Images from last winter. Winter: sadness and beauty and strangeness and silence. A planet where it snows all the time. Summer is always different: each shift in climate and each year passing brings different flowers, more or less flowers, taller trees. But each winter looks the same to me, this return to a quiet and weightless world.
The very tall dead deciduous tree that Steve painted blue this summer. And though it’s not living, things are living on it. He went down into the woods yesterday and this is what he found. Nature is incredible.
Steve unplanted the dead blue tree, rested it on the ground, and in the freezing cold he wrapped it with red lights. Then he replanted it with the lights on.
My brain goes in and out of working order. Swimming through warm and cool spots in an ocean, hormone spike here that makes me forget what I meant to say–
then exhaustion — the kind of exhaustion like in the beginning, that turns my brain to jello and makes every stair a chore. And crankiness, which makes me less lovable. This collage has circles in it. I’m getting close to the end, I can tell, because it feels like the beginning.
And fear. The what-if-I’m-not-good-enough / what-if-sleeping-on-my-back-has-damaged-the-baby / fear-fear. That’s returned. Waking last night at 3:30 in the morning, so wide awake it seems best to just get up and do some writing or clean the kitchen. Instead: ruminating (cyclical theme). About money, about all uncertain futures, about what on earth to name this baby and if I’ll know when I see him like I tell people I will, about IVF and how much I hated it and why (you mean she’s not over that already?), about the dogs and if they’re okay–
the dogs have been moved to Jack’s room for the night now. I realized in one other ruminating middle-of-the-night session that dogs in the bed with a newborn baby is a deal breaker (I’m beginning to love 30 Rock). It would be stupid, and my training sessions to try to keep the dogs on the floor would fail in the middle of the night because they’d crawl back up as I slept and I wouldn’t notice, and by morning all our training would be lost. I put the baby monitor in their room so I can hear if they’re choking or vomiting or all the dozens of fears I conjure in this transition. The first night one of them chewed up a pencil. No other incident since.
Are you going to snap right back to your old shape? That’s what happens to my Sims. (– Rosie)
You’re walking like the pregnant people do in my Sims game. (– Rosie)
Hormone spike: everything smells bad again. Even me. On our walk this morning we passed a man who smelled like airports and vodka. Coffee-breath smells like death-rot.
An hour walk still each morning. Even when it’s 11 degrees. My wool coat buttons except for around the waist. I can walk a dog on the way downtown but on the way back Steve kindly takes both leashes — tackling the meek Ann Arbor hills plus a dog plus a hot chocolate puts too much pressure on my back and shins.
I just woke from a midafternoon nap. In the studio. I turned off the lights and the room glowed dark winter gray. On the chaise lounge, barely the width of my body, especially now, both dogs crawled up there with me, the heater oscillating between all three of us.
I have no control over so many things. My parents and brother and sister have planned a trip the week before the due date, but they have to double-pack their bags in case they end up on the plane to Ann Arbor with one phone call about contractions. I am worried about ruining their plans and about the expense of sudden airline tickets during the holidays.
Just squeeze it in. ( — my sister)
Just squeeze it in. ( — Steve)
Just go over a bunch of pot holes if you want to have it early. ( — neighbor)
But I can’t even get the baby to turn or not turn. The baby’s kicking, Steve puts his hand on my stomach, and he abruptly stops kicking. I get apologetic, as if I could help it. The boy is not a performer.
I want to know what exactly the dogs know about the baby. Do babies only give off their baby smell once they’re born, or is he giving it off right now? Do the dogs smell, as the handicapped man at church in his wheelchair said to me on Sunday, that I’m walking for two? They don’t treat me any more gently. Can’t the dogs see that I swallowed a basketball or a watermelon seed or any other metaphor that I’ve heard recently?
What part of this baby is human and what part is still in a sort-of purgatory between human and upside-down blue bat? I asked Steve once on a walk if the soul/spirit/personality/essence/character of a person comes at the early embryo stage or when the baby breathes his first breath, and Steve thought that maybe it came in between, or maybe even later.
We are visual people. Or I am. Like doubting Thomas, I need to see the baby for myself before I believe that this is real. The turning in my stomach, I can only abstractly identify it with a baby. I don’t even know which part is his head. Once I thought I might have felt a foot. After nine months, the better part of a year, it gets hard to believe that this will end with a prize. Though I read this yesterday and I know it’s true: I love you more than sleep.
(In the homeless writing workshop today, I gave the prompt of Super Vision based on a gorgeous book I brought in — it shows the world that exists that we can only see with microscopes and other new technology. The goal: to try to see beyond what we initially see, and because writing asks us to do that anyway.)
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I wake and scrape sweat off my chest: the dog has slunk up into bed where the baby will be.
Fur under a microscope has a gasoline rainbow inside.
Fur patterns on the sheets: fractals, snowflake articulations. Superfur.
A core sample of his body, down past the fur a layer of muscle, sinew, bugs, coral bones.
He arranges himself around his ribs, his coat of arms.
His blood a tattoo, blue river patterns.
Rice in his intestines. Bugs along his eyelashes.
On the mattress: dirt particles.
A spine shield, it protects my body from the window.
At night the husband mutters, takes a pillow and with sinew hands slams
the mattress, slams the mattress.
Dirt fur patterns scatter, reassemble on the floor,
dirt residue like cinnamon like fleas left behind. White sheets.
Or gray-white sheets.
The dog spine curves, folds, S1 S2 S3 pushes against me.
Each spine pearl, each rubber muscle, no ice cubes.
The down quilt: dead feathers coagulate heat,
dead feathers washed and clumped, falling out of some crack in the quilt,
stuck in the northwest corner of the bedroom,
and down into my lungs and the dog lungs,
down our windpipes, quiet flutes at night.
The baby is partially comprised of dog fur and down.
I swallow dust and the baby digests, becomes us.
I don’t want the dog off the bed.
Strathmore weight white sky. Clouds impressed.
Particles of clouds drifting down here.
The heater oscillates between the two folded dogs.
Curtains on the white windowsill are translucent.
Their carved lines, a second layer of sky.
Quiet.
Dogs wait for something.
They don’t feel guilty when they sleep in the day.
You better get your sleep now.
You better get your sleep now but you can’t.
The body has other plans. Sheets twist.
Floating on the rim of sleep, dipping for a bad dream and back up again.
The dogs stir, unfold and fold, origami paper with dirt on the creases.
This is how your body prepares you. See how it’s not so bad.
The baby turns, pushes a foot or maybe a knee along my left rib.
He hangs like a bat from a cord, and he’s blue.
Not breath, not spirit, not human yet.
When I see you I’ll know your name.
When else do I wait like this, not knowing the day nor the hour.
Life and death come unannounced.
The baby turns and there’s an elbow or maybe a head touching my sciatic nerve.
Downward-facing dog at three o’clock in the morning.
The blue baby shifts. The dogs shift.
I wake to a head on my bladder. The curtains rock by the box fan.
A continuous rhythm, a heartbeat, the sound a baby knows
before he comes to the surface. Swish heart swish bladder swish swish.
The sky brightens.
When babies are born what they know is that it’s cold.
Ask him when he’s two years old and speaks:
babies say later that they remember they’re born they’re cold.
I will wrap my baby in blankets right away and put him against my heart
if I remember.
The sky brightens in irregular intervals.
The particles of clouds scurry horizontally past the window.
When is too late to sleep when sleep grazed all night. Don’t ask the dogs,
who burrow, castrated, babies their whole lives.
I have a photograph of fireworks and it looks just like these tree branches.
Slow monochrome fireworks. I didn’t dream about you all night.
Fast fireworks along the sciatic nerve.
Fireworks on the due date.
This is tenuous.
I can’t believe you’re real until I’m holding you out here in the cold.
Your skin translucent sky, my skin done doubting and not resting yet.
A fellow writing resident at the Vermont Studio Center gave some of us a recipe he got from his mother in law. Just the recipe, in Spanish, “Pastel de Yogur y Nueces” — no photographs, a lot of Spanish words in the recipe, and no description of what the outcome would be. We all agreed to make the item this weekend, and to document the process.
I loved the mysteriousness of making something without knowing at all how it would turn out, and the camaraderie of all of us baking in our separate kitchens at the same time — it reminded me of Julie and Julia, but better — and I loved the silly competition that comes from that knowledge that we’re all making the same thing. And most of all I loved the arbitrary measuring device the recipe called for: a yogurt container. Or not so arbitrary, because the recipe called for yogurt, but rather a measuring device that is extremely specific to the recipe: form and content merged.
This was our mission:
1 yogur—one container of yogurt: this container will be the measuring cup for the rest of the recipe.
1 vaso de aceite—one of oil [we always use olive oil...but I think you can use whatever you want]
4 huevos—four eggs
3 vasos de harina—three of flour [white is best, or a mixture. I was out of white last time and used all wheat flour...still good, just need to make slight adjustments on everything...obvious, I guess]
2 vasos de azucar—two of sugar
1 royal—one package of baking powder. If you’re like me and don’t have little packages that are sold everywhere in northern Spain, you’ll want to use about 1 tablespoon of powder.
Horno a 170 grados—set the oven at 170 c….what is that, 300 something? Maybe 350?
the ingredients
the helper
the measuring device
steve pops in with some frozen sage from our garden
frozen sage
a prop
licking the bowl
describing the process to them
apples on top
sprinkled cinnamon
what to do with the leftover apples and the cinnamon residue
helper
recipe
working while it bakes
i cooked it a little bit too long, about an hour.
perhaps we’ll have it for dessert.
