the Lord of the Rings.

An open letter to my son on his birthday.

To Nicholas David, bold and brave and ten years old, newly minted -

Ten years ago, a ten pound baby born with surprising ease and little fuss. Born into a new millennium, into a family that still barely knew what kind of organism it was to become or how it should like to behave; born to parents with price tags still on, who bubbled with inexperience and terror but a deep need for you.

I was afraid your sister, 2 1/2, would resent being displaced as baby of the family. But you were her baby, too, and it was me she sometimes resented, for getting so much of your attention. Your brother just wished you would be quieter. Often, he still does. But he appreciates that your birthday is like a second birthday for him, since your interests remain largely the same.

Times were uncertain ten years past, our fortunes doubly so. If we had known how well you can subsist on only tomato soup and peanut butter sandwiches, we might not have worried quite so much. Now I worry that by your next birthday you’ll be down to eating only tortilla chips and Oreos.

Ten years ago, Nickle, you didn’t just join this family, you annexed it. You changed the rhythm and flow; you rock the boat, eternally.

This past year has been computer filled for you, sweet cyborg child. I always said you were born with a computer mouse in your hand and the will to use it, but this year you officially passed my technical knowledge and now you use terms that I don’t always entirely understand. You build and play on things like Garry’s Mod, you watch videos on YouTube that give you more and better ideas of what you can do next and you have best friends all over the planet. (“Mom, I got my British friend to say ‘bloody hell!’ and it was epic!”) If ever there was a child of the future, it is you. I’ve never met anyone who thinks as far outside of the box. Sometimes I’m not sure you’re aware that a box exists.

You like to sleep on the sofa in pretzel shapes, you argue with your brother over Modern Warfare 2 and the Yu-Gi-Oh card game and you stomp away in a fury only to return to playing with him ten minutes later. Your anger burns hot but swift and you aren’t one for holding grudges. You still don’t have much use for sarcasm – which tends to be stock in trade for the rest of your family. But you have a sense of humor that is loony and sweet, and when I make a joke you find particularly pleasing, you beam at me as though you’d invented me yourself.

You approach every deal presented to you by your loved ones with suspicion, and every one pitched to you by a stranger with enthusiasm. Your sister is still your best friend. You are ever bold and passionate, but with a newfound shyness that breaks my heart a little. I hope it will temper you and help you find your balance, I hope it won’t dull your shine. You have an innate sense of your own worth, though, I think, and a compassion that is surprising sometimes in its depth and intuition.

In a family it isn’t just every person that ages individually, the family ages together as an entity. The good side to this is that at ten years old, you have freedoms and respect and privileges that your older brother only dreamed of at the same age, and you have parents who occasionally know what they’re doing. The downside is that no one takes you to see Alvin and the Chipmunks the Squeakquel when it’s in theaters. I’m sorry that we didn’t – we really should have. I fear that we’ve drug you along behind us at times, and I promise to try to honor your speeds a little better in this coming year.

When you were born, someone I used to know – someone I loved very much at the time – didn’t approve at all of your existence. Two parents should mean no more than two children; this was the perfect family in an ideal world to her – anything more than that wasn’t just greedy and selfish, it was harmful to the emotional development of all involved. She thought of family as a straight line, I think, drawn from one side to the other, grown ups vs. kids, us against them, a one way road of life’s blood pouring ever downward, never to be replenished. She believed that by adding you we would somehow all be less, because there would be less parent to go around. This person wasn’t malicious – just misguided and very ignorant about what makes a family and how it works when it does.

Not that I knew much better about such things at the time, but being a Third myself, it wasn’t exactly a leap of faith for me. I had good reason to believe that the addition of me to my family didn’t exactly have to spell gloom and doom for all involved. And if it did mean a little less for my siblings – less attention, maybe, less material goods – then they were missing what I had to offer.

We have never mistaken what you have to offer, Nicholas David. Without you, I would not be me. Khy would not be Khy and Storm would not be Storm. (I would also say that your Dad would not be your Dad, but that doesn’t come out sounding quite right. You get my drift, though.) More than that, our family would never have been complete. Until you came along, we were unfinished. Every sentence ended in dot-dot-dot.

You were the punctuation that made us real.

Love,
Mom

Sorting through old emails sent and culling out a few bits and bobs that seemed to best represent my year. I try to be a little bit more relevant and timely with this project, but life happens, and this is actually the 2008 selection…

April sucked so bad over here. And not in any real exterior definable way, it was all this messy interior yucky stuff and I’m not sure I’m over it yet so much as choosing to be Over It because now it’s May.

[on Mother's Day] My family woke me up this morning and presented me with two Gordon Ramsay books – one about his life and one his latest cookbook. Apparently Shane had some trouble with the saleswoman at the bookstore who seemed convinced that his wife would rather have a Rachael Ray cookbook. Rachael Ray isn’t sexy at all.

Egad, they didn’t think I actually wanted it for cooking, did they?

And my mother and my sister just started in with the stories and about what a drama queen I was and how funny and… I laughed at first. And then it got worse and worse and my sister was telling stories I don’t even remember from things I supposedly did when I was a teenager that don’t sound at all like me and how she would know anyway, I couldn’t tell you. Maybe it was all true. Maybe it was from the summer when my mother flew out to Arizona to extract my sister from another one of her stupid moves that we never pick on her about, and then came home to pack her things and run off with the man she’d met on that trip. Maybe it was after Mom came home from that, when she expected that everything would immediately revert to normal and we would all pretend that she hadn’t just left my father and I for months. I was a real drama queen then, let me tell you, I even had a box – hand stitched in home ec with the initials of the members of Duran Duran – that I carried around in my backpack at school full of a razor blade and all of the aspirin I could get my hands on, not because I wanted to die but because I just wanted someone to acknowledge my pain, or maybe just that I had a right to feel pain. My Mom sure didn’t think so. Or maybe it was the summer when my father and I were almost killed by a drunk driver, and we had no money and my mother had to get a job while I stayed home and nursed my father back to health, even helping him shower and use the bathroom. Or it could have been one of a number of summers when my Dad was drinking and my mother was crazy and I learned to run across the street to my grandmother’s house whenever they started to fight because while Grandma wasn’t very affectionate, at least she was close by.

I’m not asking for pity, I never have, especially not from them. Everyone has stories, everyone has it hard sometimes, we all have crosses to bear. But I’m sick to death of them acting as though my childhood was some kind of fairytale and I was the undeserving fucking princess. And they still do, and maybe that’s what drives me the craziest about spending time with my family. Because not only do they not know the first thing about me, they don’t want to know. They don’t want anything that doesn’t fit with their own stories, the ones in their head about me. Which is why the old stories, the ones from when I was 3 are so convenient, I guess. I sat there and listened and laughed along for as long as I could this time, and it was Cliff of all people that started clearly making comments trying to deflect them, growing increasingly uncomfortable with my mother and my sister and what they were saying. It was wild, and so very pathetic, sitting there realizing that in that moment, Cliff could read how incredibly unhappy I was, he was picking up my signals loud and clear while my mother and my sister went on obliviously, and in that moment he knew me better than they did AND seemed to care more. Because he made the effort to do both.

[Wedding anniversary] True, I spent the better part of anniversary day in bed having a complete freak out, but the next day we all went for a beautiful hike at Silver Falls. And of course by “all” I mean “kids, too” which let’s face it, isn’t ideal for anniversaries. But we did what we had to do. Frankly, I’ve lived my life so perversely that I never in a million years expected the 13th anniversary to be UNLUCKY. That feels so mainstream and embarrassingly predictable.

Today, among other things, I cleaned up mouse diarrhea, found my incredibly indecisive daughter with an in-betweenie body size the PERFECT swimsuit, and cleared 30 GB of space from my laptop so that my 12-year-old can install World of Warcraft on it for the funshop this weekend.

I love my family, but sometimes I think these people seriously don’t deserve me.

[LIG Unschooling Conference] Here safely. Exhausted, seeing as how between last minute to-dos and stress I got about three hours of sleep last night. MET MARY. And several other people I’d never heard of who seemed to know me. Now I’ve faded back into obscurity, enjoyed a talk by Diana Jenner called “Change Your Perspective Change Your Life” and then we high-tailed it out of there because my people, we are not high-stimulus-for-long-duration people. It was an early night anyway, and now we’re back at our hotel. Five people. Crammed into one little bitty hotel room for the evening. Glad to be here at the conference, but slightly claustrophobic, currently.

I hide in the bathroom to cry. Not because I’m ashamed. Not because I don’t think my kids can handle knowing that Mom is sad. In fact the opposite is true; I’ve always believed that it was my job to let them see that it’s okay for adults to cry, to get frustrated, to screw up (and apologize for it) and how to fight constructively with a spouse, while we’re at it. I raise my kids to be human – flawed and frantic – not android. The reason I hide is because if the process is going to be sincere, it has to be uninterrupted, unobserved. I hide because with my daughter away, it is mostly testosterone roiling through the place, and the boys – tenderhearted and nurturing as they might be – want to fix it. Distract me, hug me, make jokes, do anything, anything at all to get me to stop crying. But I need to cry.

And it’s harder when people are watching, because then I feel compelled to explain things, like why I pulled out the sewing machine I borrowed from my mother over a year ago, the one that’s been collecting dust in a corner of my dining room ever since, unobtrusive, not causing anyone trouble or drawing attention to itself. I would have to put into words why it had to be today of all days, when I’m already feeling cranky and raw, when my patience is sadly lacking, when my whole being is weary and sad, when I haven’t touched a sewing machine since I was 13 years old – and, as it happens, it’s nothing like riding a bike. Why I needed to attempt to cover pillows for the boys’ room – pillows that, being boys, they don’t even know that they want – decorative pillows, for God’s sake, for a 9 and 14 year old! Not exactly an emergency, is it? On this day and on that machine, when it physically hurt me to know that my mother was the one who threaded that bobbin with red?

She hated red.

I would have to try to explain why I went ahead with it, knowing that it was a foregone conclusion that it would end with tears and thread so tangled up and knotted that I would put the machine away in pieces, defeated. I would have to try to explain, to them and to me, how it can feel like your self destruct button got pushed and you just can’t find the right wire to cut, not in time. Not today. It’s easier just to let it explode all over you and then clean it up quietly and sob in the bathroom.

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
- T.S. Eliot

I’ve started to miss her now. Her ghost follows me around town, past the lake where we used to meet for walks sometimes. Hunting through the local stores for bits and bobs for Halloween costumes, I feel the weight of 30 Halloweens past, trailing behind me through the aisles, wearing my old costumes. Tweetie and Spiderman Me, holding hands with hobo and movie star and witch. They giggle, they whisper, they remind me of things that were better forgotten for a time, when things were hard and I had to protect myself from my mother and her pain. Things like how she took me to see that awful first Star Trek movie when I was 7, or how she used to bring out and have me open some of my Christmas presents early because she would get too excited to wait. Things like how she taught me how to write my name, one letter every day, until I was writing Kelly all over the house on everything, even furniture, and my normally perfectionist mother with her normally impeccable house didn’t even get angry. Things like how when she saw how miserable I was, new girl again in another new town, she kept me home from school and invented a half birthday celebration, taking me out and buying me toys to cheer me up. Things like daily packed lunches that always, without fail, for ten years held notes that said a variety of things but always I Love You, and usually with a smiley face.

Things that let me miss her now and mourn her.

Right before my father died we moved into this place with its high maintenance yard and it’s eleven rose bushes. He was excited about the garden area, the possibilities, and I was excited to learn from him. After he died I couldn’t hold a rake without feeling inadequate and sad. For seven years the weeds won the battles. My husband and I would trudge out half-heartedly, guiltily, weighed down by the imagined glaring of the neighbors that we’ve hardly exchanged a word with in all this time. Once or twice a year we would weed and trim and dig until we dropped, and always do just enough to make it worse. Make more room for the weeds. Then this year, a miracle. We bought perennial bulbs, we planted Dahlias and lilies and other things whose names I’ve forgotten. We worked and we cleaned and while it’s still far from the Better Homes and Gardens that my father was capable of, it’s respectable. And when this was happening, this strange rebirth, each and every time I approached a yard tool my brain would still identify it as alien to me. I would have only the vaguest idea of how to hold and use the thing. But once it was in my hands it would feel right and natural. My hands knew how to do things with it that I’d never imagined. Things my father never taught me, but I absorbed, I guess, from endless childhood days of following him around the yard while he worked.

I have muscle memory from muscles that were never mine.

So who knows? Maybe in seven years I’ll suddenly discover that I can knit and crochet. Maybe I’ll macramé a lamp. Maybe I’ll have recipes in my head that I’ve never made, and I’ll start liking to cook. And maybe I’ll finally finish those pillows.

Happy Birthday to my son Nicholas David, the beautiful boy who was in on the joke from the day he was born.

This is a baby dress crocheted by my mother, back when she thought of things beyond herself once in a while. I still miss that mother sometimes, see her only in glimpses down deep within the cracks of the woman she’s become, so seeing this beautiful piece of clothing on another little girl that I adore is bittersweet.

Mostly sweet.

Autumn Kate, with circle sammich

In 2005 the world population was 6,453,628,000, YouTube was born, and Tom Cruise thought that if dancing around in his underwear lip-synching to Bob Seger had launched his career, jumping up and down on Oprah’s sofa would be the next logical move.

In February 2005 Nicky was 5, Storm was 7, and Khy was 9.

Meanwhile, the Buchholz family met San Francisco and decided it was swell. All except for the part with the walking up and down all those hills trying to find a very specific place in Chinatown, which is the angst you see these shiny faces unsuccessfully trying to hide in this picture.