A Shift.

Some days, when the sky is falling in more ways than two, and your eyelids are being pulled to your heels by the gravity that refuses to give any part of you a break these days, some days like this, you sink. Or some days, you take a bath, long and steaming, droplets forming on your tired neck and tired temples, candles playing shadow games with porcelain.

And some days, you write.

A shift is happening. It's palpable, the way you can feel a potato bug unfurl in the palm of your hand when you have given him the time to be comfortable there. When you have given him the time to trust it there.
I used to need to wobble. I would search for hollow things that I could wear down and through until their centers exposed themselves as empty. And then I could move on without even shells to discard. That girl is still here. She still floats wishes on dandelion air and she breathes through her eyes and she craves new worlds. But I am noticing, so slowly, that she is beginning to quiet down.
Two years ago, I would have scoffed at that. "You're letting go of yourself! You're letting the real world tell you who you are! THEY ARE WINNING!!"
And maybe that's true. And maybe it's not. And maybe every wave you face doesn't have to be another one that knocks you to the ground because it's ok to be more inside a life than ankle deep.


I can say that to myself without believing it, or I can believe it without saying it until I can't even tell the difference. But it's probably true, anyway.

Only the Birds

In the mountains again. It is late morning, unless you would call it afternoon, in which case I would ask you to hand me my mimosa and let me live my life.

  All is essentially silent except for the birds, stretching their vocals for an early spring. I am kept company by two woodpeckers, one of whom is fairly inept at a what I imagine to be his only job. The other, in turn, seems to be a mighty show off. 

I can hear chipmunks cracking the hopes of seeds who only wanted to grow tall, or wide. Or beautiful.

The peaks in the distance still hold snow in their arms- a passive aggressive reminder that these tree limbs, pregnant with green buds, are still fragile and at the fickle mercy of the Rocky Mountain May.  The wind blows the cold like an exclamation point just in case you had been careless enough to forget. 

Perhaps the only way to be here is alone, if for no other reason than to listen to the birds. Only the birds. 

Airport rambling

What do you write when you have nothing to say? 

Do you describe your morning? 

  It's Easter and I'm sitting at a speckled Formica tabletop in a Nashville airport diner. I am early for my flight- enough time to have two bloody Marys. One more than I actually want. My waitress is sweet. Young, with plastic plumeria earrings, and she just wished me a happy Thanksgiving. Maybe she needs these drinks more than I do. 

Do you talk about the life you're going back to? My tiny apartment waits for me- missing someone who isn't sure she belongs there. I fill that space and I live that life never feeling completely filled myself. I have realized slowly that  you never really lose yourself, even if you're numb with happy hour and netflix. Losing yourself never applies. You allow yourself to go. Whether that is growth or degeneration is anyone's guess. 

Do you write about love?

If love is needing someone and you don't think you'll need anyone, is love lost on you? 

Maybe you write about your past, but God damnit, you spend enough time on your past- do you really want to spend ink as well? As if writing about it will quench the pining. As if anything will help. So you quietly acknowledge to yourself and no one else that those are skeletons and ghosts on that hill, and it's time to let go. 

You could talk about the beautiful things.  How Nashville was perfect as you watched one of your favorite souls marry his match. How the air felt like love and the sky was blue and the trees bloomed pink and white. 

  How you'll return to Denver one month before its own petals will cloak the city steam with yellow honeysuckle. 

  

You are in love there and maybe you miss that tiny apartment and stop thinking so much, James. Just remember to look at the stars and you'll be fine.

I used to go to the sea in the mornings.

I used to go to the sea in the mornings. The early mornings, when the breakfast cooks were rubbing their tired eyes on the 50 foot journey into their open-air kitchen. When it was still tender and almost dark. I would try to walk quietly past Chateau Maho, The Fish Bowl, The Roach Motel, The Barefoot Mansion. Through the red tile kitchen and down the main boardwalk, barely able to see Whistling Cay under a struggling moon. It would nearly be sunrise by the time I got to the goat trail, so I could see the roots of soft-shade tamarind trees and those rocks I had met with knees and toes (and one time, a shoulder) in less graceful moments. It was late fall, and I had to wave my hands in front of my face to fend off the hurricane mosquitoes, fatter and somehow quicker than those creatures we knew in the spring. I could feel the night air, heavy and falling on my shoulders, as I stripped away my morning clothes from my bathing suit and stepped toe at a time into the clear water.

Aqua jogging, we called it. A totally ridiculous name for a totally therapeutic act. I preferred to run on the hill valley roads, but my knees had become pavement-sore and I needed the drunken sand to soften the impact of a quickening foot and elevating heartbeat. With the water to my chest, I would run. From one end of the still beach to the other, back and forth. There was a stingray I had named Big Bird, the biggest I have ever seen, who would shadow me more than I necessarily wanted. He came most mornings, maybe hoping for whatever sea feast I was kicking up with my rough heels as I ran. Back and forth, back and forth. Happy to wake up with the island. To get some time together and feel that St. John, Big Bird, Whistling Cay and I were closer than anyone had been to anything ever.

You are who you are.

Every time I come to the mountains, I find something I wrote the last time I was in the mountains. I have a few notebooks that travel with me to quiet places, but I can never remember which has the most empty pages. So I end up searching through old thoughts for blank lines to write new ones.

Anyway, I am in the mountains. This notebook is red and spiral-bound. It is mostly full of half-written letters to beached friends, but this is one I wrote to myself. It most interesting because I had started to lose myself and now, probably around a year later, I feel.....not that. It's hard to say that I have lost shooting stars when the reason I am in the mountains is to watch a meteor shower. You are who you are, even if you lose it for a little while.

I am happy now. In love and happy.


Every notebook leads to buried treasure.





So you sit down at your desk, and you're wearing your glasses. You didn't know that you needed those, and you wonder how many shooting stars you've missed.

And then you realize that you haven't looked at the sky since you moved to the city.

Erin's voice sounded good tonight with tree frogs in the background. It's the first familiar thing in months. You should be there, dressed in tan lines and mosquito bites with bleach stains on your best dress.

You're in your room. On a townhouse near a corner you know to be a trading post for certain unmentionable merchandise. You have walls with white panel curtains. They are not made out of sheets. And a space heater.

You stay busy. You don't have time to miss anything, and you don't have the energy to feel much. You say that you love boots, but you love bare feet more and you wonder why moving on seemed so much like the right thing.

It was the right thing. You weren't happy there anymore until the very end, when it was too late. And that might be why you felt happier. Panic happy.

This city excites you, but don't get trapped. Don't stay forever. Do not get wrapped up in the lights and the life and forget the girl with wild eyes who looked at the sky and swam in the sea at night.

You Decide to Notice

Some days, I survive only because I am caffeinated. Where the sea used to be my savior, I am now routinely rescued by the coffee bean.

And when my feet race over hot concrete on my downtown walk home, I can still feel the sunned boardwalks like a phantom pain and I'm confused for a moment- not quite sure of where I am and less sure of where I should be.

These moments, more than a year and a half after I left those boardwalks for the true last time, still happen. They still catch me off-guard. There are days when I search my floor for a bigger gap to sweep the sand into. There is no gap. There is also no sand. When I run through one of the city parks, I still dodge shadows or leaves that look like lizards, and most nights I wish to the stars for the sound of my tree frogs. I imagine these things will go away eventually. They'll fade and turn vintage. But I suppose that I'm not in any big hurry for that to happen.

On that note, in a different color, I will say this: Walking home yesterday, the air smelled like flowers. Now, I am accustomed to knowing the personality of the world surrounding me. I am used to knowing the plants, the creatures, the wind. I am used to jasmine. Aloe. Agave and frangipani. But city air doesn't smell like jasmine. No, no. City air smells very much like a city. Fried food and street steam and diesel exhaust piping out of delivery trucks. If a city smells like flowers, it is the result of a million perfumed women, struggling to walk more quickly than men in their pant suits and high heeled shoes. Right?

Maybe not.

Denver, Colorado, for the month of June and maybe July and we'll just see about August but I'll let you know, smells like flowers. Not perfume. As luck would have it, though I miss my plumeria, Capitol Hill wind carries the sweet scent of yellow honeysuckles. Honeysuckles! Past row houses and over cracked concrete, they spill from backyard fences onto rose and lavender gardens. They don't discriminate day from night like those snotty jasmine blooms. They are as fragrant in the middle of a cloudless Tuesday as they are in the cool dark. I love them. And I needed that.




I thought St. John gave me flowers, but what it actually gave me was the heart to notice them.

In related news, there are night frogs in Cheesman Park.

Dear Mom, I don't like chocolate chip cookies, anyway.

My mother did not teach me how to bake cookies. Not ever. I still don't think that I know how to grease a pan properly, and the concept of pre-heating is fairly new. My mother has a meatloaf recipe, but I do not know what it is and the chances of it just being a general mash of hamburger and ketchup are high. For the most part, her recipes came from a frozen box and not from a soft, crumbling book of beautiful handwritten notes. She never showed me how to fill a mop bucket. She never showed me how to vacuum stairs. I still throw the occasional red sock in with my white clothes assuming that everything will be ok. I learned how to fold a fitted sheet when I entered, as a grown adult, the world of housekeeping. Not before. No one has ever referred to Candy Kelly Vandenberg as Suzie Homemaker, and no one will confuse her oldest daughter with a girl who has been raised by someone with such a title. She regrets at least some of this, I know. I know because when I finally moved into my own big girl apartment, I Facebooked a tsunami of domestic ineptness, allowing my own typing fingers to be the keyhole through which nearly everyone I know has been able to spy and snicker at my tendency to explode things in the microwave and my embarrassing inability to predict that one might need shower hooks to accompany a shower curtain. Or a hammer to assemble Ikea labyrinths. Or, you know, forks. And my mother, sometimes getting stuck in that keyhole, apologized.

So, here's the thing. It is almost Mother's Day. My sister and I do the cards every year. We do the flowers, the mix CDs, the spa day gift certificates. These things mean less to her than the fact that we both moved the 3,000 miles it was going to take to actually hug her on Mother's Day, but we do the little things when we can. This year has been eye opening for her, I think. Watching her two girls live as real life humans. Getting the phone calls when we don't know how to boil an egg at altitude or when we don't know how much a vacuum cleaner is really supposed to cost. Walking through Ikea or Target or Walmart for what has surely culminated to more than a day's worth of minutes trying to explain that, yes, you need a cutting board and no, you probably don't need a fancy serving bowl because who is it that you think you'll be serving, anyway, when your dining room table is an ironing board? She is looking at us, these two dizzy creatures, trying to make our way based on what she either has or has not taught us about living. I have decided to use her favorite keyhole to show her that I might not know how to bake cookies, but the traits I am most proud of came directly from her.

My mother taught me how to play foosball. My dad and I were playing one night on the table they had just bought. He was hyped up about it, and I was terrible. 14 and awkward on every level and I'm pretty sure I spun those little men a more than a few times before I knew that an actual foosball player would rather die than play someone who spins. Daddy and I played for hours and hours getting slightly more skilled and slightly more rambunctious and I pretty much figured out that I might end up being better at something than him, which I still don't completely believe is possible. We were on top of the world for a while with that table. We thought we were better than everyone. And then, in a floating ball of sunshine, which is her preferred method of travel, my mother walked down the stairs and into the foosball cave. She smiled at my dad, smiled sweetly at me and asked if we thought she might be able to play a game or two. It is entirely likely that I rolled my eyes. And then she kicked my ass.

My mother taught me how to shake hands. At the end of my driver's ed class, which was a bajillion dollar course complete with reverse slaloms, skid pads and lunch breaks, all the newly minted road masters shook hands with our twenty-something year old Mr. Miagis. It was kind of a graduation. As a sixteen year old girl, I'm not sure that I had ever really shaken hands with anyone at that point in my life. Why would I have? My mother, eyes open to being female in a venue dominated by men, leaned down and whispered in my ear, "When you shake their hands, you are to shake their hands. Do not let your hand go limp. Do not let them shake yours like you're a little princess. If they grip too firmly, grip too firmly back. Look them right in their eyes. And remember to say thank you."

There are a thousand more anecdotes just like these, beginning with me being fairly naive about who my mother is and ending with the realization that she is a spitfire dressed like a Care Bear.

What my mother taught me--the most important thing she has taught me--is that there is strength in kindness. That women don't need to play the "bitch" role in order to succeed. A woman can be intelligent and interesting and opinionated. She can be successful and independent and fierce and ambitious. She can kick a man's tail at bar games and shake hands as firmly as anyone. And, if she wants to, she can still wear a Broncos Santa hat at Christmastime, cry every time she watches The Notebook, and rescue any lost creature she sees wandering the cold streets of suburbia. My dad, who is one of the smartest people I know, will maintain to the ends of himself that my mother is smarter. He can also attest to her being among the kindest of kind people. She is both. She is a business woman and a family woman. A mother to latchkey kids who came home and threw a frozen dinner in the oven before she took off her high heels for the day. She is also a glittering example of the healing powers of a living room dance party and a bleeding heart who has owned at least four different pets that started out as strays.

And she travels inside a floating ball of sunshine.

Here is where I thank my mother. Thank you for sacrificing the cookies and the mopping in the name of firm hand shakes and bar games. Thank you for showing me how far a heart can really get someone. Thank you for being a truly inspirational woman, and a weirdly cheerful one at that. Your inability to frown and your drive to be happy is something everyone around you, especially your daughters, strives for. You are beautiful, funny, successful, intelligent, quirky, kind, and, honestly, the best role model anyone could ever even dream up. I love you. The whole world does.

Happy Mother's Day!