This one went to my amazing friend Alana. My son was scandalized that I sent her mail with nudity. Ah, 8.

My friend Cynthia came for a visit with her adorable son, and while the boys played in the pond (frogs! newts!) Cynthia decided to give me a long-desired painting lesson. She’s an amazing artist (this is one of my favorite of her paintings; the colors of the forsythia are so incredible in real life) and has been telling me for months she’d help me learn to put paint on paper, something that absolutely TERRIFIES me. (This is not a rational fear. This is not even an articulated fear, meaning, I don’t have words I can put it into. But paint scares the shit out of me.) When she arrived, as it happened, I had paint out for the Babe, who was busily painting a rock she found by the pond, and, oh, her entire body. Cynthia, bless her, jumped in. She painted the Babe’s picture, the Babe painted hers, and then she directed me to get a piece of paper and a brush for myself. She set up a still life, and started teaching. I was so irritable, and tense, and not particularly gracious about the enormous gift I was being given. By the end of what felt like hours but was probably only 45 minutes, I had a semi-lucid portrait of a papaya, and a headache. I felt like I’d been run through a mangle.

I was so visibly on edge that I felt terrible for my friend; I couldn’t even fake ease, so stressed was I by the paint everywhere (The Babe had taken to pouring it out on the paper, applying to her legs, and so on), the sudden appearance of my mom, who is incredibly supportive of my artistic efforts but through no fault of her own makes me feel like I’m a big fraud, and my own anxiety at how hard it was to process and replicate patterns of light and shadow and color. In the end, I produced something that, from a good distance away, looked plausibly like its subject. I will try again. But meanwhile, I love working in the ultra-forgiving, cut and paste world of mixed media collage.

The piece above arrived at my friend Hilary‘s today. She is all heart, all woman, all breathless living-with-a-capital-L, and I love her. She and Cynthia, I realized tonight, remind me of one another;  though they are so different,too, they share a quality of creative passion that I treasure.

Mailed week of May 10, 2010

“Confront the dark parts of yourself, and work to banish them with illumination and forgiveness. Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing. Use the pain as fuel, as a reminder of your strength.” –August Wilson

I am feeling particular grateful lately for the absence of pain, for moments of grace, for friends and family and love and joy. So I’m making stuff. That image above is the first piece of mail art I’ve ever made, or mailed. I sent it to my friend Suzi, a fellow student in my collage class who inspires me every week with her persistence, her creativity, her freedom. It’s a bit literal for me, something I tend to avoid, but I thought Suzi would like it, and it’s a powerful theme for our class, for her recent art exhibit with our teacher, and, let’s face it, for pretty much every woman I know. So if being on the nose makes me a hack, so be it.  I made another piece tonight to send to a friend who’s in a hard place. I realized that as much as like making stuff for me, I don’t know what to do with it when it’s done. Making something to release into the wild is much, much more fun. I think there might be a project brewing. Stay tuned.

But in every other way, the last 29 days of writing the first more or less complete piece fiction I’ve managed in, oh, more than 30 years, has been a great gift of solace and escape during a dark and difficult time.

I did it.

I wrote over 50,000 words in November (my word processor says 50,323; the official NaNoWriMo counting machine only gives me credit for 50,048, but I’m not going to quibble with victory.) This is over 150 pages of prose, the longest thing I’ve ever written, including my college thesis. (It’s possible that the final report I wrote for my graduate school field study was longer, but that was a group project and it was for business school, so it definitely.doesn’t.count.)

I ought to feel gleeful and exhilarated, but the last few weeks (outside of my little novel-writing bubble, that is) have been so painful and difficult that those particular words are not, at least for the moment, part of my personal lexicon. Even so, I am proud of myself for completing a task (a notoriously elusive accomplishment for me) and prouder still for synthesizing a million fragments of story into a semi-cohesive whole. I like the idea of my novel more than I like the draft itself at this point (and even the hard-to-please H genuinely liked the story, when I, in a moment of incredible and inexplicable vulnerability, pitched it to him a few weekends ago) but I think, I think, I can turn it into something that while not anywhere in the neighborhood of art might still be, for someone out there, a worthwhile read. I still have sections to excise, whole chapters that need to be conceived, the work is far, far, far from done. But still, I think I owe it to myself to say–

Congratulations to me.

Sundays always feel strangely hard. Too many choices, too much time stretching out in front of four people with competing goals. And the last Sunday of Christmas vacation? Egads, the pressure. But despite best efforts by the Babe and I to be at each other’s throats all day, we managed to contain our conflict (chiefly over the issues of Appropriate Sugar Consumption and Appropriate Winter Attire) to the morning. By lunch, all was good again. (My mother is laughing hysterically as she reads this, I know, to see my choice of the word “appropriate”, perhaps the adjective I most hated for its frequent use throughout my own childhood. What goes around, indeed.)

After a truly lazy morning at home (none of shed our pajamas until 11 or so) we bundled up (25 degrees here, yep) and headed off to our nearest tiny metropolis, Hudson, for lunch and a quick trip to our favorite wine store. (Holidays have a way of decimating our never-too-full-to-begin-with wine cellar.) The whole trip was delightful, enhanced by the knowledge that later in the afternoon, our wonderful friends from NYC would stop for a visit on the way home from their holiday in VT. In between, I managed to do laundry and clean out the mudroom closet.

If that last sentence is boring, reading way too much like “here’s what I had for lunch” (i.e., you, loyal readers, don’t care–and if you don’t believe me, read the book), please be patient. It all goes back to change. Really.

I’m trying to do two things, and these are part of the plan. One, trying to give myself credit for what I do manage to get done, rather than obsessing (oh, and I do) about the stuff I don’t. I try to do our laundry (meaning mine and the H’s) on Sundays. I got his done, so brava for me. And the closet, well–I hate cleaning out closets, but lately, clutter is making me twitch. (It makes the H twitch more.) I had promised him, when he opened said closet , saw the hundreds of paper grocery bags, miscellaneous crap, and giant bag of overpriced prescription dog food for our (now dead) dog, and began to, yes, twitch, that I’d clean it out this week. That’s usually code for, I’ll clean it out…sometime. Maybe. But I had a few minutes, so I just did it. It took, literally, five minutes, and the charge I got out of it was absurdly out of proportion, so bully for me. Maybe I’ll tackle my bedroom closet, or Dido’s disaster of a bedroom, or…

And that picture up at the top? From a day this week where before noon, I managed to do a project with the kids (melting all their old broken crayons into the lovely new giant madeleine-shaped crayons you see above), bake gluten-free, sugar-free (really good) pumpkin bread, get us all dressed and clean the kitchen. Credit where credit is due, and all that.