Happy Halloween!

Suzanne threw an impromptu fire pit party for Halloween last weekend, and my gracious was it the perfect way to celebrate the warmth and beauty of fall. 

For me, the best parties are the last-minute, fuss-free ones where the food is cheap and the laughter is loud.

No garlands, no place settings, no heels. 

Just neighbors and cider and blankets underneath a canopy of “nature’s decor” – those marvelous changing leaves.

Happy Halloween, friends! 

Hope you’ll be indulging in your own favorite kind of celebration with the ones you love.

From Me To You

A Journal Entry From A Month Ago:

September 31st, 11:04pm. The Mac glows in my darkened bedroom and I hear only muffled sounds – small swells of sound from the next room as Markus watches a late-night Disney movie with friends, Natalye re-positioning underneath the blanket into the shape of a question mark, the cuckoo clock ticking, ticking, ticking.

I turned in my mid-term essay tonight.

I don’t know if it was ready, but I was ready.

It’s hard to change what’s changing you. It’s hard to know when you’re finished with something so big, so important. There are always edits to make. There are always sentences to fix. There are a million ways to do better.

At some point, I suppose you just have to accept that it’s fine. That it’s better than fine – that it’s good, even. That it will never be perfect, and wrinkling your brow over setbacks/timelines/commas/colons will do nothing but delay the degree you wanted to get in the first place.

And I’m here, thanking you for it all.

Witch Fest

Fall’s my favorite season, with its changing colors and crisp air and first savory stockpot of chili. If seasons were a family, fall would be the mother shooing in her children to come inside before it gets dark – dinner’s ready, and don’t forget your jacket! It’s a season where we celebrate intentional change – the sharpening of our #2 pencils, the raking of fiery red leaves, the warming of our home’s as we prepare for a long, quiet winter.

It’s also the season of my favorite annual festival and look, here I go again talking about another festival. But this one, it’s just magical. There’s this smell that hits you the moment you enter the village area, and it conjures up a thousand memories that you never realized you stored – memories of your grandmother’s apple crisp and your neighbor’s midnight bonfire and your father’s leather belt and your elementary school’s wood floor – everything swirling together in a parade of sights and sounds and smells and experiences.

There are witches and hats and cauldrons of cider and pumpkins and haystack mazes and caramel apples and artifacts from years past – all hidden under a canopy of bridges and community. It’s just… it’s wonderful.

It was warm and windy and sunny this year, and Monet and I’d stacked every excuse to skip. But it’s the smell that beckons me; I need it for another year. I need it to mark another mile on our journey; to celebrate another season passed. It whips me into the present, straight into the realization that the life train doesn’t stop moving until it stops moving, and then we have to get off.

I continually have to resist the temptation to cling too tightly to this family, to this life. It’s one of the best things I’ve known, but the truth is, the best is yet to come. There is more waiting beyond the turning of the leaves and the shortening of the days and the bubbling of the chili.

But it can wait. Because right now, we have this very moment. We have now. We have each other. We have today.

What To Do In Murray

So. If you ever find yourself in this neck of the woods, here’s what you should do:

Greet your friends at the rink, and quickly. It’s hot and humid and sticky, but so are cinnamon rolls, so it’s also pretty perfect.

Most importantly, enjoy the ones you’re with and bask in the beauty of seeing them in a new, faraway light.

Tell me, where are you headed this fall? Any fun travels that await you? I’d love to hear!

Home, or Not

The greatest thing about living in the state I'm in, is the affordable travel factor. Save some nickels on an apartment and – boom – you’ve got yourself a cheap home base where you can travel the world, stamp your passport, road trip to Anywhere, then mosey on back home to wash your whites/visit your mother/downward dog before doing it all over again.

The not-so-greatest thing about living in the state is this: January. And February. March. Sometimes April. (I’ll let you know.)

It’s beautiful until it’s not.

My sister’s text: Want to dog-sit Poesie while I get away next weekend? Pack up the girls from NYC, rent a cabin in Hunter, take a road trip

Mine: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Want to hear something funny?

We paid the bus driver and got outta dodge, Pure Murray style.

We drove three and a half hours to skate on someone else’s ice sheet and eat off other people’s pizza and see the game from someone else’s backyard and I don’t know if it was the ute-painted under the ice or the fact that I didn’t have to clean the bus after, but it all felt so time-wastingly, mind-numbingly perfect. Give me a roof I don’t own on a Saturday and my brain will shut down faster than I can lose a round at Head’s Up.

Which is fast. (You know me and pop culture; we’re just not really running in the same circles these days, or ever.)

Sidenote: I once spent thirty-eight seconds trying to explain Marilyn Monroe, but the person I was supposed to be explaining was Marilyn Manson, who I accidentally mixed up with Charles Manson, who I then wrongly described as Ted Bundy, and then my brain went to Al Bundy and before too long I was trying to conjure up the name of the girl in ‘Married With Children’ and the timer went off. 

It gets messy in there, friends. But I redeem myself every.single.time with Animals Gone Wild, so you know. I can dominate that category.

Anyway, where were we?

Getaways. They needn’t be costly or exotic, or even well-timed. But there’s something about watching your porch being decorated over a weekend that just feels so other-worldly, like a jolt to your perspective. Like you’re walking five thousand miles in someone else’s boots and then finding that – at the end of the day – when your head falls heavy on a pillow that is your own, you’re still you, and the person next to you is still with you, and you’re strangely enough, still home.

Why It Doesn't Matter

It’s not about plugging in, or unplugging, or tethering ourselves to a movement that calls for technology within boundaries.

It’s about choosing wisely. It’s about understanding that life offers stress, one way or another. Plugged or not.

And when life has offered us technology and mobility, we have found something else to fret about. Balance. Multi-tasking. Higher expectations. We’re slaves to the machine!

—

But we’re not slaves. We cannot shackle ourselves and hand the key to our phone or the dishwasher or the CEO in the corner office.

We cannot offer that kind of power to the machine.

It does not belong to them.

It belongs to us.

Plugged

We can complain about our phones, our addictions, our inability to disconnect from the screen for hours. We can blame technology for the wrong ways we use it.

Or we can, simply, change the ways we use it.

I used to be Scrooge about my phone. I’d leave it at home for days in a row, letting it ding and vibrate and flash unanswered. It was a bother, a chore. A distraction.

And then it fell in the toilet (ah, I know).

And I changed my mind.

I often wonder what I’m doing with the time I’ve saved using my phone. I can check on Morgen at the hospital through an app and he arrives two days later, wrapped in scrubs, straight to the new center's door.

Did I save any time?

Or did I simply replace it with something else?

It’s easier to complain about others than it is to complain about ourselves. The expectations are too high. I can’t keep up. Now I have to Twitter? And no way, I can’t quit Facebook; I’d be too out of the loop.

Listen. Join Instagram, or don’t. (I chose to, for now.) Quit Facebook, or don’t. (I quit ten years ago and haven’t looked back.)

It’s your choice.

We can continue to blame technology for our lack of self-governing, or we can choose to be grateful for the mobility it offers.

Unplugged

Well, here’s what I think about being unplugged.

I love it. I love to be unplugged, to wax philosophically over what our nation’s ultra-connectedness is perhaps doing to our children, to our elders, to the society at large, to the shape of our culture forever and ever, Amen. We talk about it often, over coffee or conferences or long drives.

And the rest of the time, the lady at the art show reprimands us for texting our sister and we blush knowingly.

Some kids these days, she’d said. Can’t see past their screen, I tell ya.

She’s right, I think.
She’s wrong, I think.

Last week, I used my phone to schedule an appointment for an upcoming trip to the hair dresser. I made my family’s dentist appointments. I sent flowers to my sister. I wrote a birthday message to my friend, I checked in on a friend in Holladay, another in Sandy.

I booked dinner reservations and a bed and breakfast. I ordered dish soap refills.

And then I put my phone in my purse and sat on the passenger seat as Monet finished her conversation in the convertible.

A Room of My Own

Well, no, I can’t exactly claim the same perspectives of Monet. But truthfully, I’d never deny the beauty of a room of one’s own. A space for writing or thinking, for arranging things just-so, for practicing what it means to make a small, seemingly insignificant mark on this world – or at least your own corner of it.

We’re all in want of our X on the map. A backyard willow to sit beneath. The front porch swing. A corner booth in the local bistro.

For me, it is my new couch.

Typing on the sofa, entertaining friends over chips and guac. A space for both quiet and laughter, equal parts peace and joy. On any given afternoon, with any given beverage, I retreat to my rabbit hole with something restorative on the agenda – notebook, novel, nap.

And then, as it happens, I miss my little ones with their pulsing bodies of energy. Remembering their big ideas and adventures, their explorations and experiments. How did they grow up so fast I wonder? 

Brother & Sisters

Drawn to white space and margin, boundaries. Avoider of conflict, chaos, mess. Give me a book and a sofa, an open window and a rainy day. Shh, quiet please. Let there be peace.

It’s the way I’m wired, I’ll justify, and yet – the way in which we’re wired is always available for tweaking.

And so: in my efforts to be less selfish this fall, I’ve been tweaking.

More last-minute invites, more picking up the tab. More inconvenience (more joy). More mayhem, more adventures. Less time to myself, of course. Less energy. But energy is like sunshine, isn’t it? More arrives in the morning.

Best not to save it for later.

A Good Thing To Be

A Good Thing To Be

On a walk in the park, it’s not uncommon to unwind. How was your day, today? I ask.

A hungry one I didn't eat lunch! she’d roar on a Monday.
An abnormal amount of bleeding, she’d whimper on a Tuesday.
An explorer searching for towels! she’d cry on a Wednesday.
—

What did you do today? she asks.
Just nursed, I say brightly, and I realize it’s a milestone I haven’t yet reached.

A good thing to be, she tells me.

And also I tell myself.

A Day in The Life of a Hockey Player

A day in the life of a hockey players parent can look much like a day in the life of any parent. You rise, navigating a dark hallway lined with mismatched socks and cardboard sticks. You trip over a sleeping kid or two. You wait for your world to wake up, or at least the one beneath your roof.

It is blissfully quiet for a time. And then it is blissfully not.

I suppose a primary difference, for us at least, is that the home in which we live is also a subject in which we play. Throughout any given day, part of the boys’ learning experience is to contribute in ways both manageable and stretching. My 16-year-old son is on breakfast duty whipping up omelettes and waffles while his 40-something-year-old mother pays the bills, helps to empty the night’s dishes, makes the tea.

(This is my own answer to the “How do you do it all?” question every mother loathes to be asked. With a bit of persistence, children make for excellent chefs.)