july the four

1. she was all fading light and darkness, movement and a quickness too fast for my lagging shutter speed.

2. i was all lazy and a chipped pedicure, a pastel version of an american flag like a whisper around my knees in an evening that seemed cool for midsummer and hid a full moon behind it's gray clouds.

3. they were all pyromania and a future study in scout camp, while he-- the little he!-- lit a small army man on fire and concocted homemade fireworks from the debris that fell from the sky or rolled to the gutter.

4. ...i recollected the day, and held a firm girl in my lap, and felt her skin that hinted at goose flesh, and thought over and over about the declaration of independence and about liberty and the freedom to worship, and the freedom to raise my children in a nation nobly built by faith and devotion, and tried to suppress a bulging lump in my throat that reminded me of the stark veracity of the goodness of god-- plain and simple-- while overhead the sky popped and exploded.

these days

i'm only online if i'm posting at segullah, i guess.

(and what a little post it is!)

(i think i've run out of words, the summer sun has sucked them right out of me save for a two-worded chant that has me at hello: bear lake, bear lake, bear lake...)

and we had a tea party too

when my son was out of town, we read madeline (just the girls) in a bed built for two. and we listened attentively to the crazy rhyme, falling asleep before we could finish every book-- lulled by it i think: catapulted into dreams through the illustrations all saturated and surreal, fancying ourselves the littlest of a 12 girled set. saving dog and cat and friend. garnering dollhouse and loot for a romantic hospital stay in the lit up streets of a dizzy parieeee. proud owners of a genevieve pup. running off with the gypsies and the circus before we declared vengeance against lord cucuface.

(how can you not love a book with the name lord cucuface?)

we didn't have to do star wars. there were no bedtime facts about sharks or stories about worms with a sense of humor. there was no fighting over who sat on mama's lap and who settled for the extra large perch of the arm chair.

there were no gender-neutral berenstain bears (which i love), or even gender-specific fancy nancy (that she hates)-- we found the perfect balance of girliness and adventure in our new/old heroine: madeline.

thanks to my oldest for requesting it on a night darker than it should have been, and too rainy and wet even for a thundering and brave june bike ride. tucking ourselves under a quilt in the bedroom and in our wintry flannel, we pulled out the old volumes and instantly remembered the opening stanzas with a rush of surprise. madeline! in your old house in paris covered in vines! where have you been?

(in your old house in paris covered in vines?)

it's a travesty that she was ever forgotten! it was silly of me to lump her with the girly tales that aren't popular in these parts, as my tomboys prefer the antics of a naughty dinosaur to the "polite thing cinderella should say" any day. madeline doesn't say the nice thing. (does madeline even think before she speaks?) but her intentions are often noble and her adventures are pure adventure. there is no talk of marriage or future princely betrothal. she doesn't have to do chores to be an admired girl. she doesn't have to dress up, unless that dress up includes a lion suit. she gets to ride a magic carpet. she saves a puppy! she braves a tiger in the zoo! in other words, she is a little girl in the truest sense of the word-- having the adventures that my own little girls would imagine for themselves-- and yet still is tucked cozily into bed each night under the loving eye of miss clavel.

(how can you not love a book with the tall and intuitive miss clavel?)

(rushing to the scene of the disaster-- fast and even faster!)

when my son was out of town i started to think about this: what is interesting about the glistening perfection of the princess stories? do we really just want the perfect tidy package with a happy ending and handsome groom at the end? is that the reward? does triumph only find it's proverbial glass slipper in this medium? is it really so much about the dress? and do we ever keep thinking about the things that appear lovely on the page but have no substance behind them? or is it the safely fantastical that inspires us to burrow further into the caverns of an untapped imagination?

and is that fantastic/imaginative/adventure the real reward?

i'm not really sure.

it's just that when my son was out of town, i was really loving madeline.

(oh. and my two other girls.)

still loving my makeshift clothesline

and more.

can we still be friends?

i decided on a whim-- and the beguiling persuasion of paranoia-- that it was time to take my family blog private.

the kids are getting too old, too out into the world, too cute for every single one of their milestones and millstones to be public knowledge...

BUT,

you can still have me.

(i laughed when i typed that.)

(did you?)


and maybe i can forge a new place for just thoughts and words and pictures of my hair.

and maybe i can still keep in contact with everyone.

(and maybe some of you will email me to let me know you'd still like to know what's up with the little three.)

and maybe it will be everything it was-- just not so much personal family journal.



and maybe... just maybe, you're still along for the ride. but know this: it will be sporadic and slim.


apologizing in advance,

xo,

brooke.

Memorial Day

A holiday weekend and it’s raining.

But I could never be mad at it.

I escaped to the guest room tonight, trying to hide from the child who refuses to sleep, refuses to try, and seeks me out in hand-me-down nightgown, the bare pads of her feet skating along the floor.

I opened the window full-fledged and for two brief moments sought out smudges of dark geranium, saturated in the failing light. I laid down on the bed and listened—to constant pitter patter, windy chitter chatter, to the air conditioning refusing to go off, then on, confused by the weather.

I lay in the guest room to a cacophony of my delights: the cast-offs of furniture and decoration that I love, which have no place. I lay on big Ikea pillows, turquoise against the lighter blue of a matelasse bedspread, around me a small yellow wreath, a few pictures of bohemian reproductions in cheap frames— my favorite the one where a girl surrounded by cats sips from a bowl while her voluminous dress puddles in red bustle around her. The red reminds me of the geraniums outside, the smudges. The picture reminds me of the Montmartre. Which reminds me of an old photograph I have somewhere in which Aaron seems to materialize in the frame, and he’s holding out a red rose, to me, behind the lens, the white dome of the Sacré-Cœur in the background, the memory of a thundershower on the brilliant lines cast by a receding orange sun.

That seems like a long time ago.

I stare at the rocking chair, the white pots that hold office ephemera, the old desk collected from an even older neighbor in Sugarhouse.

I remember the wide low porch of our Sugarhouse bungalow—and how on stormy evenings we would sit out and listen and chat… but mostly listen. And how, when we went to bed the roof seemed a tin can and we the sardine-like contents; so cozy tucked together under quilts, one docile baby in the other bedroom, the rain a perfect lullaby.

I remember the late autumn of my youth, when rain would drench the Bay Area, and the front street might flood a little, and the heater would creak on—so musty!—and we would run for it with blankets to selfishly make tents above each vent, hoarding heat, knowing it wouldn’t last. And the back deck would be shiny. And the low, deep wind chimes would ring. And the trees in the park would whisper against each other.

Again, a lullaby.

Something about the sound of it. Something about the way it smells. I can’t get close enough to it. I can’t open up enough windows to bring it to my doorstep. I can’t abide by television when I could listen to it instead. The lull of it without place or time, but everywhere and everything: androgenize the spring and fall; make me want chowder and a popsicle; make me pine for childhood, even whilst I wish to fully absorb this very moment that I sit in it.

It makes idyllic even the ordinary: a quiet, restless girl with wild curls who tucks into me on the guest bed; and poignant even the unfair: the request for the swimming pool on a day without school suddenly uncertain. Better still: texturing the serene, as a feeling of hope and promise draws me forward, then halts: pushing me backward.