Women's Work

The heaviest lifting involved in a move has got to be the purging that comes before it; mostly, the overly-organized among us annoy me, but there are times when it would be useful to be in those ranks. I never was, and so when it was time for me to relocate and I was the only adult left in the house to do the sifting and packing, the job was huge. It's true, you don't take it with you, or at least my husband didn't when he died: I inherited not only the accumulated stuff of twenty-five years of life together, but also numerous cartons of the thirty-some years of his life before we met. Everyone has them, those boxes that we move with us from attic to attic, and no one remembers what they contain. I went through them all, and through all the accumulation of our own years of marriage, and the accumulation of my two children's lives up to that point. Counting all four of us, that added up to 127 years' worth of stuff. That does not count the crates we'd each been carrying around from deceased relatives , his grandparents, my mother.

You understand there was a lot of stuff, and so I try to forgive myself for not completing the job before I moved--in the end, I finished off by throwing everything I hadn't gotten to into a new carton of its own, loading it onto the truck, and hauling it here with me. Naturally as we unloaded it all expanded again, and what filled a 1400-square-foot house in New Hampshire now also fills a 2700-square-foot house in New York, and the net effect is it looks like I never threw out anything. Where in my old kitchen I had two junk drawers, I now have eight of them; I gave away my piano when I moved and in this roomy house, I am quite sure there would not have been a place to put it. Lately though I've had the urge to have another go at it, which might be an expression of the primal urge to spring clean, or might just be me getting tired of living in disarray. I know women who dust their homes every day. For me, it's time to clean when I stop being able to stand the mess.

This week I tackled the 14-inch thick stack of recipes that I've clipped out over the years. This has proven to be particularly painful, harder even than it was to give my husband's clothes away. In the early years of my marriage I was never particularly concerned with making a home. My husband and I lived in houses, of course, slept there, ate there sometimes, paid rent and, three times in our lives together, packed up the old ones and moved into new. Until I had my daughter, though, I never thought about where I lived much beyond that. I grew up a daughter of a single mother, and a feminist, in a fiercely female universe and decided, like a good feminist child of the times, that the whole housekeeping business of womanhood wasn't happening for me. On the other hand, I always loved to cook. For many years it was hard to square that enjoyment with the larger issues of suppression and empowerment. (Luckily, age and apathy took over and replaced my militancy with a shrug--I enjoyed it, why not do it? It helped to discover I could also make a pretty decent living at it.)

Before that, though, came Baby, and when she was born I became intensely interested in feeding my family--maybe it was hormonal fallout from all the nursing I was doing, maybe it was idle creativity welling up and looking for some, for any, outlet. Whatever it was, I found myself sitting at our little table nearly every day, culling recipe after recipe from any place I could find them (this was in the days before the Internet was a presence in my household). It was a habit I never lost. That collection of clippings has grown to the point where it's housed in a dozen file folders and a shoe box. Of course I'll never live enough years or cook enough hours to possibly try that many recipes, and so it's time to winnow this, as well. Here, though, memory is reaffirming its quirky ways--sometimes I don't remember conversations I had a week ago, but going through all of these little squares and rectangles I cut out, some as long as fifteen years ago, I remember exactly where I found this or that recipe, how old my kids were, where I was in my marriage...remember exactly what I imagined our conversation would be as we bent over this or that meal.

It's sad, really, how much daydreaming I invested in this little corner of existence, and how much I'm still hanging onto it emotionally, all this time later. When I was a girl I loved my grandmother fiercely and was highly disdainful of parts of her life. From my viewpoint, too much of her energy went into the creation of things that were meant to be consumed-- she spent hours embroidering pillowcases that would eventually wear out, grew gardens, cooked meals and at the end of the day, it was hard to tell she'd done anything at all. All of her work was done in the materials of impermanence, cloth, vegetation, everything she ever made was meant to be used up. That may be why I am drawn to language, to fired clay, to stone--things that can be set down and trusted to remain right where you left them, no one coming by to gobble them down or wear them out.

A few years ago I looked at some cutwork pieces my grandmother had made--cutwork is a complicated kind of embroidery; she tried to teach me once but I never had the patience for sewing needles and those tiny, maddening scissors she used. I decided to translate those panels into clay tiles and made a series of them, thinking that it would be nice to have a more permanent record of the designs those hands made so many years ago. The truth is, once I made them I didn't like them. There was nothing technically wrong with the pieces, and if you saw them hanging somewhere you'd think they were fine. In my mind, though, I compare them with the fabric pieces that engendered them, and my clay copies fail, I think, because they don't show any trace of the pleasure I know she took in making stitch after tiny stitch for all those hours for a piece that was destined, ultimately, to live on top of a bureau somewhere in a remote corner of the household. It was like a willingness to be sacrificed. And that was fine with her, and I don't know why it was never fine with me.

Just like it's really not okay with me that no one, by which I mean my husband, is going to sit down and eat all these meals I'd so carefully prepared for over the years, the record of which I'm busy throwing away now. Not that I still don't have two children to cook for, but for reasons I can't quite articulate it's not the same thing, and each of these little scraps of paper, as I look them over and divest myself of them, one by one, is a sharp little rebuke about all the things I haven't managed to do in my life. Big things, and little. I came too late to the realization that maybe it would have been okay to live life more in its small moments, that it may be that small moments would be all that we are given. Came too late to the understanding of how soon the supper hour would be over, the dead having no more need to eat and me left standing with an armful of things I wish I'd done and won't do now. Still, maybe something of memory carries over. The first time I had a dream about my husband where he wasn't sick, I was cooking him eggs and he sat, quite contentedly, waiting to eat at our dining room table. Breakfast in the Otherworld Café, I joked with a friend later. I wonder. Perhaps in that other place my husband drowses remembering the times we did eat together. Perhaps my grandmother sits across from him at that table, still busy with her embroidery hoop. Maybe together they are happy there, and I get these glimpses of them are how they let me know that impermanence is okay, that simple intentions are also okay. That if the only gestures I ever make are feeble, fading, and finally lost, well, that all will be okay, too. Anyway it would be nice to be forgiven one's incompleteness. Nicest of all to be able to forgive it in oneself.

Lunar Fish

The sun moved into Pisces one day this week, I don't know exactly when. I also don't know why I'm always aware when the sun changes signs, because I don't believe in astrology. I do, however, believe deeply in metaphor and therefore am drawn to systems like astrology, impulses like myth, the human mind trying to create order out of its surroundings and in the process, creating something like poetry. I also believe that certain times of the year affect certain parts of me in different ways, and so it is with the Sun-In-Pisces, time of the rule of water and the dreaminess that comes with that. Pisces is governed by the planet Neptune; the influence is toward illusion, poetry, fluidity. For someone who doesn't believe in astrology, I do know a thing or two about it. I like Pisceans, how I see them move through life sometimes an inch or two above the actual ground. They are a water sign, like me, only unlike me they are mutable, where I am fixed. I imagine that's why they're easier to get along with. Two of my close friends have their moons in Pisces, which means that emotionally, they'd be quite content to be mermaids. If they can't see the ocean from where they're living, they have to be able to at least drive there every day. If they had thick, glittery tails and the ability to breath underwater, that would probably be even better.

I have to live close to at least the image of wateriness, especially at this time of year when things have been frozen for so long. I know March is a cold month, but I never think of it that way, largely because where I live, come March, you start to see rivers coming back into being, creeks melting and pouring along through their icy lanes. The icicles that have hung from the roof for the past several weeks turn into pools of water on the sidewalks below. I like it, this grand thaw. Flower and leaf get all the buzz when it comes to anticipating spring but for me, there's nothing like this earliest sign of its earliest onset.

I had my first serious boyfriend during my junior year of high school, and I remember that year, right in the first part of March, I was seized by what I later learned is known as "fire in the head." It's the kind of inspiration that takes hold of you from no place you can describe, but you're alive with it, suddenly--every thought is a line of poetry, every line of poetry seems divinely inspired, that divine influence becomes what you live on instead of sleep and food. Although I had already been writing seriously for a couple of years by then, that particular March I spent in the grip of something intensified and alien, ideas pouring into me and through me nonstop. I thought maybe it was early love that was inducing this state in me, but over time I came to understand that it's not an inner state, but something outer--the time of year--that brings it on. I don't know if it's the influence of those dreamy fish that rule the month, but, in the spirit of understanding metaphor as my personal household god, I'll accept that it likely is. That slow transition from ice to water more accurately reflects, I think, what happens inside when the creative process reemerges after sleep. My truest metaphor for spring is not a pastel bloom, no matter how deliciously scented, but a pool of water, with the memory of its recent ice still chilling it.

That would be my writer's horoscope for these weeks of Piscean rule--write a poem about water every day. Also be the boat that maneuvers through it, and also become the fish that inhabits it. Or be a mermaid in it, if that is what you like. When I was young a group of us had mermaid alter egos--this game went on for many years--and the rule was, your mermaid name had to begin with the same letter as your regular first name. This was so that we remembered who we were, and knew how to get back home again. But I think that this is the one time of year to ignore that caution, and so my writer's horoscope adds this advice: write, forget your name, submerge and try not to drown. Soon, the sun will move back out of this underwater cave and re-illuminate a new corridor, another way of being. While we are in these weeks, meanwhile, I hope to discvoer that I am able to hold my breath that long.

Enter The Young Shaman

My friend Linda was pregnant with her first child when her mother died. I think how hard that must have been for her, how completely she must have been submerged then in never-will-be. That child became one of my son's close friends. Linda and I met when the boys were in kindergarten: we chaperoned the same field trip to a local lake that June. She was pregnant then with her third baby; I remember walking together through the pines around the lake, remember her swelling belly and small feet. Our sons walked ahead of us, holding hands, and I also remember how sweet that seemed to me. Then, it did not seem that long since they had been born. That day, it had been just a few weeks since my own mother had died. I was even sadder for Linda because I was so sad for myself.

The next part of this story came around pretty quickly too, when her son invited mine over to play one afternoon during those impossibly cold weeks right after my husband died. Time has funny ways of moving itself around. A maddening elasticity, have you noticed? Linda was good to me during the whole five years my husband was sick. Most everyone was, and David died anyway and afterwards, you couldn't believe how quickly those years had gone by. But on this particular day, Linda eventually drove my son home through the snow, and leaned out her car window to talk to me for a long time. She and my son, she told me, had spent much of the afternoon talking between themselves. It had begun when he mentioned to her feeling the company of his dad, very much dead by then but still very much present. Linda felt that way about her own parents as well, it turned out. Felt them in the corners of her house, sensed them in her rooms, at the edges of her conversations, random places and times, here, there. My son, though he had never said so to me, felt that about his father, too. I suspect Linda may have wondered sometimes about the reality of her ghosts. She made popcorn and sat at the table with my son and he assured her yes, they are real. I feel them too. They talked all afternoon that way. By the time she hit my driveway, Linda had shiny eyes and happiness blooming across her face. I wrote down everything I could remember of what she told me later that day; I wish I still had that piece of writing, but I don't.

The only thing that surprised me about any of this was that it was my son, my slightly awkward, slightly immature, more-than-slightly depressed 11-year-old, who had had an effect like that on another human being. Linda wasn't just interested, she was buoyed. He wasn't aware that there was anything remarkable about his having spent an afternoon eating popcorn with an adult, sharing stories of the spirit world in whose midst they both understood they lived.

My son is someone who has always seemed surrounded by ghosts. His birth was difficult and as I was being wheeled into the OR for my emergency C-section, I passed by a woman there in the hallway, there in my hallucination, sitting beside a river and reading a book--as I went by on the gurney she glanced up, but was hardly interested. Still, she was present. A couple of years later I stood over his crib one night and the thought floated into my head that he had come to us damaged, somehow. Another ghost, this one maybe of a past life I had no way to know about or to control. One night, around the time his father was getting ready to go in for his first cancer surgery, Wyatt woke crying uncontrollably after a dream in which he'd lost a tooth. He was six, and did not know what I knew, that to dream of losing a tooth meant a death in the family. But it didn't matter, that one was the omen ghost, the only truly scary ghost there is.

Being thus accustomed to them, my son was able to accept that one more ghost, his father's, remained nearby, and I was glad of it. (I only felt it once, and it wasn't meant for me. One morning a few weeks after that death, I went into my daughter's bedroom to wake her for school. It was December, and pitch dark; as soon as I entered the room I was aware of someone sitting beside her on her bed. Aware in a horrible, panicked kind of way--the sense of a physical presence was so strong I was convinced that a man had broken into her bedroom during the night and was still there at that moment. It took me a long time to find the light switch on the wall, and while I fumbled, whoever sat there didn't move. The light came on to reveal my daughter, sleeping soundly, quite alone. When I woke her she said she had just been dreaming that her father was beside her on the bed, and circled the crown of her head with his hands, and leaned over and kissed her in the middle of that circle his fingers made.)

That is the spirit that has followed my daughter. The one that trails my son is more subtle, more complex. This is the spirit that, I believe, has influenced him to become a healer: it's a notion that emerged first in his interest, as an 11-year-old, in herbalism and more recently (now that he's 12 and all grown up) in his desire to become a genetic researcher, and help find the cure for cancer through that doorway. It's that ghost, I think, who put the idea to cure cancer in his head to begin with, who prompted him to tell me seriously, not long ago, that he feels his reason for being here is for exactly that thing. To cure cancer.

Well, my son, the doctor, who would argue with that. But there's still an other-worldly component to his experiences that I cannot quite categorize. Lately he has begun having vivid dreams. Last week he had them two nights in row, and they felt shamanic to me when he related them the next morning. In the first, he was at ensemble rehearsal for a school musical. As he stood on the stage, singing, something black and vaporous flew out of the audience and into him. Later, someone was in trouble and when he heard they needed help, my son turned into a wolf. In the second dream, he fell from a great height into the sea. The fall was not the problem, since the water kept him from being hurt, and being underwater was not the problem because it turned out that he could breath there. The problem was the underwater monsters that surrounded him in that dark sea.

Later that week I was expecting a visit from a friend who is herself a practicing shaman. When I asked her about it all--the dreams, the sensitivity, the desire to be a healer--she didn't think any of it was that clear-cut. What she did tell me was the thing that was pretty obvious, but which I'd managed to miss: if any of this was real, then, taken in that context, his father's death was my son's initiatory experience.

This is a way in which no one I know is accustomed to looking at their children: backward into adulthood, as if through a long lens of future history. Just like that, I could feel my husband reduced to a foot note in my son's biography. And I resented it. That I even feel that resentment makes me uneasy, as though it's easier for me to accept that my son needed to be born wounded in order to become a healer, than that my husband should have been sacrificed for the same purpose. I also did not know until I got to this paragraph that this is how I feel, and part of me thinks that it would be better if my son never found that out. Never discovered that I was the real monster lurking in those deep pools in those bad dreams. Biographical notation: His mother was Grendel. He grew to adulthood, regardless.

It does make me wonder whether the whole notion of illness and healing isn't anything more than a zero-sum balance, in other words, maybe eradication isn't the point so much as constant movement, the pieces going ceaselessly around, square to square, and that motion the thing that truly maintains the balance and keeps the whole board from pitching over and toppling to the floor. It's hard to know what are even the right questions to ask in that case. For instance, did my husband mind being the one who got sick, if that's what engendered the healer part of his son? If my son devotes his talents to uncovering a cure, might that, in the grand tradition of Unintended Consequences, also create others sorts of illness in the world? (Is "cure" even the right word to use?)

When my husband finally realized that he wasn't going to be cured, he effortlessly, I thought, accepted it all with a "what is, is" attitude. Our son accepts his presumed role--talking ghosts with a friend's mother, spending his life engaged in a battle which may outlast him--with the same sort of easy grace. And to me, that monster who remains mired down in the mud somewhere, they are equally a mystery. But maybe, if we both live long enough, one day I can ask my son to explain what he understands of his part in it. Maybe, that will help illuminate the strategy behind those clacking playing pieces of wellness, illness, health, death.

The Reemergent Kingdom of Thule

On Tuesday morning I drove out because the weather reports said that on Tuesday evening we were going to be hit by snow. I am happy to be living in these days of few meteorological surprises; in New England the memory of unexpected storms has managed to encode itself, in a few short decades, into the collective DNA of the locals. Hurricane Carol in the 1950's. The blizzard of 1977. A random tornado that struck the touristy shores of New Hampshire's Hampton Beach on the fourth of July, 1898, and killed nearly a dozen. My sister had come upon a row of these graves once, in the little antique cemetery in the little antique town I lived in. Father, daughter, two sons, all with the same death date. As it turned out, two of the bodies were never recovered from the sea, and the stones marked empty earth. To the right of these, the mother's grave, finally dug thirty or more years later, and inscribed with the legend "One day we will understand."

A hundred years later, four hundred miles away, and in an opposite season, I am thinking of that family, that storm, as I drive to the store for milk and flour and whatever else I think I may need for the rest of the week. My New England training--turns out the genetic memory the locals share is transmissible, and I acquired it during my years there--tells me to stock up, to hoard, to expect the worst. On Tuesday morning the air is quiet but has the unsettling quality of being smoky all around me--but white smoke, not the resinous gray stuff that pours from the innumerable wood stoves in this town. I can't identify the source. It seems too cold for it to be frozen mist from the river; it seems too motionless to be some sort of precipitation. As I watch the trucks rolling down the road ahead of me I realize that they are kicking up the haze in their heavy wake--I may be, too--the air is full of salt, because the whole valley is full of salt, it has been laid down daily for many days and has finally, I think, saturated the roads beyond their ability to hold it. Now, ground to its finest possible dust, it seems as though it has attained the ability to shapeshift, to acquire form beyond its intended form. The metamorphosis has been gradual. Mornings, the streets are so white that I always think, upon rising, that it has snowed in the night. It has not: it is only the chalky trail left by salt trucks overnight. Many trucks, on many nights.

And eventually, they seem to have been the catalyst for this gossamer form that's permeating the air in the morning. It's not Dame Winter herself, it's not quite holding a mirror up to Dame Winter, but it's not that far off, either. Something slightly foreign is in the atmosphere. It takes a long time for the real thing to finally get here. That came, finally, Tuesday night. By the end of the storm last night we'd gained maybe 20 inches of snow, maybe two feet. I shoveled all day. Several times while I was outside an older man in a pick-up truck passed by me, and each time stopped to speak to me, offer a comment, force a laugh at the circumstances, at some dull joke. I have no idea who he might be. He had two gas cans in the bed of his pick-up, and each time he went by, the snow had piled a little higher until on his last trip, the cans were completely covered. I do not know where he had gone to amass snow like that, since it wasn't falling that hard, as far as I could tell, anywhere else. On his final pass, I was shoveling out where the plows had once again filled the bottom of my driveway (note to county crews: Lift. The. Blade.) He stopped and leaned over toward me, saying, do you really think you're ever going to catch up? I thought, no, I don't, but what I said was, well, the other three seasons sure are pretty. He threw his head back and laughed as though I'd said something really witty, something that in any way made sense as an answer to his question.

Which of course it didn't, but I've discovered that in this kind of weather, with this kind of change to the landscape, the regular rules for What's Real turn viscous and malleable. The Greek Pytheas claimed to have sailed north from Scotland into a land he called Thule, which, in the malleable metamorphic way of salt-into-mist and strangers-into-friends, became a myth of a lost outpost of ice, a hidden realm of the fantastic locked away far from the northernmost points of our world. (I also acknowledge that some members of the Aryan Nation, displaying the typical lack of imagination and continued lack of understanding that is their most prominent characteristic, co-opted the term as a symbol of racial purity. Well, I'm taking it back.) I imagine right now that I am living in Thule, and despite the inconveniences of snow and wind and muscles made painful by the heavy work of the shovel, it is still the mythic that trumps the mundane here. The spinning planet carried this storm to us, and I have been carried into it whether I will or not. I know a dozen folktales about Winter and in most of them, Winter is a woman. Yesterday while I was bent over the shovel I had just such a glimpse out of the corner of my eye: a woman, dressed in white, throwing her arm out in some vast, indecipherable gesture. She was gone before I could turn my head. This morning I can look more directly at what this Thule has engendered: the patterns of frost on the window, the patterns of snow on the pines and the gestures of branches tossing in the wind. In the life of the mind, this is a treasure box. All of these patterns, once I learn to read them, will reveal themselves to be lines of poetry, shapes of stories. Forms for the next tile or woodcut I carve. It can take a long time to learn to translate all of this, to learn the language of this particular kingdom with its ancient days and its viscous seas. I have come, over the past several years, to like the idea that things take time to do. My younger self never felt this way but my older self, who is clearly more suited to life in frozen Thule, truly does. This morning, I feel I am starting from a good place for it all. There is milk in the refrigerator, later there will be soup in the pot. The house, with its thirty-three windows, is filled with light today, as I knew it would be once winter came and the sun fell on the snow all around me. The imagination streams out across that snow on its steel runners and if you could reach out and touch them as they flew by you, the cold would snap the bones in your hand and send its shock straight through your teeth and spine. For a long time after, you would taste that metal in your mouth.

Fodder

My friend called me early one evening to let me know her grandmother had died. A tough death for them all to endure, although not at all unexpected; the woman was in her 90's and had been in poor health for years. Still. When she called, my friend was en route to the airport to pick up her brother, who was flying in from the opposite coast. As she went along she chokingly told me the story of how it had all happened, pauses for crying, emotion preventing her from editing the story in the telling, so that I knew I was getting the visceral version, she was letting me experience it the way she had experienced it.

Then she said this: don't tell anyone else this story, I mean, I don't want you writing about this anywhere.

I never did tell that story, and I'm not telling it now. Even though I don't understand her impulse: I've racked up a few death stories of my own and love it when I have the chance to tell them, and whenever I do, it's with the hope that I'm getting it just right, that I'm managing to convey to my listener exactly what it was like, at that moment. How mysterious and profound, and how my ability to tell it that way is the only thing I have left of that mystery and profundity. (This would also explain why my two birth stories haven't kept their hold on my imagination: my two children stand as testaments to themselves. The dead among us have no more voice.)

At least, that's what my writerly self feels like. What my human self felt like at hearing her request was considerably less ennobled--I felt as though I was being accused of something really unsavory, perhaps opportunistic, scavenging. In any event, something inappropriate to the circumstance. As if a penchant for making stories was itself somehow inappropriate. I know she meant it, and I also know she didn't mean it. I know she loves me, I know she is generous about supporting my creative work. We have hours together on beach walks, while I nattered and she listened, to prove that. She has been present at the genesis of most of my ideas for the better part of the last decade. But I never knew, until that night, that she--or anyone in my life, for that matter--would feel the need to protect herself from that.

People love to ask: where do you get your ideas? I gather mine by bending down and picking them up, the way crows gather corn out of a field. The material is all around every one of us, falling off the people who walk through your life, or maybe developing as any other feature of the landscape develops. I suspect sometimes ideas even grow the way crystals do, in invisible chemistry that suddenly blooms into the visible world. An idea isn't there, then simply, it is. Before, after. But I have a secret fondness for the stories that aren't mine at all, that come from what other people tell me. There is something partly elegant, partly elegaic, to be had in the retelling. The shift in emphasis, the decision to stress this adjective, that scene, some little piece of the plot over another. The detail that you nearly overlooked becomes, at my second look, rather central to the whole. Your story becomes our story and the desire on my part, as it turns out, has been not for gossip, but for intimacy.

So, if I know you and you one day see yourself in my writing, know that my putting you there was itself an act of love. If you are someone to whom I want to be closer, but cannot, sometimes this is the best I can do. Here's a story now, part of my mother's death story: my aunt, who you will know I love because I am about to tell you something about her, was with my sister and I the night my mother died. The thing she never wanted known about that was how, at 5:30 in the morning, she asked for a shot of brandy in her tea. My mother had just died, and it was a perfectly reasonable thing to want. The last time I spoke with my aunt she still remembered that. She remembered the drink, she remembered not wanting us to tell anyone she had had that drink. What I still remember is how she sat for the next hour while she nursed her tea and we all three talked, my aunt's toes tucked under my mother's left leg. It kept her warm, she said, it kept her feet warm that whole time, in the chilly early morning air on that early June day.

Three Dreams

I didn't have recurring dreams until I was in my twenties, but once I started having them they were all about the same thing: houses. The houses changed over the years but if, as I have read, architecture in a dream is a metaphor for the inner self, then change is what ought to have come. Even as I missed the old places that used to present themselves, serially, with such astonishing, and welcome, consistency.

The earliest one of these dreams I remember concerned a library. The situation was always the same: I was hosting a party in my home, a large and comfortable place, and the house was filled with guests, friends, people I didn't know but was glad to see, regardless. This is rather unlike my waking self, who is normally loathe to socialize at all, never mind gathering groups of people in my own space. In each of these dreams, however, there would come a time when I found myself walking down a hallway, looking toward some glass doors that fronted the house library--my library. And every time I walked down that hall, I had the same thought, that I couldn't wait until the party was over, the house was empty, and I would be free to explore what lay on those shelves. I knew that even though I owned it, I had never been in that room, and the enormity of it, and of my own anticipation in finally getting to be in it, left me giddy. In the dream I never walked through those glass doors, and didn't care--it was enough to be standing just on the other side of them.

That dream came to me for many years, and there have been many others that formed themselves after. One of the best of those concerned a house that my family and I had moved into--this dream started happening when I was in my mid-thirties, with small children, a horribly busy lifestyle, one of those phases that feels, at the time, as though it will last forever. (As it turns out, these phases never last forever.) This house was an enormous old ark of a place, and mostly it was neglected inside and in dire need of some paint, a thorough cleaning, someone to live in it and love it, too. We were pretty sure we were going to be who would love it. The inside was mostly gray, and all the cupboards were empty. As I wandered through these rooms I would eventually come into a secret, inner room of the house, which was somehow suspended between the floors or otherwise hidden, and which no one had thought to point out to us existed. This room, despite its position, was always sun-lit and clean, with yellow walls and a white floor. There was a piano. And there were several raised platforms around the space. I knew that one was for writing, one was for thinking, one was for drawing, and so forth. It was my room. I knew that mathematically, the platforms lined up with hours of the day, that they were divisible by task and that I would always have equal energy for each of them. There were doors on opposite walls, and staircases leading away from them. After the first time I visited this room I always knew to hightail it back there, whenever that house appeared in my dream again.

I stopped dreaming about these houses when my mother died of cancer, which was when I began to dream about the real houses we had lived in when she had still been alive. When my husband got sick next with cancer, I stopped dreaming about houses at all, because by then I had begun dreaming about the Underworld almost exclusively. Last week I had my first house dream in years. In it, I was standing with an elderly architect, and we were looking at a plan for a small house. He had drawn me extensive diagrams explaining the exact things I needed to do to make this place a prosperity house. As I watched, the building began to materialize on the ground below us, while we continued to discuss its nature from our vantage point somewhere in the air above it. It was a square, hip-roofed building, with a small capped chimney protruding from its exact middle. When I woke up from this dream I was still having it, and realized immediately that the house was not meant for me, nor was it even a house--it was supposed to be a studio, and it I was meant to build it for someone I had met a few weeks previously, someone who told me he once wanted to be an artist but who had abandoned that idea. His situation was not even the point. What was the point was the bolt of attraction I had felt for him suddenly, unexpectedly, one afternoon while we talked. It was the first emotion other than anger or grief that I had felt in all the long months--years--since my husband had sickened and then died. And there was something in me that was so grateful to finally be pushed awake, to be made to climb back up out of that grave where all mourners really go to live for a time. Of course I would have a house dream again. It's that grateful part of me wanting to construct a thank-you note, a little temple to house what's been awakened. My architect companion has evaporated by now, but when I look out my window to where I imagine the studio would be, I can feel him invisible beside me, nodding, nodding, manipulating the master plan this way and that. I feel desire coming to life in me again, manipulating my own thoughts this way and that. I think, is this what he meant by prosperity when he first dreamt of this building, and then put that dream in me?

Thinking out loud

This morning started off like so many of them do, that is, optimistically. Early in the day, before the weight of things has started to assert itself, it's easy to be forward-looking, easy to imagine that on this day, things might come together, everything might really work out after all. By seven-thirty I was on the computer, reading my usual papers, and thinking about what sort of things might spin themselves out of the day's fibers. What piles of gold. I wasn't thinking that the phone would ring then, but it did, and the call was from my son at school, who had forgotten something crucial to his day. This was really a minor matter; my reactions to it were not. It always surprises me, my ready slide from annoyance, to anger, to fury. Organization has long been one of my son's challenges, although his teachers have told me that overall, his abilities fall somewhere in the middle of the boys his age. Not so bad, in other words. But I don't compare him to his classmates, I compare him to his sister, whose own organizational skills developed at warp drive. It's always unfair to compare kids, yes, but I am angry now at the interruption, angry that I have to drive the fifteen-mile circuit from home to school to home again. And, once my morning has been interrupted like this, my mood is likewise in free fall, and of course, there will be no meaningful work done for the day.

I debate: is the right thing here to bail him out, take the missing papers to the school, or is the right thing to be a tough love parent now and make him endure the backlash from forgetting his work. The real question is, do I want to teach him consequences or do I want to teach him that there are second chances? I think about it while already knowing I'm going to opt for the route of second chances, and here, it's his history that's working in his favor. My son watched his father get a second chance when he went into remission from a serious cancer, and then watched him die anyway after the cancer came back. That's something no one can undo; now, I decide, all I can do is go ahead and offer help when I am able to do so. Try to prove that sometimes, things do work out like you hope they will.

By the time the car is warming I've dampened enough of my anger to start thinking more clearly about my son. Yes, he's messy and disorganized where his sister is precise and methodical. But he is also empathetic where she is self-absorbed, compassionate where she is sarcastic. And in many ways, at twelve years old, is more mature than I, who am so ready to be overwhelmed by my anger some days. When they were both much younger I decided once that what kids lack is perspective; these days it is my own shaky perspective that is out of step with what's really going on in my world. That amplifies my reactions to the point where they drown out everything else.

Truth is, sometimes the kids just get in the way, and when I'm yelling at them, it's not them that I'm angry with. This morning I was less angry with my son's forgetfulness than I was with my own creativity's skittishness. Why, at the first sign of imbalance in the day, does the desire to write, to create, run away and hide itself in a cave? And why will nothing coax it back out, all the rest of the day? I sometimes imagine that my own kids are comparing me to their friends' mothers, and not favorably: I am sure those women seem worlds kinder, more patient, more successful than I. Today I can imagine that my wounded writing impulse is sitting by itself somewhere, also comparing me--also unfavorably--to all the other writers to whom it might have belonged, other writers who are smarter, more centered, more productive than I have ever been able to be. How, I wonder, to convince it that there are also second chances there. What word, what gesture, will it take.