When the night comes.

Dogsitting for my in-laws tonight and in the midst of a late night cleaning session with my husband, the dog offers a few low howls that fit perfectly with the song we're listening to, "When the Night Comes" by Dan Auerbach.

Oh my heck.

Get ready to hear your new favorite song! Or at least to have a really catchy, awesome stuck in your head for awhile.

Life is pretty cool.

At a friend's house last weekend, I opened up one of her kitchen drawers only to find a little nest of adorable tea towels. Now I'm kind of obsessed with getting some of my own. Here are a few of my favorites:

summer pennant at katherine j lee

life is pretty cool print at sweetnature designs

paper airplane print at bespoke uprising

The thousand tiny deaths that mark our growing.

Every song you hear is about dying. This is true - even songs about sex and love and "oh my god" and the dance floor - I mean, what else are we going to fill our time with until we meet our inevitable ends? This is the long view, and some would say the bleak view - but to me, it's the best thing about music, how it serves to freeze a moment so we can play it again and again, forever, or celebrate life or the thousand tiny deaths that mark our growing: childhood, parents, hopes and fears and failures and success.

Abundance.

Adding more kindness.

I'm not having the greatest couple of days, upset over circumstances that are actually in my control but suck anyway - basically, I've mucked some things up without meaning to - and am feeling all around crummy today. Then I popped over to Zoot and read her post, You offered me much more than your umbrella.

And suddenly I'm feeling so much better. It gave me a bit of much-needed perspective. Circumstances may not be good, but the isolated beauty of someone offering another person their umbrella in the rain? To me, it's kind of the point of everything. Kindness, the offer of shelter, the serving of others, self-sacrifice. And when you are looking for moments like that, they are suddenly not isolated at all, not when you are inspired to share the moment with others, to repay those moments in turn. Just beautiful.

Choose to look where the light is.

It's hard to see the lovely in a day like today, where I've been frustrated and cranky and generally short-tempered with everyone, most especially my girls, who have been ultra-preschoolish today. Which is to say that on the continuum of preschooler, they've been on the less tolerable end - but normal nonetheless.

I've reacted by flying into unmitigated rage in a couple of instances. I cannot overemphasize the ugly here, the snappy comments and the all-out screaming.

The girls are in bed now and hopefully on their way to sleep, so I'm choosing to see lovely in the promise of tomorrow, where the day can always be a little brighter than the one before it if you choose to look where the light is.

A sophisticated gentleman.

Via Sweet Juniper! More here.

Tap dancing lovely.

White panic of soft flesh.

The First Rain
Yehuda Amichai

The first rain reminds me
Of the rising summer dust.
The rain doesn't remember the rain of yesteryear.
A year is a trained beast with no memories.
Soon you will again wear your harnesses,
Beautiful and embroidered, to hold
Sheer stockings: you
Mare and harnesser in one body.

The white panic of soft flesh
In the panic of a sudden vision
Of ancient saints.

It does last forever.

It’s hard to do a thing like this justice, stepping out at night into the sticky warm summer, driving out past buildings edged in neon lights and glinting under a big moon. Feeling a knot of responsibility unravel starting at your house, where the children are watching movies with their grandmother, and unfurling down highways, still attached to you and getting looser and looser, until you reach your destination. And you get out and walk among the hipsters, the indie guys and girls in their skinny jeans and mullets and cigarettes, drinking beer and projecting cool. And you are wearing your new blue summer dress and brown flats and you’re no hipster, but you feel it, and that’s good enough.
Walking into the tiny venue, a band called Whiskey Folk Ramblers takes the stage and the singer opens his mouth and sounds a bit like Johnny Cash, and you fall a little bit in love with the guy on the horn who is chubby and sloppy and scruffy, but he’s just such a character that you can’t help it. And he’s got that horn and he’s wailing on it, and a horn on a sticky warm summer night, underscoring a Johnny Cash moan? The unraveled knot of responsibilities is quivering behind you, vibrating with music, and you start to feel happier than you’ve felt in weeks.
And then Frontier Ruckus takes the stage, and they’ve got the horn and the banjo and the guy who plays a saw, for crying out loud, and that’s it: the knot snaps, that long thread lets go and you just feel perfect. And it all feels like nostalgia. It’s everyone’s childhood wafting from rusted wet screen doors and mosquito bite welts and sand in your shoes and sweat at your brow and the feeling of forever, that you are young and it will last and last. And the trick is that it does last forever. You just needed this banjo and this saw and these lyrics to remind you.

Dark Autumn Hour! Frontier Ruckus, y'all. from amber on Vimeo.

Your joy is bigger than the universe.

(from a blog post at jenniferlawler.com)

For Jessica
A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine and I were talking about a study she’d just read, which concluded that people without children were happier than people with children; or, to put it more precisely, despite what conventional wisdom holds, the study found that having children did not increase anyone’s happiness. (Read the rest here.)

Cupcakes!

Rain and chalk.

Flinging smooth-skinned trinities.

One of my favorite Frontier Ruckus songs, performed in an old church.

Backyard, mud.

Bagpipes and mud clouds and tiny fish.

Hot this evening, but not unbearable. Walking with the girls toward the Trinity River, contemplating a major life change, an impending decision to be made. Somewhere in the distance, bagpipes.

***

At the river's edge, treading on slippery moss while minnows scurry away from our feet. Mad and V are delighted with them. We scoop some up in the tupperware we brought, and Mad manages to hold a larger one in her hand for a moment before sending it back to the water. Clouds of mud bloom and hide our toes.

***

On the way home, Mad asks if we will hear the "pipes" again. Her tricycle is tucked into the wagon, and the girls are walking next to me. A woman on a bike asks how the water was. "Good," she tells me when I say the girls had fun. It is 7:30 p.m., and I think, I won't be missing out on this stuff.

This is the best stuff anyway.

Quietly and humbly in between.

From Breed 'Em and Weep:
I love my daughters, but they are not mine to keep. If I love them well, if I do my job with guts and honesty and humor and compassion, hopefully I will raise strong, kind daughters who will leave me and venture out into the world to love well themselves. They will choose their own loves. And someday, if I am very blessed, maybe they will choose to love me—not as their mother, not as their friend, but as something waiting for us quietly and humbly in between.

Warm toes of summer.

from tastes orangey

And it's your one time on Earth.

I just finished "Feed" by M.T. Anderson, and I thought it was amazing. This excerpt was particularly lovely and poignant, even given (or especially because of) the bizarro world that the book imagines is our future:

And it's your one time on Earth, I mean, your hundred years, that's all you have, so there you are, on Earth, a little kid, the one time you'll be a little kid, and you're standing, waiting for the artificial sun, and feeling the mud, and at that point, your toes still work perfectly. So you stand there, and you squelch your toes, and you raise your arms up above your head, and you watch the clouds get sucked back into the ducts in the sky. And that's it. That's an afternoon.

Green a little greener.

It was about 4 billion degrees outside today, so we waited until after dinner to go for a walk. Violet rode in the wagon and Mad trailed behind with Wayland, collecting green june bugs along the way. We cooled our mosquito bites with the ice I'd brought for the girls; the ice melted nearly immediately on our overheated skin.

We were getting ready to circle around and head back home when suddenly the wind began gusting a little, rattling the dry summer leaves in a steady roar. I noticed a few minutes later that the sky behind us was deepening into gray, and as I opened my mouth to say, "I think it's going to rain," I caught that smell, wet earth sailing in on another gust of wind. Seconds later we felt the first drops, and then it began raining in earnest - light, but steady, and falling through the canopy of leaves so that the sunlight illuminated it in patches.
This was magical, this brief rain, thunder rumbling quietly somewhere far away. The green a little greener, our skin much cooler, the mosquitos hiding even for just a little bit. On the bridge the girls reveled in it, yelling "fast cat," as they ran the length and raised their arms to the enveloping sky.
On the way home, everything was sweeter. I found myself exhaling longer, deeper -- a sudden quiet, an easy letting go.

Today's lovely.

Roasted potatoes, onions and garlic. Rinse veggies, cut as needed so everything is roughly the same size. Toss with olive oil, season with cracked pepper and herbs de Provence. Roast at 400, stirring once or twice, until potatoes are fork-tender.

Happy Saturday.

You are enough.

Love letter from the universe. Inspired by Dream Lab!

And I shout I have to go.

This picture makes me think of stillness, an oppressive stillness, everything so quiet you can't even pull in a breath. And then I try to think beyond the placid, even blue, and imagine the movement of ice, the way molecules of water crinch together as they freeze into stillness. I think of how Icelandic poets so many centuries ago tried to put a name to all the noise they heard in the deep, dark cold, and what they came up with was religion, things to worship, to bring stillness to the chaos of black and chill: gnomes, fairies, elves, gods.

Listening: "Gobbledigook," Sigur Ros

"Is It All Worth It?" - Treetop Flyers

Hope personified.

You won't lose a thing to let yourself sink into everything you love right now. Your pillow, your family, the way the smallest things bring you delight and joy. To savor is to let gratitude in, and gratitude is a gateway to joy. What will you savor today, dreamer? - Mondo Beyondo Dream Lab, "Love Letter From the Universe."

I wanted to write something about gratitude after reading this letter from the universe, and after a perfectly (mostly) lovely day with my kids, the evening descended into one of our worse battles: Mad would not stop hitting, kicking, pinching, screaming. I actually tried spanking her even though time has proven this NEVER works, and of course it didn't. And so I gave up and just cried, right there in front of my 4-year-old daughter, begging her to tell me what pushes her to behave that way.

Of course she had no answer.

There was nothing I could do. So I let her cry herself to sleep, even after she begged me to stay and sobbed that she loves me and promised to never hit me. She's done this before. And the thing I hated most was that I looked into her deep brown eyes - they are fathomless, these eyes - and I felt....hopeless. This was the worst thing -- not that my hand was stinging in a failed attempt at control, not the guilt gnawing at me for even going there, not the hurt that I feel every time my firstborn lashes out at me that way -- the worst thing was that I looked into a face I used to gaze into when she was a tiny baby and see infinite possibility. Sweetness and joy, everything light and good in the world, right there on that small face. Hope personified.

And tonight, I felt hopeless.

So instead of focusing on gratitude, I want to remind myself that she is always something to celebrate. We are in a rough patch, and we have been for awhile, but this is the same little girl who after her bath tonight gathered four different nail polish colors and asked if I could use them all on her toes, who sat still and patient while I painted her toes blue, pink, red, orange and blue again, who delighted when I called them rainbow toes.

The same girl who chases grasshoppers with a dogged patience and is overcome with excitement when she sees lizards outside. Who also likes dresses and the color pink and coos to her kitten, "It's okay, I'm not upset with you," when the kitten does something naughty. Who is by all accounts a delicious and complicated girl. She is always something to celebrate, even after a night like tonight.

Listening: "I Know," Jude