Unfolding

Under the Blue Moon(s)

This is strictly a vain effort to pin time as it’s passing.

I’ve had a hard time letting go of this post because I’ve had a hard time letting go of Spring; a hard time falling into this open-ended Summer. Maybe feels how American Teenager feels.

Spring, all of May, the end of April, was a waking dream; I couldn’t ground in any one moment for perspective. There were too many moments.

Here they are, to sort, and look at one after another like beads on a string, like a stack of Polaroids. Like days fall sometimes.

Castles in the sand, and clouds in my coffee and all that noise:

Nothing goes by as fast as the month of May because it’s superior to nearly all other months. It’s restless and bright and uncomfortable, chilly and sweaty at once.

This year it feels like Fall. Days off are all rusty, chilly wind in the chimes and mourning doves. It’s summer green through the library windows, but there’s almost-frost on the cars some mornings.

Almost exactly twenty years ago I climbed onto the back of a 4wheeler (or into a truck, or onto the back of a horse or onto a carriage or wagon) with this boy, and we kinda been doing some version of that in all the years since.

I see 2 new coloring books out the corner of my eye; under The Antidote. I only ever color on Saturday nights after midnight when I’m tempted to throw off the human vestiges of the sleep schedule and edge up near the wilder, darker unconscious spaces. I’m not sleeping much with the speed of life anyway, so I’m trying to fill those borderline hours with far-off whiffs. Dig a hole right through with a very sharp (or very dull) pencil tip, or the soft low squeal of really wet markers. There are nights like these with the rain and the right movie (Mads) that make me want to give it up awhile and go all in. But that’s itchy lobster skin springtime.

That’s the call Amy Carlson heard, that made her give up what she had for what she knew things could be- open, vast, mysterious, full of possibility and cruelty and twists and turns and spaceships (or not) and tragedy and that life was meant to be big, big, big and strange, full of weird and interesting things, weird and interesting thoughts.

Listening to Lana and Ethel and TBH, Sunny Day Real Estate.

Dear Prudence feels like coming out of depression- it’s like one day you just remember, “Oh, right, I’m alive,” which is a strange brief almost impossible thing.

Almost five years ago I was driving home from Chicago the weekend before 4th of July and kept getting diverted by traffic and just driving south south south across Illinois farmland with nothing but blue and green like a Little Golden Book and 2 lane roads the only roads you could see, stretching thin fingers across fields dotted with plain perfect farmhouses and the shadows of clouds, and I listened to Lana & Phoebe Bridgers and was as alone, alone, alone, as a person could be and as connected as a person could be and it was the happiest day, the longest day, one long country road and one long song, and I’ve been chasing that high every time I get in my car with a free hour since, and I’ve gotten damn close, especially on old RT35 or with my dog in the passenger seat, and I tried to pin that feeling to the page a little, that road joy, in Summerksin, I know that day informed those scenes at least, but couldn’t do it, not properly, but I heard the feeling done properly in Thoroughfare, by Ethel Cain, and I felt it one night not long ago in Newport, Ky under a semicircle eyelid of white moon and a few fireworks (from our family at the Reds game for blanket night) when she did it as the last song of her encore and no one was simultaneously as restless and satisfied, as empty and filled, as wide open and as squeezed as we all were that night.

You think there’d be more than one person, in the land of Preacher’s Daughter fans in a windbreaker, but no. I was the only one in gold hoops and Lakers colors. Oldest and brightest in the pit, just me and one other dad in a Cabella’s shirt in a sea of black, nude and camo. Even the drunk Stove-coded girls knew all the words. I knew all the words, my kid knew all the words. It was a magical night.

Went to a local author reading with a library pal and met Amanda Flowers, an ex-librarian who lives in northern Ohio, runs a cat rescue with her husband and writes 4 books a year- 4 books a year! I’ll be lucky if I write four books in my life.

My bff is incoming with a camper, I’m shining up the porch furniture and beginning the gardening.

I don’t think I like ANYTHING lately. I am 100 yrs old, remember, and probably way past touch with anything modern that’s not nostalgic/gay/90s-adjacent.

Keeping strict to my reading list until I spotted Peaces by Helen Oyeyemi on an outward-facing library shelf.

“Perhaps to be flawless was another kind of sadness,” The Hellbound Heart by Clive Barker. We took everything special and made it an illness.

I have a pile of questions for my Pen pal Interview with Craig.

Went straight to the Senior Breakfast meeting from the plant swap at the Library. I used to romanticize Trainspotting. I used to do really hard drugs and expect to die at any moment like Marla Singer didn’t either.

Just on my way to do a Walmart pickup and thought about how there’s a substation where my son used to play soccer.

On Mother’s Day I make a trip to the Cemeteries with Mom & Heather. Death is never faraway and never, ever scary on these sunny afternoons. We have milkshakes and put out bright decorations to remember. We make remembering into its own memory.

My kid did the Grad Walk yesterday, a new-ish tradition that sees the outgoing grads put on their caps and gowns and bus to the elementary schools to tour.

There are 10 teenagers at my house. The row of practical economy cars denotes their advanced age more than the fact that they all came from grad rehearsal. They’re spending the evening having water balloon fights and riding the 4wheeler.

Sitting in senior assembly high up in the bleachers and remembering people that are dead now singing No Doubt at my own senior assembly. Remembering how badly I didn’t care about anything on the slide show. Remembering how lost and free and wild and possible everything felt. There were only beginnings, nothing was ever going to end again- life was new and new forever.

Saw a funeral procession in town, and it may be 2026, but not one car passed or moved while the lights changed green to red green until all the mourning cars were through.

I wish I could put my old dog in suspended animation and save her old age for 25 years in the future so we can we be old together. All week I look forward to the morning I get to sleep in with her, the snoring body pillow.

All the valedictorian speeches were about pressure, were about FOMO, living up to, fear to disappoint. Under these circumstances I hope I am expecting nothing of my kid. And especially not that passive-aggressive, largest of offhand “I just want you to be happy” demands. It casts an easily-believed but false spell that that happy part is something to be snatched along the way, while racking up the other conventional life things, it can be spotted and grabbed. The implication is not the terrible truth, that happiness is ephemeral and surprising if not downright shocking, not easily re-creatable or formulatable, mystically evasive, sometimes thick and plentiful in the worst places, and just not chaseable. It’s a by-product of Good Living, whatever that means to you, a thing like Inspiration that has to find you fucking Working. You gotta be trying at making other things of which Happiness is a side effect, it can never be the product.

Oh my gosh, ugh. I guess that was my advice for grads. And half of it was made-up words.

My sister’s electric went out on the first weekend of summer break, the weekend the tree came down, Memorial Day weekend, and her only thought was of the baking she’d yet to finish for our cookout that was definitely getting rained out.

Rain split the tree, but not into the house. Rain changed the weekend.

Still with all that, ended graduation weekend with a new cotton candy machine and an evening sky striped pink & purple like the Cheshire Cat.

Also worth noting that I’m writing every day, even if that means staring out the window and deciding something doesn’t work after all, or making notes in my phone (I like writing in my phone, okay, I KNOW it’s gauche as hell that half of my drafting is bent-neck lady and iPhone notes app or talk-to-text, and only part of it is in artistically pleasing and socially acceptable to my craft notebooks, sketchbooks, & software with lots of tabs), or scrabbling over dog & husband in the middle of the night to blind-scribble some piece of dialogue or gesture. There is less urgency to the feeling at the moment, like I can catch it all if I keep to it, like I can keep this arm open for the Big Feelings of the blog and the other open to draw from and catch from the fiction soup (ocean? Flow? BS?), and between the writing and the family and the upcoming summer’s wide blue sky, I can stay full and warm enough to survive any cold corner.

Writing is just staying in the habit of making observations.

And putting them in my new sunset trapper keeper.

Ran to my parents’ right after a storm and met an Amish man at a roadblock. We agreed we could get through and around this downed tree, and moved the cones to each side for each other on either end as he passed in his buggy and I passed in my truck and replaced the roadblock on opposite ends.

I average one butterfly a day in my house during May and the first weeks of June. I’ve given up catching them with a cup and trust myself to just be good and careful and not crush their wings with my massive grubby hands, just lightly cage them with my fingers and open my palm at the window, usually after shimmying behind a thousand garden implements or over an old closed well, practiced and sure like a monkey, because I do it so much, I have a 100% catch and release success rate.

Sometimes I miss everything that’s over and gone and everyone that’s long past that I don’t feel like anything anymore, like a billboard or the cars passing, I can’t hold anything because there’s too much and too little and it’s all too fast for a creature that feels built internally like a tortoise, like an operating system converted directly from spiral notebooks to a puffy white bubble hard drive, from the Necronomicon to the Cloud, analog to digital and the astrological to the scientific, just eyeballs, what was it Amy Winehouse said about being a marble in a pipe?

If you’re feeling lost and don’t know what the future holds remember at least The Vampire Lestat starts June 7th and that joy will carry us at least until we hit the wall of August and the endless heat grinds our bones to dust.

Or, Fall.

‘There’s a bird in the house there’s a bird in the house,’ is an uncommon exclamation in my household but I wouldn’t go so far to say it’s rare. It’s the time of year that all the mother birds bring their fledglings to our feeders.

Came home from a week of camping & befriending butterflies, & put laundry in close to noon after Eric fed the birds. I went out to water the roses and a hummingbird circled the feeder then came to the water to drink and wash itself in the thin arcs of spray above the coleus - a magical, surreal experience of flashing tiny splashing wings that has me pretty tethered to the earth right now.

Tomorrow is my birthday. It’s fitting that I’m sitting with my notes tonight.

(One note just says: end with kindergarten alarm clock) The night before the first day of kindergarten, my son asked me how we would know what time to get up. We had barely any relationship to clocks and he had never seen or heard of an alarm before that evening.

Happy anniversary, Eric. And happy graduation season, friends. Do something fun and a little reckless. You only live once.

-Amanda