How to write your tween at camp
First, grumble fuck a duck under your breath when you realize you have to spend another $19.95 for the right to correspond for two weeks with the creature you were in labor with for 40 hours straight, the baby who rendered your vagina a Level 5 Haz Mat situation, the daughter you have kept alive for 12 years despite poor culinary skills, the confounding little broad who stares at your left eyebrow with her mouth slightly agape when you try to explain that hygiene is really a very exciting thing. Yes. Fork over $19.95 to Bunk Notes for a third year in a row. Bunk Notes: the Official Hostage Converter for Summer Campers.
The stories with nowhere to go
Time took care of most stories.
It was a massacre, I could not watch, you're
lucky to live so ever-far. I envy you that, I covet your stoic silence
and hate you for it and when I say hate you I mean love you with
the very last thread of what I have and what I am.
Senseless? Fine. I am weary of short words posing as sense.
To think I might have touched your face.
I still don't know what bravery means to you.
Here's what you'll do
Here's what you'll do if you know
what's good for you. Pick a star,
nothing fancy, a five-and-dime
bit of glitter from a flyover galaxy.
Then weave the roses I like so much
into the indigo one or the other of us
calls sky (but never at the same time).
Mother-Daughter conversation #45,063
"Do you ever feel, like, RAGE?" I ask my mother today as she is hanging her new white cotton curtains.
"Oh dear," she says. "I really wish you had inherited more of my genes when it came to this stuff."
In case you want to get the memo about your kid and my kid
So your kid says to my kid
You look like a self-harmer
Your kid also says to my kid
You have perfect breasts
You're the only one who
can compete with my boobs.
Your kid also says to my kid
How do you stay so skinny?
With my luck as it pertains to you
Three-ten in the morning and I am thinking
about the two white-and-gray feathers.
You really should have seen them,
the way they were. Resting side
by side, parallel parked on the scorch
of asphalt desert stretching lost
behind the defunct community stage.
.
Catalina
Get in my purse, you darling American Riviera. Just you get in my purse.
Temecula sunrise
It's a song, too. Really, it is.
Ethel
Ethel of Catalina Island
Sophie's a Berkshire Idol contestant..and needs your votes!
So this kid of mine? The songbird? She made it to the Finals Round of Berkshire Idol, with this performance of "Someone Like You," below. Finals are this weekend, May 11th, at the Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, MA. But this week, online votes are also being tallied at iBerkshires.com! Yes, you have to create a username (boooo!) but I swear it's short and painless (yaaaaay!). Will you help a kid get her rock star on? CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP AND VOTE!
At Finals, Sophie will be taking on "Somebody to Love" by Queen. OH YES. Tall order, but she's going for it. I'll post that soon too. In the meantime, thank you for all the AMAZING support, and please do consider voting once a day this week for our favorite Berkshire Idol (who still needs to be reminded to clean her room, but hey, rock stars are supposed to be messy, right?).
The reason I love spring
Beloved Sophie Mary Rose, at 4:09 am today, you will be 12 years old. Twelve. A dozen. I can no longer hold out my hands and say YOU ARE THIS MANY, and neither can you, come to think of it, although you might try to, with some concoction of your odd double-jointed digits.
Sophie, my firstborn, you were four pounds at birth and the doctors were solemn about your prognosis.
A simple no
This morning:
the first reason I've ever had to love spring
asks me if she can borrow the nondescript hoodie
once worn by the peep-toeing songstress of
my won't-tell soul.
We are talking:
thin gray slubbed cloth belonging to
my grocery-store savior, my ridiculous
avocado-mash seductress, my star-spun
tangle with a little thing called beauty,
my once-and-only simple and complete.
Just so you know:
This hoodie would not sell on eBay.
Relist? No. Reenlist? Maybe, in that
dreamy world of if that then this.
Borrow it:
Springtime child knows my answer before she asks.
But she asks anyway, to prove a point to herself.
She is a tornado coiling into itself, compressing into
blurred, indignant loops, no sense of up or down.
Fine, all you had to say was no. A simple no.
Away she whirls, in search of a hoodie unwoven by
winter threads of a mother's tedious memory.
I wonder how long it will be until this child of spring
learns that there is no such thing
as a simple no.
America's Top Model uses Wee-Wee pads
Isabella Cosette Flora Wilhelmina von Matternhaus recently snagged the opportunity to model for the absolutely amazing renowned pet photographer Amanda Jones. I am awfully lucky to call Amanda my friend and creative collaborator. If you ever want to give an extraordinary gift to yourself (or someone else in love with a dog), book a session with her. (She'll even come to your neck of the woods.)
Isabella the Italian Greyhound, in her beloved ratty skull sweater, February 2013.
