Long time no blog

Long time...no blog....long time, short time. We had our son three years ago in April. Not only are we asking how did that happen, we are wondering if we want to stop it or speed it up. Some days we are in such a hurry for our little one to grow, because we are convinced that as he gets older, it will get easier. It doesn't get easier. It gets different. I wish it did get easier. The second I let go of the idea that mabey it will all continue to get easier the better I felt. The quicker I learned that burning up energy trying to change situations in parenting, is harder than just going through it, the better off I was. And that is it.

So for now, we are waiting on our second child, knowing it wont get easier. It is just going to get different. We try to till the land gently, we try to raise our kids kindly, except on the days we lose our shit. And then we kindly apologize for going over the handle bars, ask for forgiveness, and let everything around us know we love it even when we seem to be the crazy incarnates of ourselves. If that is different from how "everyone else" seems to be raising their kids, I would hope that everyone would dare to be different a little more often.  That is the symphony for now.

Spring, a poets sucker punch

Every writer goes off about spring. And as an audience in the North East we are suckers for it. We drink the poetic discourse about spring like that shit is liquid morphine. Its so easy. We are vulnerable after a season suffering. We have expended extraneous amounts of energy in order to shape a way to live our lives in a climatic condition that says die.
    So here we are in spring. We have the astrological equinox. A balancing point of daylight and darkness. The rocks of our stone wall are poking their heads above water, and gasping after the long winter submersion. The earths dreary eyelids that live around the base of the trees are slowing opening. On the first day of rain the tips of the trees color the possibility of life. We are suckers for it.

     Both spring and fall act like powerful elixirs inducing amnesia in our life experience. Spring starts flowing through our blood creating a heady high of warm sun on the skin, and the groovy beat of rain falling and snow dripping. Before we know it,  summer is happening at the possibility that winer ever existed seems ludicrous.
     Fall functions as our hallucinogenic tincture. It blow out your brain so you cant even remember that things were green. And before you know it, winter is slathered all over the landscape, and the idea that summer ever existed is ludicrous.
   I will take my elixirs gladly. I will sit on a shoveled off deck in long johns and jeans, soaking in thirty one
degree temperatures, and drinking beer like it is nude sunbathing season in July. The minuet there is a path cleared to the grill, I will fire off  when it is 40 degrees and cloudy, and pretend it is a Memorial Day barbecue. I like my seasonal elixirs. I love that each season is erased, and each new season has a blank canvas to be an original for the first time.

The lion, comes in, the lamb leaves....what does that look like again?

The Yankee saying: "In like a lion, our like a lamb" describes March weather. Each year we try to narrate March, identifying the characters one at a time. A lot of the time we are using either character to narrate the weather. "Pretty lamby to start of with, then we got hit"  or " Pretty burly lion led off March didn't it?" Even better " There wasn't really a lion at all, and we sure as hell haven't had any lambs!"
Our lawn chairs lay mangled on the eight feet of deck I shoveled of the other day. Sun hit us, and temps rose to almost 50 degrees. I wanted my deck back from old man winter. And I got it for two days. Is this our lion? Wind out of the north temps driven back down, the road froze back over. Or is there a lion somewhere else in March laying in the grass of the latter weeks of the month ready to pounce on winter weary homesteaders?  We got two days. I knew it wasn't going to last. If this is the lion so be it, if we haven't even had our roar, so be it. We got two days to cut the crap, stop hustling to make a fire in the morning, our driveway shrank back a bit, and we spent more time outside than all winter. So if there is a lamb in our future, great. If there is more lion, we will survive. We survive knowing that either of these creatures are possible in March, but April....April is the cruel month.

How long has it been? For: Hopi, John, Cassius and Ginger

It will be three years this summer being married. It has been two years since we closed on the homestead. Seamus will be two. It has been two years since our baby was born. Nice neat time lines. They help us keep track of the way life is suppose to go. Life usually isn't that way. Its been ten years coming to this point in life. Inside that ten years is a swirl of experiences meshed together with a paper mache of emotions. Its a glued collage of images, tastes, smells.
      Looking forward in time we try to chose the tastes smells, and experiences we think we want to have. It had been fifteen years when Hopi, John, Ginger, and Cassius showed up at our house in Vermont. They opened the possibility that things in my past are not what I thought they were. I was sure I knew what that time in life meant. And then that security was blown out of the water. It has been fifteen years. The possibility that other friendships and relationships mean something different a looms on the horizon. A tickle of possibility, speaks to me saying, "Would you like to find out?"
     What are the chances that eight people, separated by fifteen years and three thousand miles, would connect, fall madly in love with one another, and in short periods of time, let life's burdens melt away like butter in the summer? Fifteen years after being sure I would never see any of these people again, and probably never go back to where we were, the chances became reality, and for lack of a better description, we had our brains melted by Darth Vader from planet vulcan.
     How long as has it been? It probably doesn't matter. Honest proof that you just never know what things will mean in the future.