Stargazers

My papa was a Hotshot in the US Forest Service - those crazy guys who go running into flames when deer go running the other way. The job meant that he was ace with a chainsaw, and could navigate around Big Sur with only a topographical map and the stars. It also meant that, unlike his daughter, he rarely panicked even when fire was involved.

Remember to look up. (JP Stanley, 2006) 

One time my papa found himself walled into a meadow by flames. There was little he could do in the circumstances but wait, so he curled up next to the embers of a smoldering log and decided to get some rest. Back to the burnt earth, eyes to the heavens, he watched the long-dead fires of ghosting stars blink overhead, and felt the resigned peace of a tiny ant in a gargantuan universe.

This is my memory of a story I was told when I was little. Due to the challenges of stargazing through smoke, I am probably embellishing some of the details. But it is true that my papa made a point of showing me the constellations when I was a girl.

When Ana was born, my initial course of action was to obsessively hover over her to make sure she was still breathing. Papa's main concern in the was getting me to stop hovering and go the heck to sleep. His next priority was to take her outside and show her the stars. Apparently - and he remembers this like I remember the Big Sur story - he was taken outside and shown the stars in his infancy.

I did eventually stopped hovering. Ana kept on breathing, and she even got to gurgle at the stars like a baby ant. Thank goodness for papas.

15: Westward leading

Perfect light. 

Day fifteen and we have not yet found Orientar. Nor do we have any good leads to be honest. However, in the Dory 'just keep swimming' school of thought, we are doggedly following yonder star.

This week at Chaos HQ

We are counting our blessings as per some old bit of Lutheran wisdom I just made up.

Our blessings are as numerous as stars in the sky or flowers in the urban field.

Especially this week, as we wait for three of our beloved ones to land.

They are crossing a cold sea and braving the perils of Heathrow as I type.

Without our beloved ones, we would only be wandering stars or flowers lost in the urban field. 

As any sufficiently lapsed Lutheran will tell you, it pays to count your blessings. 

We welcome them in out of the cold swim with open arms: Grandma, Uncle Rice, and Auntie A. 

Wonderlust

My daughters are gobsmacked by new discoveries every day. Their gobsmackery is manifested on a sliding scale between pure delight and abject terror.

Grown-ups encounter new things far less frequently than children. But occasional moments of gobsmackery permeate the adult defences too.

Today I discovered these beauties at the farmer's market.

Stargazing.

Aren't they gorgeous? Like constellations of stars marauding as berries.

I've been staring at them all afternoon with a childish grin. They taste good - about how you would expect Cassiopeia to taste if Cassiopeia were made of albino currants and not stars.

Greengages, a fruit I only had the pleasure of meeting in recent years, had a similar initial effect on me. Greengages are such a counter-intuitive plum - they look for all the world like unripe apricots and taste like heaven.

Even more wonderful than greengages is Kid, Ana's imaginary friend who lives in her hand. As with so many wonderful characters in this world, I met Kid on a bus. Not a Greyhound on smoke break in Kansas City at 4am, but rather Ana's first red double-decker through the big smoke.

As we sat at the very top by the window and she told me repeatedly that we were going to London on the bus (we were in fact in London already, but she was impervious to this suggestion). Then, beaming delightedly, she extended her hand out to the window, shaped like a shadow puppet.

A kid's Kid. 

'Look Kid,' she said. 'Look at that! We're going to London, Kid!'

I love Kid. I ask to talk to him all the time, and if Ana is in a good mood she indulges me. She understands that one should respect the hand that feeds. You see, while Kid inhabits her right hand, Kid's Mama inhabits her left.

Today's currants made me recall two of my own favourite moments of adult wonder.

Ana, an abstract free-form scribbler of the Jackson Pollock school, recently sat down of her own accord and - with grown-up-like concentration - drew a discernible person on paper for the first time. 'Look Mama,' she said with authority, 'it's WALL-E.'

And indeed, there was no mistaking WALL-E. I was gobsmacked with delight.

WALL-E (and EVE).

Around the same time, Ali toddled over to the sliding glass door of our old house. She gazed up at the sky and pointed.

'Moon!' she whispered in pure delighted wonder. She'd never said the word before, identified any celestial bodies, or frankly appeared to have much interest in them.

Then she toddled off and began shouting at her blocks in spite of my best efforts to prologue the magic by sitting at the window and shouting 'MOON!' in that silly undignified fashion that only gobsmacked parent would do.

Both moments passed in a blink. The girls have forgotten. Till the currants today, I had forgotten too.

In fact, at this juncture any sensible reader might bang her head against the wall and demand to know why these mundane moments are worth remembering at all.

And my response to all this imaginary head-banging is this: because these were not isolated moments at all. Instead they were ripples from two monumentally wondrous moments. Twice in my life I have hovered over a newborn daughter, gazing in wonder at her perfect sleeping face for the first time.

It doesn't get more wonderful than that.

Of course birth is followed by years in the wilderness. No sooner does the midwife say 'Congratulations, it's a girl!' then you are rushed onto a waiting boat in the Thames and shipped off to years of hard labour with added ketchup in a Tasmanian penal colony.

Which is why savouring these moments of wonder is so important.

Parenthood is the act of jumping from sweet moment to sweet moment like a game of hop-scotch played over a lava field.

In fact life in general is a confusing cocktail of tragedy and wonder. Which is easy to remember on grim news weeks like this one. All that matters is loving the people we love. And making valiant efforts to love everybody else too.

Flying in thunderstorms

February in England, and in the overworked insult to injury department, it's raining. No thunder, no lightning, no terrifyingly beautiful thunderheads, just drizzle. Blerg above, blerg below, a generous helping of blerg on the side. 

 But on the bright side, the lovely Polish Mama on the Prairie has given Mañana Mama the Versatile Blogger Award - high praise indeed for an old stuck-in-a-rut type like me - thank you Polish Mama. As per the terms of the honour, here follow three mostly true trivialities about me (more versatile bloggers than I go for seven, but I'll stick to three to save on reader eye-strain).  

Firstly, I am a bookish* Lutheran from a Catholic town, which means that I am contractually obliged to regard Garrison Keillor as the patron saint of English majors everywhere.

Secondly, Cassiopeia is my favourite constellation in all of the big, black night sky. Sometimes I step outside, close my eyes, and picture Cassiopeia etched on the backs of my eyelids. Before you call me a wierdo, remember I live in Britain, where 'looking at the stars' is an old Scots phrase that means 'use your flipping imagination'. 

And lastly, a rambling childhood ghost** resurrected in my mind by the pitter-patter of little raindrops outside.
I grew up down a bumpy dirt road that crossed an arroyo by way of a dirt bridge*** with a tin culvert in the middle. One summer thunderclouds rolled over the llano in June and didn't leave until September. And one afternoon in that monsoon summer it rained - as per my favourite agricultural phrase -  like a cow pissing on a flat rock. A torrent of angry muddy water filled the arroyo and then - with a terrifying boom - blew the culvert clear out of the bridge like a cannon shot. When the flood subsided we found the culvert farther down the arroyo, washed up like a sad, beached corrugated whale in a sand bank. And there is stayed for years. 

There were huge, lush, neon-green weeds everywhere that summer, covered in velvety black caterpillars - a bit of a fluke in the high desert. In June a flotilla of construction vehicles descended on the neighbourhood to widen the narrow highway that connected our culvert-less dirt road to town. The builders paved the new stretch of road parallel to the old one, working hard all morning to drop tools by late afternoon. In the quiet evenings, my dad and I would sneak into the site armed with a pink bike and a set of training wheels, and he taught me how to ride.

The tarmac was so smooth, smoother than the proverbial baby's backside, and while I peddled like mad down the newborn road, wind in my face, the smell of the warmed summer earth and car exhaust in my nose, I used to shut my eyes and pretend I was flying.

On a good day, that's what it feels like to sit down to plonk out some nonsense on a keyboard. 

Learning to fly, ain't got wings. 

Anyway, in the spirit of versatility, and for any reader left awake, here's a handful of the wonderful stuff I like to read, when not otherwise occupied with imaginary stargazing and a Prairie Home Companion.

• Imperfect Pages Notes on motherhood and the gazillion things in orbit around it. 
• Life in the Country The antidote for the stuck-in-the-city blues.  
• Bod for Tea Delightful musings on being a mama and eating glorious food.
• Cranky Monkeys in London Witty dispatches on monkey-rearing in the big smoke. 
• This Mid 30s Life Hilarity penned with the help of an extremely important celebrity sidekick.  
• OneArmGirl Traveller, philosopher, eye-witness to the culvert incident.  
• Cinnamon and Truffle A transatlantic sisterhood of positive energy and edibles. 
• Kate Takes 5 Frank and funny postings from a listography superhero. 
• Jenny Matlock A tangential queen.
• A Muddled Mother Resonant insights into the front line of the 'get me out of here' school of parenting.  

To all the above: it is always such a pleasure to read your work - thank you for sharing it. Please feel free to pass on the versatility bug (or not) as, if and when you see fit.

In the meantime, rain, rain go away.

*A devastating condition for which there is no known cure.
**Really quite rambling, so permission granted to commence TLDR now.
***You may have noticed a general 'dirt' theme at work in my life by now. 

Ode to the road

To my beloved open road,

It's been a long four long years since I last hit you.

Of course I meant to return to you sooner, but a mountain of nappies grew between us. You see, travel is kryptonite to kids. Actually kids find kryptonite in almost everything under the sun, but travel is high on the list.

Something in the way.

Sometimes when I can't stand missing you any longer, I jump in the car and drive up the tallest hill around just to look out at the horizon. Often this makes things worse because usually all I can see is Aylesbury and a bit of fog. But on quiet nights I can hear you purring seductively out on the London Orbital, so tantalizingly close.

I can remember heading out on the highway like it was yesterday. Papa and I drove like the wind through endless rolling plains, past countless dodgy truck stops, up sky-scraping mountains, down lonely scenic byways into the wilderness, past town after crappy town. We lived on the fly; all we knew was that the fuel tank would flatline too soon, and that there would be at least one toothless, oil-stained dude at whatever gas station it was that we stopped to fill up at.

Out west we pitched camp under the bright Milky Way at night. In sleepless awe we listened to crickets sing into the big empty. And to grizzly bears rummaging for midnight snacks in rubbish bins. And to rain drip-dripping right through our waterproof tent and straight onto our foreheads. What joyous comfort it was to rise with the sun and return to strong steel arms, to the gritty smell of petrol exhaust, to the smooth old reliable tarmac.

Hit the road in tooth and claw. 

Planes, trains, broken-down automobiles, blistery hiking boots: so many forms, but always my one true. I no longer care about the right side, the left side, California stops or WTF roundabouts—I can't deny what is between us. The sedentary life simply ain't my bag.

A rolling stone can't sit still forever and I know we'll be together again. Till then my heart will pine after your broad shoulders and your smooth curves; my lead foot will yearn for your high speed limits and your wide open straightaways.

Much love and a little gas money,

~M

PS: This sappy billet-doux was inspired by Honest Mum's far more eloquent love letter to London, and it is accompanied by Polish Mama on the Prairie's dedication to her beloved Wroclaw.