Neanderthal Mondays Part I

This March I’m taking a class on neanderthals on Monday nights.

The first thing was saw was a review of how neanderthals have been drawn over the ages.  Mostly the artists have portrayed a dominant societies projection of a contemporary alien ‘other.’

We really wanted to make sure we didn't look too related!

Skulls were this night’s view

Erectus, Heidelbergensis

Neanderthal too

brow ridge and occipital bun

zygomatic arch flat as my thumb

Large nasal chamber  to warm ice age air

Light eyes, red hair!

Then me and you

We have a chin now

But what does it do?

Adjustments

I’ll get up early, write then swim

I sleep in

I get up later and write 

I’ll write till 7, then take my son and go swim

I write till 8

I'll take my son and swim, we’ll get home at 9 and I’ll take my daughter to the writer’s workshop

We swim till 10

I’ll take my daughter to the writer’s workshop and meet husband and boys downtown at 1

We aren’t ready to leave till 11

I say to my husband “We’ll meet you downtown at 2”

My youngest son throws up

“Never mind,” I say. “We’ll come back home at 2:30”

My daughter and I write till 3

We make it home by 3:30

I take my older son to the branch library for his research project at 4, the library closes at 5

“That’s an interesting topic,” says the helpful librarian.  “I’ve never looked for information on the space programs of monsoon Asian countries before.  Perhaps upstairs in the college library?”

At 4:45 my son and I are sitting on the floor in the stacks looking in the indexes of a dozen books on Asia and space.  They blink the lights.  The library is closing.

We make it home with a pile of books - what to make for dinner?

Husband and older son will leave at 6:30 to go juggling

Dinner is on the table at 7

They leave at 7:30

Sick son feeling a little better.  I tuck him in.

I’ll just write a quick slice.  I’ll be done by 9

It’s 10

On Watching the Spring Come In

When the children were small we went on nature walks every week from January to May deep in the Connecticut woods.  
Our friendly neighborhood naturalist, Ronnie Kamphausen, would help us find vernal ponds filled with tadpoles, turn over logs to find salamanders and peek in the speckled red spathes of skunk cabbage, the secret hiding places of bees caught out on a cold spring night.  We moved to Colorado and reveled in the prairie and the mountains but somehow got too busy to just watch each week to see the spring creep in, until now.  

Today we took the first of what I hope will be weekly spring walks near our house to watch for the change of the season.  We saw ducks on the pond, a kestrel in a tree and prairie dogs chirping alarms. We threw snow at each other and covered our boots in mud.  It was glorious.  

Each of us brought some small thing home to sketch as well.  We were inspired to do this by my friend Ruth Ann Olson, who writes a blog about her small farm (http://www.lillabondgard.blogspot.com/).  When she was a young schoolgirl in England they would go for a walk each day and every student was expected to bring back some small thing to draw.

So here is to spring as it slowly comes in and seeing the magic as it happens!

Today a List of Stories

The alarm

Tea - don’t forget to get the tea going before you get in the shower

Find something clean in the dryer

Start the shower

Wake the kiddos

A little light, a little kiss

Same for hubby

Water’s hot

brush teeth

“Are you ready? Are you out of bed? We have ten minutes!”

The tea, remember the tea

Drive teen daughter to high school

She talks about the story of Moses and

Slavery in the antebellum south

I think how everything, everything I know 

is knit into my memory as a story

At work I tell stories

About people who spoke Latin

About the invention of Algebra

I listen to stories

About why he wonders about stars

About how Tock, the new puppy, came home

About her love of bees and magic

We work on telling together

on how to say Eyjafjallajökull

and other fancy words

Drive home

Listen to stories about budgets and cardinals

both sequestered on the same day

In the grocery store we tell knock knock jokes

Buy a dizzy chicken - spinning while it cooks

Stories round the table

Stories before bed

Write a story for Slice of Life

Set the alarm

Bed and I tell myself the surreal stories of dreams.

Today I am a Small Creature

This evening I was looking at the photo of Saturn hanging above my son's desk as he did his homework.  You can see our home if you look carefully.  Earth is a small blue dot, second ring in from the outside, in the upper left of the photo.

Today I am a small creature 

wandering in wonder

on the thin crust

a mere mote of dust

brushed by a wisp of air,

a creature teacher

wanting wonder to awake

waiting in the wake of time

to see if what I though was fine

will root and grow.

What arrows are there

that I can throw ahead

to say when I am dead

such a one was here?

None I fear

when I turn and see what was cast

I throw my present like water

on fires of long past,

only an echo 

of one mother, no other

two hundred thousand

years ago.

Her faint call

encodes the thread

the weft that powers the web

echoes off each cell wall.

Will her long line

throw forward in space

find out new place

be unbroken by time?

And Mars Just Sits There

I stay up late at night

worried about how 

I may have been judged

cataloguing my faults

worrying at the ones

I haven’t counted yet

but may well be counted by

others who can see them

so easily since they can 

so easily observe me 

from the outside

And roiling over 

in social disjointed 

image soaked media

till all hours

just to avoid 

the laundry

till I’m nauseous with tag lines

And then Mars just sits there

the little rover, far from home

just sits there on Mars

where all that was 

has passed away

where the rock

the sun

the wind

the dust

just there

uncaring

Parabolas in the Swimming Pool

I love the olympics.  I know there is a lot to be cynical about, but really, I just love it when groups of people from all over the world can get together and do something without becoming violent.  It has been such a rare thing in our history.  Each person involved is an inspiration to me.  Thus I’ve been swimming with my husband this summer. We go every weekday and do laps over the lunch hour.  We take a little dip in the hot tub mid session.  My husband has recent Swedish ancestors, which I blame for his love of jumping from hot to cold to hot to cold.  I’m a little less enthusiastic, but it is refreshing.

I was planning on training for a second triathlon at the end of this summer.  I was scared stiff of swimming in open water, (my first tri was in a pool) but energized by the thought of working my way through that fear.  Then I pushed running a little too hard and my right knee told me to back off.  I let that turn into an excuse for not facing the open water.  But the better part of me has not given up and says ‘next summer’.  This part of me remembers life is short.  I only have a few moments left to experience the thrill of racing through open water, the power of snapping my shoes into my bike and really committing to pushing myself full out - leaving behind the fear of falling.  Not the fears and thrills of an olympian, but this is what I can touch.

My husband jumps out of the hot tub and back into the icy pool.  I linger in the warmth and sink down, eye level with the surface.  Tiny drops of water jump up in the air as thousands of bubbles break, each drop describing a perfect parabolic arc.  I could calculate them all, if my brain was faster.  But the droplets don’t calculate, they just burst up into the air and fall back along the prefect curves of space.  Equations are just a way to write about what happens, like words.  The experience of a parabola though, that is the thing itself.  I sit in the  hot tub feeling ancient and slow.  But the better part of me moves my body out to dive into the cold water and swim.