washwords

I’m honeymooning.

Not literally. Yes, we’re planning our fabulous England/Scotland honeymoon (Bath – York – Edinburgh – highlands – glasgow-london. heee!) but that’s not what I mean.

Life is sweet –even when I’m tired and work is… work and it’s too hot and/or too cold (jon stewart’s line: hits by grandma, featuring “Its suffocatingly hot” and the B side, “now I’m too cold”) and the grass isn’t mowed and we have to do laundry and grocery shop and the car has a rumble… there’s a peace and a beauty I’ve not felt in so long… maybe ever.

It’s making you a sandwich though you say you’re fine, because I know it’s what you need; it’s you telling me “I got it” and that I know you do. It’s watching you write out cards and scroll through books and spreadsheets and maps, for us; and merging those cards with my own. It’s yard-saling, the perfect rhythm of my energy for selling and yours for packing and clearing. It’s walking with weights and strolling with woofs, our steps and words echoing as we move.

It’s holding my niece, crayons in one fist, new shirt I bought her dragged along in the other, playing in the grass and breezes, hearing her hearty laugh.

It’s friends, who sail in and out, but are there, always.

It’s working out physically in the gym and emotionally at meditation and feeling change if not seeing it quite yet.

So there’s still the orange line, the pointy bags, the close talkers. And there’s still work and trying to prove myself and help others thrive and learn. And there’s undone blogs, and “nights” I fall asleep at 4 p.m., and the missed opportunity of a deal unsnagged, but still…
there is still and peace and calm and… love.

Before noon today, I received surprise news concealed in a routine email – an acquaintance is engaged … and expecting!

I shouldn’t have been surprised. It capped an already happy morning. I came in early and was done what I thought would take all morning before nine, and then found a meeting canceled – happy day indeed, which, in turn, laced and tied a wonderful weekend. More than happy, it was a weekend, no a time, of love.

Saturday morning ML and I brunched with an old friend. I was blessed to grow up with “family friends” – I was probably 20 or so before I realized not everyone had this. But we did. And this friend – J – almost exactly a year younger than me has been my friend pretty literally from (her) birth. We shared a crib and a childhood at the therapeutic camp our parents ran that integrated “typical” kids and those with emotional disturbances or developmental disabilities (yessss, it was the 70s), holidays and playgrounds.  She and her family are more than friend, sometimes more than family. We spent weekends in a multi-family cabin in the Adirondacks, touring Williamsburg one year, at their community pool, after they moved to Virginia, a lifetime away then, when I was a kid.

Her dad’s calm, steady, soothing eulogy is one of the few concrete moments I can recall from my dad’s funeral when I was twelve, their support instrumental beyond measure in helping us all move beyond that day and breathe again.

J and I are both “sensitive” people, something that as anyone who has Read more »

Can’t we all just get along?
After spending the morning on blogher, reading about the NYT relegation of the blogher confererence to the style section and whether “mommy-blogging” is a term of empowerment or a mechanism for belittling, I came to Joy Nash’s “A Fat Rant” on Gena’s On the Stoop (and from there to LaurieStar’s response, “A thin rant.”) This fem-centered morning has me thinking a lot about the way we treat each other, the way we think of “women’s issues” and “women’s places,” be it in the media, the blogosphere or the mall.

YouTube – A Fat Rant

YouTube – A Thin Rant

I’m neither Joy’s size nor Laurie’s (though closer to Joy’s by far!) and I admit being one of the eyerollers at the tiny ones. More because “it’s not fair” – a big thing with me, I realize. It’s not fair that skinny girls are (See more after the jump.)

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