A strange day. It has been one week since my mother lost her job (fired) and her cat (missing), and ten years since my niece Rowan was born, and today the air was cold but the sun was bright, making for good outdoors weather, if only I wasn't only wearing my Target boyfriend cardigan over my Pitaya sleeveless gray tunic.
I do not like to think of the day that Rowan was born, which I remember in weird, vivid, broken pieces--Kenny had coupons for that steakhouse in the Newport Shopping Center area, so we walked there (he liked walking to the Newport Shopping Center) and I ate too much and while walking home, in the area that's now been bulldozed down to build a Target and a Kroger's Marketplace, I had to stop and sit in a driveway while waiting for my stomach to settle. We got back to my mom's house, her old apartment, and I stood in the doorway of her bedroom and she told me that Rowan had been born, and that she was a girl, and that her name was Rowan (they knew she was a girl, but I wanted to be sure, because there are such things as mistakes, and if she'd been born a boy, her name would have been Jack, a name which I like, but which my dad didn't), and that Val had been diagnosed with leukemia. After that is when it gets weird and broken--I remember nothing else of the day, except for one little piece of a scene, lying on the couch (the green futon), watching
Buffy the Vampire Slayer and crying to myself. I think Kenny was there with me, but I don't remember why we were watching
Buffy or why I was just crying by myself. Because I was awkward and fifteen, maybe?
That is not a pleasant memory. But I am glad to celebrate the fact that Rowan, my only niece and a bright, funny, creative, playful girl I can't wait to share things with, has turned ten. (My gifts to her were Prismacolor pencils--too expensive for me to afford myself, though I've heard they are excellent pencils and I could use some colored pencils--and the Lemony Snicket books
The Beatrice Letters--one of my favorite books in all the world--and
The Unauthorized Autobiography, since Rob said she's just finished listening to the entire Series of Unfortunate Events, books that I love,
audiobooks that I love, and that I have been recommending to her for ages and ages. I am so thrilled, and strangely proud, that she's read them and loved them.)
A good night last night, shaking off this like crippling melancholy I've had lately. I did the dishes and then sat down at my desk and worked for an hour, writing notes and working my way through tenish pages (I didn't count, only took note of how far it was until the part I wanted to get to--still ten pages). I felt good last night, and I felt good when I woke up this morning. I slept with the curtains closed but the windows open, because the apartment has started to smell a little lately and I wanted to air it out without getting cold, and at some point during the windy night, I heard for the first time my little wind-chimes, which I bought at the Broad Ripple Art Fair with Caroline, made of forks and spoons and hanging crookedly by my window getting tarnished in hopes of catching a breeze. They didn't jingle much, but I heard them in the night, and was happy. I didn't go back to sleep after my first alarm went off, but lay snuggled in bed, half-awake, thinking, and read the latest Shannon Hale,
Forest Born, over breakfast, and liked it.
And a good day today--cold, and hectic, but somehow I was outside of the hecticness. I was happy, somewhat cheerful. I was glad to sit on the floor this afternoon and talk to and play with my children, holding them on my lap and encouraging them to play with cars the right way (on the floor, going
vroom, vroom, beep, beep) instead of rolling them off the sides of the shelves. And we listened to a Halloween CD today that I liked, one that had "Monster Mash" and "Witch Doctor" and "It's My Party" and "Little Red Riding Hood" on it and was fun to rock to. Three kids had accidents today, and one of the toilets clogged and overflowed and my co-teacher was irritated throughout the day, but I was mellow. I rolled with it. Maybe I was powered by the thrall of a good book, by Shannon Hale's beautiful and enviable words, so
easy to read and compelling.
(I like reading Shannon Hale. Most of the time. I read five of her then-six books mostly in the space of a week or so in February of 2008, and when I think of reading Shannon Hale books, I think of being curled up in bed with a plate of muffins and reading happily, reading things that are
good and that I like reading, things that feel fresh and funny and interesting, and are comfortable to read on cold days.)
I came home and made spaghetti and meatballs and garlic bread (we had spaghetti and meatballs for lunch at work today, and I remembered that I still had a serving's worth of meatballs in the freezer), and they were delicious. The garlic bread, not as much, because it tastes best the way my sister makes it, with seasoning salt and garlic, and also I had to make it on an Arnold's bun or else go without a sandwich one day this week, but it was still pretty good.
And then I settled in to finish reading
Forest Born (I picked it up from the library last night. The spacing is a little funky, a lot of white space around the edges, I think, but it's four hundred pages long. A little less.), plowing right on through it and thinking about how I could use beautiful words in my writing, and how for me beautiful words are, like, a state of mind, or a conscious
effort--I put things down as I see them, or feel them, and then leave them there, and they are obvious, indelicate, lacking even the basic grace of Stephen King's (who does not really use beautiful words, if you understand what I'm saying here).
And then came the little patch of melancholy for the evening--realizing that
Forest Born is very much like AEFB and possibly--probably--better. Awkward. And then my mom texting me to say that they'd followed up on a call about missing Fox, and gone to see a lady on 10th St. and then the cat wasn't Fox, didn't have the weird black spots on his nose that Elyse and I are pretty sure are from letting him sniff the business end of permanent markers, and he had his claws. And then I felt sad for my mom, for feeling hopeful and then the cat not being Fox, but still being a stray which they couldn't take home.
I finished
Forest Born, a bit into my writing time. (I have decided to write this instead of AEFB, though I am definitely going to put in some real AEFB time before going to bed, because putting good effort into it makes me feel good about myself.) I liked it well enough, but not as much as the others, and it felt younger than the others. (I did like that it had zero romance in it, even less than
Princess Academy. I love romance, but it is everywhere, and I figure we can do with a shot less of romance every now and then.) I got on the computer and caught the Internet signal and got on here with the intention of writing about my excellent mellow day followed by the patch of melancholy...
And then while I was writing this my sister texted me and said they'd seen Fox on the porch, and I called right away and she said he'd come up on the porch and was eating the food there and was still skittish so ran off--but he's alive, and he came to us.
And now I feel happy again, and hopeful.