Looking Down

At the Anchorage Center for the Performing Arts, just after the Ira Glass show

Crocuses: One Week After the Snow

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

- from The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot

From Blizzard to Blue

Recently I've been holding my breath for the seasons to truly change. And when I say that I mean both literally and figuratively. The snow has been nearly gone three times this April - after seven months under white I've spied grass, I've seen crocuses blooming in the front yard, I've let myself exhale and ride a bike and get a pedicure and then a blizzard today covers the fresh all over once again, my newly polished toes in the freezing parking lot slush.

But then, figuratively (which has been much longer than snow), and this side dictates somewhere to belong and something to make that makes sense - and this season turned just recently. After nine months of planning, my business partner, Shana and I have made a radio show blossom from an idea. We will air starting in August on Alaska public radio, throughout the state, and she will host and I will produce something that aims to connect parents together. We'll give them a forum and a voice and air their concerns and discuss the current issues in good childraising.

It's been months of meetings, writing business plans, making graphs, strategizing, seeking funding, and then that last round of meetings last week, after we drove back to our cars we sat in the parking lot (in the snow) and nodded sitting there in our wooly jackets with our meeting notes on our laps. "I think we just got ourselves the jobs we wanted," said we, smiling, then smiling even bigger as we realized what we did and how long it'd been and how now it was a whole new real thing that needed a not-hypothetical schedule.

Shana doesn't know this, but she's something of an inspiration to me - young, hip mother married to the love of her life, living in Alaska, crafting herself a career in journalism here, and content with it all (I assume). It's been a pleasure creating something from nothing with her, and it will be even more of a pleasure seeing it all through, I am sure.

I'm reluctant to write about this, to even write anything at all on here lately. I had a turning point recently, and it was that I don't want to forge a pathway to feel okay about regretting something that I once really wanted. Meaning - I'd rather say that I got what I worked hard for after it came to fruition, instead of lamenting that I almost had something I really wanted once.

The bottom line is that I'm done with disappointment, which stings a lot more if something wanted is touted along the way. That old woman I'll be, in a chair, dozing and suddenly full of stories some day, I'd rather let her be someone with victory tales instead of letdown sagas. I think about her a lot, I do, and what she'll say and what she'll regret and what she'll be proud of. For now she is me, younger, perhaps learning the value of patience, steady as she goes, until there is something to celebrate, but not before it's time.

This reckoning, this life-step victory, they've served to heighten my confidence and somehow I haven't needed to write about this. It's my life, and I love and I work and I get along and I think this might be the real end of my blog. It's just occurred to me, this could be coming to an end and it feels like a life flashing before me - driving an old Volvo to college, not sure of what major to declare, a pair of sailor pants from J. Crew, sitting on a beach in central California, a garage sale selling a green and yellow dresser on the lawn, unclogging a drain in a tenant's bathroom, dangling feet in a hotel pool, publishing my first story about becoming a woman, feeling the rest of my life like a great onus, interviewing for my first job in a white headband that looked like a bandage, playing tennis in Griffith Park, studying for the GRE in English Literature, having lunch in Paris, recovering from a surgery, driving hundreds of miles north, borrowing a friend's dress to wear to an interview at Time Magazine, losing my glasses for the hundredth time, kayaking on a lake while a float plane lands, drinking wine with my parents around a fire pit in summer, being proposed marriage to on bended knee, losing a pregnancy in the middle of the night, holding someone most dear every single day, falling asleep calm and satisfied and ready for tomorrow, realizing that maybe I do get everything that I want, I just get it slower.

This evening the sudden snow storm ceased and the sky went from blizzard to blue. I was working on an article when then computer screen started to lighten, then glare in the sun, all the dust and cat hair suddenly shadowing over my words. My face warmed in the window and I immediately forgot the disappointment over a delayed spring. I instead closed my eyes and just soaked up what was supposed to happen at this time of year - of course it would end, of course there would come a change, of course I'd be happy.

Sweet Dreams Are Made of Parrots

Our African Grey Congo, Weeter, is such a good little dance partner on days like today when I'm cleaning the house, preparing for a dinner party and blasting the dance mix as I go. I would've really missed this if things had gone differently a few weeks ago...

Unbelievable to tell from the dancing singing parrot below, but we almost lost Weeter recently. He was so sick, unmoving and actually lying in the bottom of his cage with his feet tucked under him. The vets said he would die, but he'd just learned to whistle the Olymipcs theme song so we knew he had some champion in him. Mucho dinero and many doctors later, he pulled through and has returned to his nutty self. Witness: