The Melting World

REMEMBER THIS 4 a.m. She’s awake, taking notice. A hollow, repetitive thud of water tumbles, one poorly insulated wall away from her head, from the clogged gutter down onto a plastic cover caulked over the basement window. She remembers to tell the landlord to clean the gutter. By morning she’ll forget. She turns a fan […]

Summer officially began months ago, but psychologically for me–since work actually gets busier in June and July, my summer starts in August. My son finished his stint at summer school today–jumping 7 percentage points on his math test, which seems, to me, like a pretty good leap forward in 5 weeks’ time. He also wraps […]

My son has discovered the beauty of Michael Jackson’s voice.  Granted, it’s been over a week of T-chan listening continuously to an extended DJ mix of MJ’s music that my husband had downloaded whenever we were driving about in the car. Yet, finally, a few nights ago, when the car had stopped, but the music […]

Photo: extra-long hopscotch pattern drawn by my son My son had a poetry unit in his class the past two weeks. His first poem he wrote was called Peace Poem. He recites it as thus: Peace Poem Love Hugs Sharing Taking turns Trains Traveling Peace The second poem he composed with me while we drove […]

And why not fight the power?, as my son suggests above in his thrift store find of the month and his Linus shirt. Those in power are typically pretty boring, from what I’ve seen at a far distance…and they usually have horrible taste when they re-design whatever building they purchased for some horribly unoriginal business […]

I came across T-chan, age 7, reading Robert Bly’s book, Morning Poems. He read silently, his mouth shaping out the words. It’s the first time I ever noticed him reading one of my books. It makes me wonder what else he has been reading when I wasn’t around. I am so proud of him. A […]

Updated view of our garden, now run amok, taken by husband, with me stuck in the middle. Yellow zucchini, Japanese cucumbers, green beans, sweet peas, basil, daikon radish, purple radish, cilantro, and roma tomatoes–not yet bright red though, all bursting out and over the fence. We also discovered a pumpkin under some big leaves creeping […]

Here’s a shot of our garden patch–my son and I planted everything from seed and he must have a green thumb because it’s blissfully wild and green. I just signed up for an account on flickr because this new blog platform at UBC has a tight limit on storage–almost peaked. Thus most images are not […]

aesthetic apparatus image found here: http://www.obamaartreport.com/2009/01/usa-ok-by-aesthetic-apparatus.html Uh-huh. Just feeling all-around happy over the change that has come!

My son has become very interested in an area of town he calls the broken railroad, a place where about four railroad lines converge near a factory on the northeast side. He directs me there, telling me, ‘turn right, go straight, turn left, turn around,’ etc. He has recreated this area in a drawing he […]

My son drew these the other day…I thought they were pretty sweet. He said the one with teeth is “Mom” and the other one is him, and he said the feet are Levi’s–who is a boy at school that he told me is his best friend.

Well, I don’t know how things went down last night wherever you are, but this clip made me cry, especially the trumpeter blasting out his solo. This impromptu party broke out on the streets of the West Bank neighborhood near the U of MN in Minneapolis. The people are erupting with joy, so no one […]

Only my son has the power to get me to go to Mall of America–the largest indoor shopping mall in the world. I don’t like the crowds, the noise, the plastic shops and the onslaught of buy-buy-buy. But he wants to go there for a reason. Mainly, it is to ride the light-rail train, which […]

The bottom two teeth have fallen out, folks. One surrendered after a determined and lengthy chew around the circumference of an apple, and the second retired after he gnawed on a plastic straw. These pics are to commemorate my 5-year-old son’s steps toward future man-sized chompers. May he keep biting into apples well into his […]

I discovered two grown Japanese cucumbers in our garden. They tasted so gooood and fresh, not tasteless like store-bought ones–even my son ate them with relish (and that’s a first). My son and I hid from the world by snuggling under a heavy quilt. I felt happy to not be racing around, just be-ing quiet. […]

From winding all around the concert hall, across a bridge, down a hill, curving to the left and to the right, and around a corner, and way beyond, where my eyes could no longer see, these people waited, hopeful that a change is gonna come.