I’m growing a child while I sleep
I’m growing a child while I weed the lavender
I’m growing a child while I fill the ice cube trays
I’m growing a child while I wipe down the toilet
I’m growing a child while I organize headbands I never wear
I’m growing a child while I edit Spotify playlists
I’m growing a child while I throw out all my underwear with holes
I’m growing a child while I water the geraniums
I’m growing a child while I add more salt to the pesto
I’m growing a child while I bobby-pin my hair
I’m growing a child while I remove dirt from my fingernails
I’m growing a child while the maples slip into their best red outfits, while the mornings dampen with mist, while I pack cucumbers and hot peppers into jars, while I bag corn and blackberries and peppers for the freezer, while I simmer plum compote and pick the last batch of cosmos, while the cows enjoy their last spin around the paddocks, while I braid the garlic and wrap the yarrow in string, while summer unzips her skirt and throws it atop the yellowing milkweed, the New England asters, the spent blossoms of Queen Anne—
1. Sissy visit. Beautiful leaves. Beautiful little wreaths. Jokes & foods. New plan hatched where sissy moves to Montpelier. Scheming, scheming.
2. We’re handing out little poems of mine (free verses from Free Verse Farm!) at the market now. It’s the best.
3. Wendy Guerra, Cuban poet and fantastic human, read and chatted at Revolution this week. Just what I needed. Wendy says:
“The wounds, before healing, should be named.”
4. We’re moving! We’re moving into the woods! Into the woods with friends!
5. And now: coffee with a lot of hot milk! Apples to be picked and pears to be dried! Two new sweaters made for boys but befitting this small woman! Here we go Sunday here we go (clap clap).
This is one of the farms that will not be our home.
This was at the farmers’ market in Montpelier, when Ellie was visiting, and we met up with Kenzie, who is also a Suzie’s Farm Person, and she had those long fabulous dreadlocks.
This was when Ellie and Scott and Josh were staying over. I made Misha wear my happy wreath because he was happy, too. And we drank that whole bottle of bourbon. And life was sweet and Scott jumped in the pond and Josh ended up getting a free Suzie’s Farm hat.
This is my favorite photo of my friend Andrew, because the sun is all up in his face.
Those ladies? Oh those are my ladies.
These are some bodacious poppies and some pretty Unidentified Other Flowers that grow beneath the grapes in front of our house.
This is another farm which we won’t live on. But boy, was it pretty.
This is my pen pal, Shannon. She’s even better in person than written. Plus, she’s married! Also, a poet!
This was the fourth of July. Misha didn’t even mean to wear red white and blue and we had sausages for dinner.
This is Misha with flowering mullein on Cape Cod. He really loves that plant. And in this photograph, he even matches it!
This is my family in the early 90s. I don’t think I’ll ever be as baller as I was that day on Cape Cod, with that stance and that minnow net and that belly-bearing bathing suit. Also: how cute is my sister. Also also: notice how all our bathing suits match!
This was leaving the Cape just today, admiring the font of the Sagamore Bridge, admiring structure.
I was given a fur coat for my birthday this year (by my mother-out-law, who gives amazing presents–raw silk scarves & notebooks & dark chocolates & the most pristine and gorgeous hand-me-downs). I’m not here to give my opinion on fur, mostly because I’m not sure of my opinion on fur. But this is what I do know. This coat is a beauty. This coat is so warm that when I walk outside in it, I feel like I’m still inside. It covers my entire body and it is both warm and beautiful and utterly deluxe. Here’s a picture of me the day I was given it, which was a very very snowy Saturday, a day I was not expecting to leave the house but then I did and wonderful things happened.
Today I wore the coat outside to let out the chickies. The chickies had no sense of my my unnecessary glamour, but they were pretty pumped to hop up and out of the coop. Tomorrow, I’ll wear it to a black tie Academy Awards party downtown, which I am attending mostly so that I can wear my new fur coat. Also for the company. Also for general deluxeness, which is scarce in February in Vermont.
And soon friends will arrive in Vermont & it will be my birthday & I will wear the fur coat again. And then spring will come & the snow will melt revealing the hidden garlic & I will be twenty-seven & eager to plant things & eat them. And the fur coat will hang graciously on its soft pink hanger, waiting until I need it again.
Gilmore is a holiday celebrated by my family. It involves my sister and I watching Adam Sandler’s “Happy Gilmore,” and then we take a nap. Sometimes we skip the movie altogether and go straight to the nap. It’s a great holiday!
Here’s me cutting down our Christmas tree in Vermont.
Here’s a reindeer with bad spelling and holiday joy. Off I go to Austin, TX. Merry days to you!
On the night before Thanksgiving, I am thankful for friends. Thankful for the emails I get from friends like Chase, with this enclosed:
because I’M LAUGHING and because that video is so much like my life, my life is so much of making up songs about loving the things I’m cooking, picking, making, seeing. Thankful for friends who have and will come visit, and thankful for new friends in the making, thankful to be back east nearby closefriends I felt so far away from and thankful for the busestrainsandautomobiles which transport me and them to and from the country where I live. I’m thankful for my family members who are my friends in the deepest sense, the friends I haven’t picked but who have made me and it continues:
Thankful for
winter sun and
a grownup rooster fluffed with feathers (his name is Claude!) and
the shoes on my feet and
good soup and a fire and
the ever-discovery of poems and
the way lighting a candle makes me feel sacred no matter the time of day I do it and thankful
and apologetic to the mice we’ve killed in the basement who did not deserve to die and
thankful for free health insurance from the state of Vermont!
and emoticons and
thankful for sage and sweetgrass and cedar incense and
for the pond that I hopehopehope will turn to ice and hopeful
for finding ice skates at the thrift store for our pond and
thankful for nice thick socks
thankful for nice coworkers and kind customers and a wall of windows
thankful for how cheap a stamp remains and
for letters and packages and our big box from “fungi perfecti”
which means we’ll grow mushrooms underneath the sink throughout the winter and
thankful for the boldness of 2012 and all the good change it’s wrought and brought and
thankful for mittens
and a yellow hat from my sister
and a red hat from the country store which makes me look like a hipster which I am a little bit I guess but mostly I’m just a farmer who likes clothes and colors and thankful for
a grey hat from amsterdam
and thankful for all the things that weren’t stolen from our truck
like eachother and my gorgeous blue rounded piece of sodalite
which a woman at the stone store told me to select
because she said the purple of my aura was sagging that day
and it was
I was sagging that day
I’m thankful for people who help me unsag
like that cosmic lady who made me buy a very dark sodalite and also for my family and friends and
now I’m back to where I began which is thankfulness and
1. My dad no longer has a mustache. (My dad has had a mustache my entire life. My mom has literally never seen his upper lip before.)
2. We got CHICKENS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Four ladies and a cock.
3. My parents live in Austin, TX. It’s true what they say: you can never go home again.
4. I quit a job after one day. Adios, youseguys!
5. I’m currently cooking a VAT of French onion soup. That is a lot of soup. (I’m using the word “vat” loosely here, considering I have no idea how much soup amounts to one. But trust me: soup for days.)
6. My closest friend lives over an hour away (insert sad emoticons here).
7. Almost every item of clothing that I’ve been wearing for the past THREE YEARS is packed away in a box labeled “Summer.”
8. I read a memoir. (I hate memoirs! Not this one though. Probably because I know the author. Also she is very, very skilled at describing food.).
9. THE LEAVES ARE CHANGING COLORS EVERY DAY IT IS SERIOUSLY A DYNAMIC EXPERIENCE TO WATCH.
10. I thought I was eating bacon the other day, but…it was ham. I ate ham, you guys. This is Really New.
Wore a headlamp in Hollywood, walked to see
my only cousin in a one-room apartment
with blue carpet and a Yankees cap
hung on the heater
One parking ticket and four apples later
we got “the hell outta dodge”
as my father would say
or as my mother would say
They both say what the other says now
so it’s hard to know who started what
And now I say what they say too
and I say “bellicious” and “Why I outta” with a little shaking fist
because Ellie says it
And she says it because her mom said it
and a kid said it and it sounds
good to hear your mouth say what your family
and your friends have said
Just like it feels good to obsess
over a spider building its own home
anew every day
There’s a reason poets are in love with spiders
There’s a reason we’re not driving straight back east
There’s a web wet with rain that’s threaded north
We must wreck what we’ve built
so we may build the home again
Chutzpah (pronounced huuts-pah) is a Yiddish word used by Jews and non-Jews alike to describe someone who is particularly audacious or has a major guts, or, more crudely put, someone with balls.
panache, perhaps 