At the Video Store

After a long day of teaching a class followed by grocery shopping with my grouchy, hungry kids, I head to the video store to get them a movie. After a long wait in the line, I can barely talk to the clerk because Ella keeps interrupting me, asking for candy, asking what we’ll be having for dinner, and because God did not put off buttons on children, I finally threaten to cancel movie night if she can’t keep quiet.  Then I look up at the sales clerk and sigh.

“Do you ever feel like you badly need a nap but there’s no chance in hell you’ll get one?” 
I say wearily.

“Yes,” he says in all seriousness, nodding passionately, like he TOTALLY gets it, totally gets ME, and for a split second I feel truly seen, truly sympathized with, before he adds: “We hardly ever get coffee breaks around here.”

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January 4

January.
There’s a squirrel darting across the road.  Now he’s climbing up the Sycamore tree.
I’m at my window, looking out over a calm, grey day, tree branches swinging slightly in the cold air.  The furnace kicks on and off.

Have I mentioned I love it here?

It turns out there was a house to rent just down the block from our other place—at the end of the alley, in fact, the same alley where the girls scattered their nail-polish painted rocks and learned to ride their bicycles.  There I was feeling so melancholy about leaving it, but it turns out we didn’t have to leave it after all

For years, I’ve admired this house from a distance.  It’s big and old, white with green trim, has large windows and five big trees in the yard—mostly Maples and one enormous old Sycamore.  There’s also an apple tree in the back yard with strong, outstretched branches that are perfect for climbing.

All last spring and summer, I saw the owner out in his yard cutting the grass.  I couldn’t help but notice the ‘For Sale’ sign had been standing there for over a year.  Talking to him one afternoon, I learned that the house was sitting empty—the owner just came to cut the grass every week.  So after some thought, I wrote him a note letting him know that if he was looking for renters, we’d love to live in his house.  For some reason, I could see us there, the girls climbing the apple tree, me hanging laundry on the clothesline that stretches off the back stoop.

I saw him in his yard again in September, when we learned we needed to move.
“I have an offer on it, but it might fall through”, he said.  “If it does, I’ll rent it to you.”

It did fall through.

And so here we are.

The house is bigger than our old house.  My writing room is on the top floor, overlooking the street lined with the oldest Maple trees in the city.  To the left is the big Sycamore.  The branches come so close to the window that, sitting at my desk feels like being in a tree house.  In the fall when the wind came up, a flurry of leaves would swoosh past my window and click against the glass. Now the branches are just knobby little limbs, edged with snow.

I look out and think:  who knows how long we’ll be here.  With renting, there is a temporariness that I’ve come to appreciate.  Although it has its uncomfortable aspects, the feeling of impermanence is almost nice:  I can’t settle in and numb out.  It forces me to remember to enjoy every day I have here.  Which applies to….well, everything, obviously.

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Post-Christmas Haiku

Drooping Christmas tree
Soon you will be tossed outside
Against the trash heap.

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December 18th

This past month or so has been a lovely blur of quarter-end exams, mailing out albums, planning final school projects and doing Christmas shows.

This morning our house is all lit up with lights, the sky is still holding onto its pinky morning glow, and I am packing for a few days of much needed silence and rest at a monastery a few hours out of town.  I’m going to read, scribble poems, snap some photos with my film camera, and walk between tall, creaky birch trees.

In the meantime, I’ve just been notified that Paper Sun is available to order in hard-copy from CD Baby HERE.

xox kim

 

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A Poem: Me, Forgetting My Life is Already Happening

The crumbs scattered at the table
The half-cup of lukewarm tea
Dry leaves whirling around the roads on the other side of the window.
Waiting for snow
Waiting for the mail
Waiting for September or July or January
For the kettle to boil
or someone to arrive at the door
or the phone to ring
with a kind, sure voice on the other end
that says:  It’s time now.  Begin

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