We planted so much basil. Maybe the most we’ve ever planted, and we still have pesto leftover from last year (and, actually, from the year before that, too). So I shouldn’t have been so sad.

When we were in Seattle, we paid someone to drive by our house and check on our basil to make sure that it didn’t get hit by frost. We had sheets ready to drape them. When we came home, our basil was still alive, though many of the leaves had dropped. There was a green carpet underneath the thinned, still-green basil plants.

Then my family came to town for four days. There was a lot of activity and much to do and no time to think about the basil, and on the last night it frosted. We woke to gray basil leaves at the edges of the basil patch, but the inside leaves were still okay.

We were too exhausted that day to pick leaves. We dropped by sister off at the airport in the afternoon, then I went home and slept for three hours. We checked the weather that night and saw that it wouldn’t frost again. I slept for nine hours that night.

But the next morning the leaves looked worse. Every one had gray spots.

We harvested anyway, last night, half-heartedly, after more hours of self-imposed bed rest.

We didn’t have to pick for long.

I know it’s a lot about the hormones, but the sort-of harvest made me too sad. After our beautiful summer, after all our tending, all the songs inside the smell of our basil. After a week of adventure and a perfect weekend with my family, we were just a little bit too late to save it. I can’t stand loss right now. It makes me too afraid for other losses.

October 13th, 2009 | Category: house | Leave a comment

You can drive on the beach in Washington. 25 mph. That’s fast on sand.

We passed a dead sea lion. And a pile of salmon carcasses, congregated by seagulls.

There aren’t many houses with an ocean view at all. Some hotels, but not like I would have thought. Maybe because the water’s always too cold to swim in.

The beach is so long. I’m used to New Jersey. So long that if you lived right on the beach, you’d still have to hike a good bit to get your toes in the water.

In some ways it felt more like a desert than a beach. The water unreachable, sand stretching so far that nothing else is close-up even with a zoom lens.

I’m used to feeling the expanse of the ocean on one side and the wall of houses on the other, but here I felt little and a little, mostly wonderfully, agoraphobic.

October 13th, 2009 | Category: happening | Leave a comment

A beautiful essay in the New York Times Magazine: Against Meat, by Jonathan Safran Foer.

October 12th, 2009 | Category: overheard | Leave a comment

We went to a beautiful wedding in Seattle. Fabric, wind, long poles of trees. A setting sun and a full moon rising. To go to a wedding is to witness with such empathy that I get married all over again, again and again.

October 12th, 2009 | Category: happening | Leave a comment

I heard a lot last weekend from people who hadn’t seen me in some time that I have a pregnant glow. I don’t know what it is. I don’t think it’s true. I’ve not seen it in anyone else who’s pregnant.

I think I look healthier because I don’t get to drink or eat too badly. But I also think I look waterlogged, like my sinuses sting. I definitely look more tired. I look like I’ve gained weight in my face at my cheeks. And if I haven’t eat for a couple of hours, I start to look green. Sometimes I wonder why people haven’t stopped me on the street to ask if I’m okay, my eyes look so gray underneath.

I read somewhere that it’s the oxytocin that makes the cheeks flush. But oxytocin is emitted during nursing, too, and no one says that women have a nursing glow.

I pressed someone who said it to me to tell me what she meant, how I could possibly look like I have a pregnant glow. This woman is smart, but she shrugged and said she just sees it in people when they start to show, and I am wary.

We saw a friend in Northern Michigan earlier this summer who didn’t recognize us at first — it was too coincidental that she was there at the very same beach at the very moment that we were there — and when she saw me, she said to herself, that woman’s pregnant. She said she could tell by the way I was smiling, and at that point it was too soon to tell by my stomach.

October 12th, 2009 | Category: the baby thing | Leave a comment

My mom and older sister organized a baby shower for me at our house this weekend. It was at points overwhelming to see all these people I love in my house. I wanted to lock the door so no more people I loved would come in because if they did then I might explode. I couldn’t believe that people even remembered to come, and brought gifts for the coming baby, and stayed for hours to talk to strangers and listen to my dad tell them to save ten percent. It was elegant and beautiful and comfortable and really fun, and we kept partying long after we thought we would. After some feelings of loneliness the week before, it was just so amazing to see that we really aren’t alone and that there are so many people who already care for this baby and for us. Looking around at everyone, I felt completely sure that the baby would turn out okay, with a community as beautiful as the one I have around me.

My dad said the day before the party that we needed a balloon to help people find their way. I pictured a tiny blue balloon sagging from a string on our mailbox, but he went out with Steve and came back with the most massive balloon. BABY SHOWER, it says on the shape of a rattle, waving above the mailbox, letting all the neighbors know without a doubt that actually I’m pregnant like they may have suspected. Steve tried to convince my dad to get a small, discrete balloon, but my dad insisted. He said he wanted me to know that he supported me. He was so proud of it, he went outside after the party and took this picture himself.

October 12th, 2009 | Category: the baby thing | Leave a comment

For much of my life, my stomach has been my barometer: it tells me if I’m nervous, excited, uncomfortable, unwell. It lets me know if the food I eat is something I should eat (I feel my stomach turn away if it’s something that might hurt me), it lets me know if the food I ate was bad or bad for me, if I’m hungry or full, if I’m too afraid, it what I’m about to do is a big deal.

But now my stomach has butterflies inside because of a baby. At first the barometer told me a lot that I was anxious, but its reading was off because the baby was turning or kicking. Now I don’t have a barometer anymore. I don’t know much about how to tell if I’m stressed or hungry — the hormones keep the stress at bay, and I eat too much to feel hungry very often. Hunger now is indicated by fatigue and annoyance.

I love that I don’t have my stomach to tell me how I’m feeling anymore. I love that I can feel all the moving inside and know that it has nothing to do with fear or indigestion. The entire middle of my body is taken over by a moving human, and it changes all the signs.

October 12th, 2009 | Category: the baby thing | Leave a comment

Two nightmares in one night. These days logic drowns. Especially in the dark. I am afraid of being alone. What saves me often: love. I grab onto his hand.

But he’s sleeping, and when I try to wake him he doesn’t understand. A father to his daughter when she comes into our room: it was just a dream go back to bed. He pushes logic but it has spikes sometimes. She cries and sleeps beside her brother instead.

I feel that fear: when I die I will be alone. Love can’t save me from that, and love can’t save me now. I will hold all children who come to my bedside afraid. For now I am a furry animal with a hurricane for a brain and a jellyfish heart.

I turn into my pillow and the night ticks on. In the first dream no one was there and I was lost and it started to snow. In the second dream a man was burning a woman and I was clubbing him in the face for hours.

I need to believe that if I wake, he wakes, and if I stutter out fear he understands and his hands comb my hair, his arms hold me unbearably tight. Then my heart would return to my chest.

What do people do without love. Virginia Woolf says that there are parts of us that no one, not even the most beloved, could ever find.

October 6th, 2009 | Category: dream | Leave a comment

Part of the muteness here the past few weeks is that I can’t remember what I meant to write about. Before, I would have a thought, ruminate, and when I had a chance to get to my computer I would write and learn as I went. But these days, in the third trimester, my brain is toast just like people say about pregnancy brain.

I have lost so many thoughts. Trying to get ready for our trip was a comedy, lists upon lists, lists lost, and not even close to everything got done — I’m not even sure what was supposed to get done, I just know there must have been things to do but my brain couldn’t picture the larger logic.

I was going to write something else here, but I am only permitted one thought at a time. This one, about brain scatteredness, swept over whatever else it was I meant to say. The other thought may come to me soon, but let’s hope that when it does I’m near something to write with.

October 6th, 2009 | Category: the baby thing | Leave a comment