Your Mother the Writer

This blog is for you kids. You knew that, right?

Your mother is gone to work, editing copy and writing the headlines that will be read across the state tomorrow by sleepy people in bathrobes while they sip hot beverages. She is in an interesting position, writing stories and also editing, producing and processing, the artist and the critic all wrapped up into one. So tomorrow, the bath-robed throngs will read both her headlines and her byline.

I love your Mother's job, I love that she is a writer. And not in the sense that I am a writer because I am not, though I want to write some things for you to read in the future. Let's get that straight right off the bat. Your mother is a real writer.

If you could read, you would notice her name in the grocery newsstand while buying bananas like I do. You would have seen her front page story over Independence Day weekend, the large color image of a woman hugging a man and crying on the front page, crying because the man had saved her life when she was a child. Your Mother told everyone about their reunion in the newspaper. Reading that story, even thinking of that story blurs my vision and raises the hair on my neck, even now in near September, almost two months distant. It was beautiful.

I called your mother once on her way to work. It was early on before she even knew I lived on this planet, before she went away to Taiwan. I still remember that because of how I was admiring her for what she did. I even remember the way the sound of her voice changed on the phone when she walked into the echoey corridors of her building and I was trying to imagine what it looked like.

She gathers up information, it is difficult because there is so much. I imagine it is like composing a panel of stained glass out of a pile of jagged and misshapen shards. She gathers them, sorts through them, and arranges them for the rest of us to see and understand and sometimes to feel. Like the Independence Day story.

And sometimes she writes me love notes.

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Anyway, what I really set out to say was that if your mother was here with me, I would want to raise all the shades and let people see our happy silhouettes through the yellow lighted windows. We would be bending over to sit on the floor and eat "American style", carefully setting down plates of tamale pie and green beans and expressing our concerns about where the Gilmore Girls are headed in season 5. People would see our silhouettes moving and chatting easily and would know that all was well.

8/23/09

Tonight the two of us ate dinner, "American style", which meant eating on the floor in front of a DVD episode of the Gilmore Girls. I have been hooked, and am rooting for Luke, though I can't say the relationship has me convinced. We ate my lasagna with green beans from the parent's garden and lettuce from Smiths. I have fallen for the white poppy seed dressing in the bottle with the peach (?) on it and for Santa Fe style tortilla strips, no matter the theme of the salad laid below their seasoned and crunchy goodness. It was all thoroughly enjoyable, with the sliding door open and the fan on, our house squat under the dark clouds and easy blowing of a pre-autumn storm. It looks like night out the window, but there is light blue sky on the horizon. One of my favorite things. Autumn foods are on the mind.

We took Z to the lake today while the clouds were moving fast overhead. A female duck hopped up on the boardwalk and followed us, Z watching her intently for some time. We fed her two orange goldfish crackers and moved on. We fed Z many goldfish crackers as she waved at passers by and swung her striped leggings about in the stroller. I almost, almost, had to put a jacket over my fleece vest and short sleeves. Beebs put her hood on over wet hair and when I laughed exclaimed she would fall prey to pneumonia if exposed to the breeze, leaving me alone to nurse her back to health and wrangle the Z. When she lowered the hood I put it back up.

Fall Falls in Salt Lake City

It is dark when it used to be light.

Nights are cool despite brutal afternoon heat.

The trails will be dusty and dry, the humid, heavy scent of the scrub oak diminished.

I've seen geese flying over slow moving farm equipment in the brown fields of southern Idaho. The potato trucks will be out soon.

Matt Pond PA is playing on the stereo in the kitchen, leaking out the open windows while I am thinking of acorn squash and clam chowder.