Get a little cheese to go with my whine

Hey friends,


I have nothing to say, which is weird. I'm in a funk and it has been sucking all the fun out of me for a while. It is not a deep depression, where I can't get out of bed or shower or speak sentences. It's more like a creeping malaise that sticks its long, dark fingers into all of the things I normally enjoy, like wine. I love wine! I love everything from crisp, bright whites that taste like sunshine and citrus to chewy darks that taste like moss and chocolate. Lately, though, I don't care. I don't want a wine to perfectly compliment my dinner. I'll just have tap water. Really? It has been like that with everything! I read two books that I should have LOVED and they were fine. I made a costume for E and I should have been so excited that it came out like it did and I was glad she liked it and that was it. I have been fun places and done fun things and I should be feeling HAPPY! and INVIGORATED!  and EXCITED! but I just feel meh. Part of it has to be the weather: 80 degrees and soupy does nothing for my soul. My hair is frizzy, my skin is blotchy, my knees hurt and I feel the oppression of humidity inside all the fibers of my being(it makes me whiny, too).

Maybe crisp autumn days and a fire in the fireplace because it's actually cold and getting into bed and having the sheets feel chilly and crisp, instead of soggy, will make me feel better? Maybe...but I'll probably have to ride it out. Usually, I come out on the other side of these downtimes with some kind of new skill or awareness or idea. Change is hard and it takes so much energy that I guess there's nothing left for fun or creativity. I wonder, what skill am I honing way down below the surface? I haven't really tried to do anything new, except for this writing thing and the ever-elusive "be a better person." Maybe in a week or three or six or twelve, I'll be writing Pulitzer Prize-quality sentences and you'll all be saying "I knew her when..." But I doubt it.  I'm hoping, maybe, I'll be nicer to myself.

What do you do when you've got the creeping funk? Do you feed it? Do you listen to sad music? Do you light candles and watch them flicker? Do you lie in bed late at night and look at the ceiling and bemoan every choice you've ever made? Ever. Like, "why did I think neon Jamms and pink converse high tops were going to make me look HAWT?" (It has been thirty years now, and that question haunts me.) Why didn't I study something artsy in college? Why didn't I listen when people gave me good advice? Why did I listen when people gave me bad advice? Why is my gut reaction ALWAYS anger? I think I have tapped into what's driving my funk/insomnia: WHY DO I ASK SO MANY DAMN QUESTIONS? WHY CAN'T I ACCEPT THE STATUS QUO? WHY CAN'T I BE HAPPY?

Let me know if you figure it out. I'm going to be sitting in the dark, listening to the Smiths with the air conditioning turned down to 60.

Love,
Corks

PS Don't worry about me. I'm already bored with this funk. I'll be pulling myself up by the bootstraps in no time. xoxo

Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration. Charles Dickens

Hello, my Darlings!

I've missed you. How are you? I've been thinking about you all because I'm reading Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert and I feel released, creatively. I'd been trying to add some sort of learning I've gleaned into every blog and I've decided to set myself free. I want to just experience and write and if there's a lesson in it, FANTASTIC! And if there isn't, who cares? Life can be learning or experience(which we all know is learning) and I don't feel obligated to beat you over the head with it.

I had also been beating myself up about not editing more, but I am in the throes of being mom and wife and boss and human and writer and I don't have time. There will come a time when I do, but now is not that time. If I miss a word or mix a metaphor, I apologize, but I won't feel guilty. Today, I am Popeye: "I yam what I yam."

I have returned home tonight from a trip to the Metro DC area, where I grew up and where I immediately feel at home. I flew into BWI(Maryland, my Maryland) and was picked up by my BFF and we drove down the parkway, surrounded by my favorite Eastern Deciduous trees--dressed all shades of orange and yellow and some still green--and past my favorite city. I got to see the Capitol, all gussied up in scaffolding, and the Smithsonian buildings and some new offices and terrible 295 traffic and we crossed into beautiful Northern Virginia, my home of 15 years. BFF lives in the most charming neighborhood, in the most charming house, with an ivy-covered slope and beautiful brick steps up to the front door. Her house is INVITING and WARM and FUN because she has flawless taste and because she gets me. You know how you feel at home in some places and you feel at home with some people? I'm talking total package here, friends. She was prepared with things I didn't know I loved, like coloring books and bible journaling and other things I do know I love, like gin and tonics and homemade soap and shopping at Tyson's Corner.

We went junkin' and shopping and ate burgers and sweet potato fries and drank LOTS of coffee and just reveled in the normalness of our relationship, even though we only get to hang out every other year, on average. Who else could I watch the "Unauthorized 90210" with or the Tori Spelling Lie Detector interview, with only a hint of irony(although if you ask me next week, I'll deny it)than my BFF? It was a necessity to see her because I think we both need to be grounded in the way that we ground each other. It's not necessary to explain ourselves, because we know. She knows I'm going to touch EVERYTHING and say "Isn't this fun?" and I know she's going to be drawn to sheep and bleached out colors and clean architectural details and we both know it could all go south if we indulge the (much smaller now that we're more mature)chips on our shoulders;). We are aware of our limitations and it's great. The lesson of being 43 is that you can let your friends be who they are as long as they are doing the same for you.

And then I left, wishing I could stay one more day, but knowing it was the perfect way to leave. And I arrived home to my overscheduled  and unpredictable life. To have the pilot slam the brakes on as we taxied out of Dulles "because someone was landing where we were supposed to take off" and the gate wasn't ready in ATL and I took the wrong door out of the airport and my parking ticket wouldn't read at the kiosk. I got home to pick L up from youth at church and miraculously arrived for much-needed evening prayer and sweet church friends and new church friends and finally home to my adorable family, including the new Pepper dog who actually missed me and kissed me like I was important to her. And I'm back home again, but this time with the people who love me for different reasons(I'm hot, or I once was) or I'm their mom and I don't have to cover up my arm fat or my belly sticking out and who love me because I am theirs and they are mine.

So I leave you tonight, with not so much a lesson, but a thought: home is anywhere you feel loved and supported and comfortable and family is anyone who loves you and supports you and makes you feel comfortable. You are my family and I hope I'm yours.

Love,
Corks

View from outside

Hello dears,

I went outside a minute ago to regather myself after reacting and reacting and reacting to my family. I watched the clouds roll along and the moon rise among the pines and I saw the faces of my ancestors and all of the stories in the sky. "What are you trying to tell me?" I asked one gaping, sneering maw. And I asked another to send me a smile and its eye just narrowed. For a moment, I saw my father's profile--the jutting jaw, the straight nose, the deep-set eyes--that I recognize in my and my children's faces. Then it was gone, lost to the ever-changing sky, lost like so many other happinesses to the impending storm.

It's been stormy around here lately. So much loss and grief and melancholy, we're still trying to break out of the funk. The sky is a mimic, I guess. It sends back to me what I send into it. That sneer, that frown, that profile, is me.

I needed that moment with the unforgiving scape to step away and hear my life from the other side of a badly insulated window. I could hear A making a pb&j for E, who wasn't a fan of Michael's tetrazzini, even as he teased her about not eating mushrooms. I could hear A and Michael enjoying their soccer game with it's remarkable hat trick +2 and the more remarkable beaming Germans. I know Lily is upstairs happily doing homework and texting on the coveted cellphone that we were so reluctant to give her. I could hear my life being lived and I could appreciate it so much more from the outside because, sometimes, from the inside it's so. much. noise.

Watching the moonrise, finding the faces, I'm reminded of the universal music that winds around above us and is caught, occasionally, by Indonesian musicians playing percussion in gamelan.
Listen here:
http://freemusicarchive.org/curator/FMA/blog/MP3_of_the_Day_Peliatan_Gamelan_Kapi_Radja

And universal music made me think of Elizabeth Gilbert's TED talk(http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius?language=en) about creativity and productivity and the living, breathing genius that comes to us and refuses to let us go until we've produced something and how CAN that be anything but the universal wind that blows around the world and sometimes descends to us to give us gifts of music and art and inspires people and animals and flowers to bloom and grow and greet us every morning? And if I'm sitting in my backyard blowing angry faces into the clouds, how can I be inspiring anything good in the world? Have I engaged the muse of melancholy who inspires sad songs and bad poetry and hotel seascapes? Will I have to answer for this negative addition to the world? Will I have to listen to sentimental poetry or the same POP song over and over and over again(seriously T. Swift, I love you, but it's too much)?

I don't know. I won't in this world, I guess. Too many questions for tonight, but I am going to sit out and face those copycat clouds again and I'll try to send out something hopeful and maybe something positive will descend on the world.

Lots of love to all of you.

Love,
Corks

Mind the pedestrian.

Hello My Sweets!

I live on a country lane, one hairpin turn and one s-curve from the closest highway. When we moved to the outer suburbs of a mediumish Georgia city, our neighborhood was decidedly quiet. There were three subdivisions on our stretch of road, but not a lot of traffic. Then they built another subdivision and they keep building in the first three and then a middle school, so now our little lane is busy and decidedly unquiet. Our road is also part of a series of roads that connects two four-lane highways that eventually lead to other cities, so that adds another layer of traffic, plus the elementary school two miles away and the factory at the end of the road. I will sit in my backyard sometimes--early, with coffee--hoping to get some piece and quiet and, inevitably, it's broken up by the whoosh of cars rushing past.

Often, in the mornings, especially in the summer when I'm leaving for work or going out to do errands, I see a small, older woman walking down the side of the lane(against traffic like they taught us as children). She's usually wearing culottes, and a bright green polo shirt with the collar popped, so clearly she's a woman with a sense of purpose--you don't pop your collar without one, after all. She walks on the car side of the white line on our busy two-lane road, and she does not waver a centimeter as I pass her. Her expression is stern and authoritative and she stares me down, silently daring me to hit her. I'm pretty sure that if I did hit her, she would leave a tiny woman-shaped dent in the car and then keep on going--she's that tough-looking. If there is a car in the other lane and I can't glide over the yellow lines to avoid her and I have to inch past her, she takes the time to give me the death-glare, but it's not like there is anything I can do about it.  She walks in the road when she's going around the blind curve, so that if someone is coming around the curve in the wrong lane, I have nowhere to go. Her choice of grass green polo also helps to camouflage her against the lush jungle of oaks, clover, ragweed and pines on the side of the road, oh and the really lovely bermuda grass of the house on the corner of the hairpin turn. Clearly, this woman is a menace. And she doesn't care.

Maybe you share a fear with me? The fear of running over a pedestrian or bicyclist as they amble down the road beside you? I just know in the core of my being that any cyclist I pass is going to fall under my wheels and I'll squash their head like an errant watermelon from a produce truck. I would rather trail along behind them, going 15, than pass. This senior sociopath makes me feel the same way. I am terrorized by her. And that really pisses me off. As I approach her, I feel the bile rising. I want to roll down the window and say "get out of the f*&^%#@ road, you monster!" but so far I have suppressed that urge, because it would simply encourage the little Napolean's anti-social behavior and I would look like a jerk. Although I think I do already. I believe my facial expression when I see her is half-scowl/half-sneer. Why does she bother me so?

I think it's because I value community and cooperation. I grew up in a place that's hard to explain--religious community, commune, communal farm are the closest to it, but none of them is quite right--and without anyone ever saying it, I grew up with a sense that it's up to each of us to make room for each other and sometimes that means yielding when you don't want to. It must have been the one-lane road on the farm. If you were walking and a car come up the gravel path, you had to hop into the trees to make way, or if you were driving, you had to back up until the nearest intersection, which could take a minute. I was a teenager then so I'm sure I sometimes felt annoyed at having to back up to let others through, but no more than any other teenage angst. I was way more annoyed that my parents and I shared one car, so my dad would drop me off and pick me up from work. Ugh. Anyway, the diminutive tyrant on my street is flouting the idea of cooperation. I don't want her to get off the road when there's no one around but me. I'm glad to move over. I just want some consideration when there are other cars around, because if I run her over, I will be the one left to suffer the consequences.

Really, isn't that a modern problem? We've all started to live like strangers. I know I run around with my head in the clouds, lost in my own thoughts most of the time. I've almost run over people I know in parking lots because I was thinking about my hair. MY. HAIR. I am trying to be more others-aware, but it's hard. I'm at a time in my life that is dominated by sensory assault--at home, at work, everywhere I go. I have three children at home and two out in the world and a husband who need me, and a job that requires near-constant human interaction (and is punctuated by bright colors!), plus the new normal of relentless media. Are we all overwhelmed? Is that why we don't take the time to work together anymore? Are we just tired of interacting because we have forced interaction every day? I'm not sure, but I do know that I live inside my head a lot these days. So, what do I do? Charge myself, I guess, to really engage, to find connections with those people I feel inclined to push off to the side of the road. Watch out, Ms. Cranky Culottes, you might even see me smile.

Love,
Corks

You better.

Hey loves,

"Sometimes when I'm scared, I get furious." Our all-around-wacky and weirdly-wise 5-year-old said that.

Yeah. I'm furious a little too often so I guess that means I'm...


scared.

And when I'm scared I feel really small. And then I act really small. 



Often I HAVE AN ALL CAPS MOMENT and I get really loud and really scary and sometimes I get my way. But I'm still scared.

The number one thing I'm scared of is that I won't be heard.
Because if I'm not heard, no one knows who I am. And I guess I want to be known. 
I mean, don't we all? Even the quiet, the meek, the shy want to be known, 
not just the ALL CAPS people, like me. 


The question that begs to be answered then, is "how can I be known without it coming from a place of fear?" 

Like, how can I be brave enough to accept that I am known even though I am not the skinniest?

How can I be known even though I haven't reached my career goals(that's a big one for me)--it makes me feel very small.

How can I be known if I'm not the most fun, most empathetic, most intelligent? 

How can I be me and it's okay? 

There is God, who loves me, I hope. I try to be firm in God's love, but I'm so wretched sometimes that I feel like God says "Oy vey, this one."  And there's my mom, who definitely thinks I'm great(although I am not attentive enough--I know, Mom, I'm trying). I guess the hubs loves me, I mean we're coming up on 25 years next month. And there's my BFF who loves me, even though she's known me since I was 12 and let's just say I was a very, uh, challenging teenager. And I have so many wonderful friends and family who know me, and I assume, like me. I'm pretty sure my children love me, because it's required. They don't always like me, but that's not required.

And then there's me. Do I like me? Kind of. I think I can be funny and I'm smart enough, but I'm kind of a bitch and I sometimes make ridiculous choices and I'm truly, truly mistake-prone. Like, I make lots of big mistakes. And then I feel diminished and scared and you know, small.

Wow. Seems like that's a cycle. 

I guess I've got an idea of where to start. How, though? The challenge of my life is: I'm a GO BIG OR GO HOME kind of girl. If I can't be the best, I don't want to play.  So if I can't be the smartest, I'll be the funniest and if I can't be the funniest, then I'll be the most passionate and if can't be the most passionate, then I don't care. It's all about that -EST.

I need to do better.
Better has never been a destination for me.

It's going to be hard, but I'm going to try to moderate. Kinder, not kindest. More patient, not the most. More engaged, not all in, all the time. More faithful, not Mother Teresa. Remind me, when I look overwrought, that's it's better, not best. I'll be glad to remind you, too, because I want you to do better, too. That's where we start: doing better. I don't mean we need to improve. I mean, instead of BEING the best, we just need to DO better. IF we DO better, there's no fear of the failure of BEST. And no fear is so much better.

Let's do better together.

Love,
Corks

PS le mieux est l'ennemi du bien. (perfect is the enemy of good). Voltaire

For the love of dog.

Darling peeps,

happy national dog day.

Normally I'd be all over that crap, posting selfies with my pooches and posing them in ridiculous positions, but this year, my dogs have decided to die. Well, I'm sure they didn't decide, it just kind of happened, but either way it sucks.  I am a dyed-in-the-wool, card-carrying, Facebook- and Instagram-posting, crazy dog person. I love them all: big ones, little ones, long ones, tall ones, skinny ones, fat ones, but especially Winston Buddy and Daffodil Shmoopie(no, you're a shmoopie). After Greta, the Wonder Dog(RIP),






Winston,

and Daffodil

are my fave dogs ever.  Daffodil is suffering from systemic lymphoma and Winston has spinal nerve compression which will leave him paralyzed. They are both old: Daffodil is 11 and a half and Winston is 9 and a half. It's time to say goodbye, but we keep doing these things to keep them alive, like trying anti-inflammatories and antibiotics and hand-feeding Daffodil anything she will eat(today, it was tuna and hamburger. Yesterday, it was apple slices).

What do you do when things start falling apart? Me? I use a lot of profanity and then I cry at inopportune times, like walking in to the grocery store, then I try to muster the troops and keep on going. Mostly, I'm making a lot of uncomfortable jokes about dogs dying, which is super fun for everyone around me, and then filling my cheeks with air and slowly exhaling in a big, dramatic sigh. I'm in this weird middle place, waiting for these dogs to give up the ghost or, really, figuring out when to help them on to the next life. E says it's dog heaven, where they will play fetch with Jesus and be whole, young dogs again. E has a real connection to Jesus so it's pretty much guaranteed.

Why do I love these dogs anyway? On paper, Daffodil is a terrible dog. She's not affectionate, kind of a biter, intimidating to strangers, and as soon as you start to make a connection, she gets uncomfortable and moves 1cm out of arm's reach. But she's so chatty and asks for cookies by barking three syllables(biscuit, please!)and used to ask for water by standing at the garage door and howling "wa-wa-wa." When E was born, Daffodil was her constant protector, lying at the foot of the bed or next to her bassinet or anywhere she was. And in the middle of the night, she jumps up on the bed and lies in-between Michael and me and she scootches closer and closer to the top of the bed and might softly lick our hands if she thinks we're sleeping. Winston has fecal incontinence, gas that would wilt sturdy oaks, grabs sandwiches out of our hands and gets warm, viscous slobber on every surface in our house, including the ceiling.  Every morning when he gets out of his kennel, though, Winston leans against us and gazes into our eyes and wills all of his love into us. In happier times, he would jump up with front paws on our shoulders and make out with all of us when we got home from anywhere, including just out to the mailbox. He used to kick a soccer ball and Daffodil used to catch everything you threw for her(unless she didn't feel like it). I haven't had to talk to a Jehovah's Witness or a traveling salesman or the people casing the joint in years because of my big-ass dogs. I'm going to have to start locking my front door.

What am I going to miss the most when these guys are gone? Standing in the middle of the family room and Winston coming to put his head under my hand. Daffodil lying on my feet during Thanksgiving dinner(because after a couple of glasses of wine, I start to drop food). Knowing that the dogs are just downstairs whenever the family goes away for the weekend and I have to stay home and work. Having someone who acts like they're listening on all of the worst days, with no judgement and really cute expressions if I add the words "snack" or "cookie" or "biscuit" to any sentence.

When will our family be ready for a new dog? Probably as soon as we have new carpeting put in, because our life is like that. What screams puppy more than clean, cream berber carpet?

Can I love a dog again? Will any dog ever entertain us like Daffodil or love us like Winston or calm us like Greta? Probably not. Will we treasure the memories of these wacky canines? Forever. Sigh. Say a prayer, or think a happy thought, for Winston and Daffodil and us, friends, we're kind of a disaster.

Love,
Corks