quest for a faerie child

thank you

I don't have much time this morning, but I felt compelled to just write for a moment.  I'm sitting on the front porch and it is unbelievably chilly, but for the first time in days there is a lone star visible in the early morning Pacific Northwest sky and it inspires me.  Make no mistake, it will not last.  Even the weatherman stated, "the rainy season is officially here."  So, we must celebrate each individual star that manages to break through the unyielding cloud cover, even if for only a brief moment in time.

I've been a busy beaver in the last week or so.  I've been making and canning an astronomical amount of fresh apple/pear sauce made solely with orchard picked apples, pears, cinnamon sticks and cloves.  There are 21.5 pints of sauce downstairs in the basement and I estimate about 70lbs of fruit still left to go.  There is something incredibly satisfying about doing this in my new, big kitchen with the weather raging outside.

I've also been working dilgently on adapting a recipe for Roasted Turkey Roulade from Barefoot Contessa for Thanksgiving.  This has taken a great deal of thought, creative energy and multiple attempts, but I believe I have managed to create a gluten-free, allergen-free, almost dairy-free (it still has eggs) fig and cranberry stuffing even better than the original recipe, which I made for the first time last year.

Our guests and my husband will definitely not feel deprived by my whole-foods diet and I can't tell you how happy that makes me.  I am going to attempt it one more time without eggs, now that I have the answer to the bread portion of the stuffing (i.e. making my own).  I'm also going to substitute portabellos for the sausage in a portion of the recipe to see if I can make it completely vegan.  Stay tuned for the results.

In other exciting news:  I have an appointment tomorrow with the midwife, and the mirena is coming out.  As of 3pm tomorrow afternoon, I will be birth-control free.  We'll see how long it takes.  I have been pregnant 4 times in the last 4 years and for the last year and a half, I've had the mirena in.  So, really, you could say I was pregnant 4 times in 2.5 years.  To say Moose and I are fertile together, is an understatement.

Someone or something wants us having babies...

I also just wanted to mention, I have gotten a couple emails in recent weeks and I will be responding to them.  I do so love getting them.  I need to be better about responding right away, but I fall into this trap of wanting some unadulterated time to do so and I never seem to get it.  However, please know until I actually do sit down and thoughtfully respond, it really touches me when you guys reach out to me.  Thank you!  Thank you!

My readers are a small base, but unbelievably caring....

it was truly lovely.

As I continue to unpack box after box, I feel almost as if I am pulling back the layers of an onion.  I am reaching boxes I never even unpacked in the last house, boxes I haven't looked at in years and years, boxes that have remained packed through move after move. 

You know the types of boxes to which I am referring, right?

The boxes holding mementos, old textbooks you couldn't bear to part with, scrapbooks from high school, pictures and the like.  They are a doorway to your past and when you open them, it is next to impossible to not get sucked in.

I opened one this evening as I continue to try and get my new office into some semblance of peace and tranquility, rather than a picture of chaos.  Out came a 3-ring binder, the contents of which were always so precious to me. It holds the memories of a time spent deep within the darkened, almost claustrophobic confines of a darkroom. 

My early days with Karl.

You recall Karl, right?  I spoke of him here and here and probably in a number of other places I can no longer recall.  I can recall these posts because they occurred last year at this time, when I found out he had passed away after a long battle with cancer.

This binder holds contact sheets and negatives of multitudes of black and white photographs taken while in my photography phase, a phase I happily shared with Karl, who taught me much of what I knew of developing film and printing prints, despite having grown up with a professional photographer as a grandfather. 

As I was pouring over the contact sheets, Karl's face jumped out at me in print after print.  He truly was beautiful, the strong angles of his perfectly-nordic featured face.  There were a number of times where we traversed out amidst the cold, wintery, Chicago snow, set up a tri-pod and took pictures of ourselves either together or separate. There are pictures of Karl swinging on a swing, dressed in a long, black wool coat, amidst a backdrop of clean, white snow.  Pictures of Karl standing out along a rocky ridge, looking towards Lake Michigan.  Karl and I huddled on a park bench.  Karl and me kissing.

Those were truly happy days, full of the spark of creativity and filled with a great deal of passion and love.  I was a sponge and Karl was the liquid I so desperately needed to drink up.  Days filled with jazz music and wine, cooking beautiful meals together. The days of my beautiful and sexy boyfriend who left me weak in the knees.  He was god-like to me then.

Eventually he fell from the pedestal, as most people will do.  Because noone is perfect and placing them up there is a recipe for disaster and disappointment.  You have to embrace their imperfections and try not to assume they can do no wrong.

But for a moment in time last night, I remembered whole-heartedly how good we were together at that point in our lives.  How special we were.  And how absolutely, fucking in love we were.

And it was so nice to delve into that memory for a short time.  It was truly lovely.

what??

I am sitting on the stairs of my front porch in the early evening.  The stars are already out tonight.  Our house is partially painted.  A streetlight down the street is the only illumination to pierce the darkness this evening, but my fingers seem to always find the keys I need by touch alone.  I could be in complete and utter darkness with no light from the screen and I would still find my way to a coherent sentence. 

I am waiting for something and the truth is I don't even really know what it is.  I have an idea, of course.  But, I am more than positive that what I have been building in my mind despite all efforts to not do this, is far from the reality of the situation.  It bothers me on a core level.  It makes me feel like a child and I really despise feeling that way.

Childhood experiences or things that place me back into that frame of mind are generally not the most pleasant of spaces in which to find myself.  It makes me alternately feel angry and giddy and absolutely not in control of anything around me.  It makes me feel as if the person I have become is gone and in her place we find the goofy, adolescent I always was.

Inside me, I can feel her screaming out, "But I am not that way anymore.... I am not that way.  This will not affect me the way it once did."

And yet it is.

It does.

I think the key to it is to just shut it out.  Lock it down.  Accept that there are experiences in life which will make you feel this way, people you encounter who bring out that child in you and recognize it for what it is.  Remove the situation from your life and move on.  Just fucking move on.

The waiting is ridiculous.  It ties me up, makes me feel incapable of acting like an adult, makes me grasp at things that aren't really there. 

I know I am being cryptic.  I am probably intentionally being cryptic.  There is no need to address the situation here, just the emotions it seems to draw from me because they are something I haven't felt in a really long time, so long in fact, they seem foreign to me.  And I have to wonder about that.

Why now?  And why this situation?  Am I supposed to be learning from this and if so, for god's sake... what?  What in the world do you want me to know... ?

What??