Tag: beauty

Humanity

July’s end

Lovelovemotherexpletive

I’ve been reading a lot. I’m waiting for the patches to dry and then I’m repainting the walls in the kitchen. I’m beginning week two of my daughter being at summer camp and I’m officially over it. My 18-year-old has been working every day and then evenings with his dad as they over there are preparing to move into a new house. lovely man bob is down with another heart thing (not open-heart surgery again so that is excellent) and i’m just done with all of it.

ALL OF IT.

i’m dreaming about escape to a waterfront cabin in far north maine, where I will spend my winters with nothing but books and a fireplace. fuck it all. let me nurse the wounds of leaving motherhood all by myself. maybe some bread, cheese, a weekly beer and a television that only works once a week. No need for a plow because I have nowhere to go.

the last time I was this fixated on escape, I was married with young children and had no company. that, I still understand. this time around? I don’t really understand it as much. I mean, I have a life, friends, man, job, and a great ability to find all the shimmer and joy that there is.

Now? it is loss, so much change of an internal, self-identity sort that I cannot process it all. My middle E, 18, was singing and playing the guitar on my sofa and singing, still in his lifeguard uniform, and I shoved him out when he was done because I was about to sob in his face. I’ve spent a lot of time pretending I’m fine. It’s fine. It’s fine.

I’ve started writing for myself again, journaling if you will, but what I keep circling back to is the need for me to reforge myself. I’ve been burnt already and now, since I am currently in a melted pool on the porch, it should be a straightforward process?

How do I make myself into the main character?

I was a good daughter, good grandchild, decent-enough wife (though clearly, not ACTUALLY enough), and then a mom, and in all those relationships, I was in service, or that is how it feels. and so now, when I am no longer approaching things like that, no longer serving others… I become an entirely different being.

I mean, don’t I? Do I?

more to come, more to come.

-lovelove

Humanity

New Year, now 2026

Lovelovemotherexpletive

I did finish Cannery Row. I loved it, the detached but clear, the emotions laid out, no therapy needed.. the gathering of characters, the drinking without emotional recoil, the raucous life. and honestly, the history, the ways in which a cannery town feels like a mining town, a logging camp, and oilman’s camp. All the characters in a mix with the greatest emotional turmoil being loneliness. Ah. Somehow all so lovely, ending up lovely with a sweet bit of poetry included:

Even now,
I know that I have savored the hot taste of life
Lifting green cups and gold at the great feast.
Just for a small and a forgotten time
I have had full in my eyes from off my girl
The whitest pouring of eternal light-

-on the last page of Cannery Row, lest you think I wrote it myself, because no.

I went to the first hockey game of my life and loved it. It was a regional high school team which includes friends of my kids, and siblings etc. AND they won dramatically and fantastically in an amazing match up. And because I am a goalie mom I watched and whispered strength to the goalie who had an astonishing number of saves. What more is there than that? That the percentage of saves is what really matters in life, and we all tend to forget that in our rush for ambitions and progress and ‘wins’.

My percentage of saves is high, my friends. and I’m really damn lucky. and hallelujah, January is here, and my body feels better and its over, for another year, this holiday fuckery. Made it through. I guess we all did, who are reading here. So there is that. And I love you, and I’ll see you.

_kate

My final slip of paper, my duty for the year is to make this true:

I can do it. I’m halfway there already.

Humanity

Leaving the farm.

Lovelovemotherexpletive

Is it on? Is this thing on?

I sat down to write about how it felt to climb down off the tractor and to know I won’t be climbing back up. There is so much in this for me. I tried paper and pen but couldn’t bear it. The beauty the beauty. Unbearable.

It was heavy. My whole chest was physically constricted. And I know it has to be done, is being done, but I still have not come to grips. I cannot believe it.

I’ve gotten a job, a grown up job that has benefits and the same hours every day and a salary, and possibly sick days and things like that that i haven’t even considered.

And I’m starting tomorrow. And it precludes/excludes the ‘squeezing in of hours’ that my life before allowed.

And I’m in mourning. For the woman who started there, as a way to fill in the times when the kids were with their dad. It was really like that. They were young, i was always there. Always.

Seeds

I started there probably seven years ago, my eldest would have been 13, and the youngest just six. It felt like a lot of money because it was farmwork and when i did it in high school, i was just paid $7 an hour, under the table. So it was way way more than that, and I would start having references again. It was a step, a little one, an it got me talking to people in the world again.

And I helped people pick out the good veggies and the farmers washed and harvested and put everything out at the beginning and away at the end of every night.

Now i harvest (only a little bit but i do.) and wash, and set up, and break down, and make the board and think about next week’s setup and keep it all stocked and i know so many of the customers intimately. And I seed the baby plants and run the plant sale and I take care of thousands of eggs and chickens per week and I drive the goddamned tractor. I’ve watched the farmer’s kid grow into a really cool girl, and i love my farmers isn’t just a bumper sticker over here.

Sigh. Sky.

And I worry that I’ll lose my connection to the work and the joy and pain of being outside year round. And what if my dad stops being proud of me? Or Grammie, or Joel, or Kate Crowley? Or the goddamned farmer? What if they move on like i was never there? I WAS THERE. (From heaven, three of them, because i have issues and need therapy. Always.)

And then, there is the beauty. I don’t think you know how beautiful it is out there. The dirt in a tractor tire, the lean of a fence post, the water sluicing the dirt off the carrots, the shocking color of the Swiss chard. I don’t think you know the wild variety of egg. Shells and breakage and boxes and delivering the food to people, feeding, knowing that what is happening, the exchange of energy is pure goodness. Pure.

Dirt is the way. The beginning and the end. And I WAS THERE.

What? I was.

Humanity

Sunday, I slept til 8:30 am, a miracle.

Lovelovemotherexpletive

Sleep.

a miracle. my head is a little foggy, but there is coffee nearby, and a kid with a tiny tv in her lap. the table is cluttered again, as is regular, and there is a christmas tree bowling set-up, an empty water bottle on its side and an unattached cord, a wide fat white candle, two empty glasses and a box of magic cards. every chair has something on it. a scarf, a stolen coat, a gifted denim shirt, and a pretty brown bag that used to have dumplings in it. it is quite lovely really, that bag, especially for a bag that is explicitly for ‘take away’. i love it when the mundane are treated with craft and meaning.

i’m not sure what i came here to write about today, just know that i needed to. i’ve finished a book lately, Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and it was wildly familiar, while being utterly separate from any experience I’ve ever had. Maybe as a former sidecar to an alcoholic, I recognize it? Maybe its my dream of escape returning, that young mother’s delusional dream? The main character willfully and determinedly tries to drug herself into sleep for a year, in the sincere hopes that when the sleep is done, there will be clarity, blueberries at the end of the rainbow and such. The names of the pills were mostly foreign to me, but I sure do know that my alarm bells will ring if anyone ever mentions any of them to me. but the dream of somehow waking up? a true deep waking up? oh yes. I feel that dream, have lived that one.

maybe that’s what sleeping is all about, for me. the hope for the waking up well-rested, the clarity of mind and purpose. the appreciation of the coffee and the clutter with an uncluttered mind.

and then again, maybe sleeping is just about sleeping. resting. breaking the mind from its yoke.

I guess thats what i came here for, to talk miracles, and waking up, and sleeping. I’m not going to lie, I’m not sure what you’ll make of it. but i’m here for it, still a little bit groggy, because the wakeup was unclear. Definitely cluttered. Its a beginning, and there is alot more. Dare I mention the yoke of ‘woke’? HAAAAA. i dared, and it felt awful, and I’m sorry. But my grimace is heading towards light-hearted on that one, sort of. ugh. sorry.

what’re your daily miracles? How do you wake up in the morning? What is your sleep like? what are the waking dreams?

Humanity

summer lists and tips

Lovelovemotherexpletive

like the boat my father-in-law lost in the harbor, she tips, and leans, and slowly sinks. the heat, my friends, the heat, and she’s only half way done.

In my fiftieth year, I set myself some goals, which is a thing I am wishy washy about, being as they are, something of a new year’s resolution, bound for sinking.

but with the joy of a number like fifty, there is something so satisfying in the attempt. I would like to have fifty beach visits this year, and fifty books. I am small-wishing, a possibly achievable goal, and one which I will really enjoy attempting.

books, as you know, are harder to read when your mind has shifted to the quick and tempestuous nature of the phone. the ability to pay attention has weakened, and i want it back. At work at the farm, I have to listen while I seed, or drive, so there is that change to my life of reading.

I am currently listening to Jane Eyre. and c’mon. there is so much that I have forgotten and my relationship with Mr. Rochester is so deeply changed. What a goddamned scoundrel. I want to rush to grab Jane and take her away from the living RedFlag.

And I listened to the Grass Harp last month, and man, I was surprised by moments of deep love for some of those characters. And the treehouse and the desire to escape to one. and love, what does it mean to love, and to love hard, the tiniest of things. Oh my laws.

I’ve been to the beach seven times this month, and that is seven times more than I went last summer, which is part of my deeply needed change taking place. There is, there, a way to grab back your own soul from what buildings your body builds around it. I’ve lost track of how many staircases there are in my way these days, and I need to get back to the simple shoreline of my self.

Town beach, Westport,MA.

I’m here. There are a few things I am failing at, and I’ve got no choice but to look at them. And that is tough and very unliked. But there are so many more things that I am swinging right through. And today I will cut some flowers from my garden. I’m taking my dirty feet out there as soon as I’m done here, and I will be astonished, and so will my kitchen table.

i love you guys out there in the world, because you read my words, and i feel in company, and thats pretty damn valuable to me.

and while the boat may drift, she is not counted out just yet.

  • me.