"What's love got to do with it?"

Chey got roses today. A mammoth, gaudy, had to be hauled to the office in a van because they wouldn't fit in a VW, bouquet of roses. I love roses. But not like this. I like rambling wild roses spider crawling up the fence like a pink blackberry bush gone mad. I like seven sisters, passed from house to house and from generation to generation. I like my roses. Thorny and knotty, accidently beautiful, and free....

She didn't show me the card or read me the words and she didn't have to. As the long stemmed beauties dipped over the counter, babies breath stretching, reaching, rising....the bouquet spoke for itself. The fifty dollar apology. The show everybody "I'm the man" button. The secret admirer out of the box. The loud mouth.

I'll stick to wildflowers, thank you....
and words.....
just say the words....

Peace~love

The baby with the old soul......

She didn't know. Couldn't know. And so she slept in peace. Fluorescent lights flashed frantically to the rhythmatic noise sounding down the halls....sirens....doors sliding, locking, the padded footsteps of nurses hunkering down...yanking little ones from the tentative first time arms of their Mommies and wheeling them to the safety of the glass cage. No, she didn't know, that there amidst the chaos surrounding her first little breath, puff of sweet, sweet awaited air.... peace was born....and neither did we.

She had come to us by surprise. Concieved early and accidently, the gift of a rocky rebellious teenage romance. We gathered together, girlscouts around the ever needy campfire, and kindled her, watched her grow....watched her Mama, 16 before her birth, 40 after, grow.....

Her eyes opened, as if in surprise, at everything. Ceiling fans were giant ferris wheels doing cartwheels from the indoor sky. She oooohed and ahhhhed. Our mouths, each word spoken, were enchanted tunnels to places she wanted to travel. She stared. Studied. Leaned closer, until her little eyelashes kissed our lips, until she could almost crawl down our throats and touch the words before they left our hearts. And perhaps she did.

"Me'Me', it's time to rest now".....she tells Kimbies. All of three, and bouncing. But knowing. Me'Me's treatments leave her tired, and thirsty for just a moment's sleep.....She arranges the pillows just so on the couch, and with one shoe off and one shoe on, beckons her grandmother near. Pats the pillow. "Here" she whispers. Her little fingers trace her Mommy's Mama's face.

Love grows.....
She knows......

Rickety Tickety Tock

It's an old door. Crooked from birth. And the hinges wail....whine....shriek, if taken by surprise. The inside frame is notched from an endless parade of hook-n-eyes screwed in at every level, in a futile attempt to keep her tethered, and later lost to wayward windstorms, escaping dogs, and hissy fits.

She's a great door. Her melodic night time creaking, whispers to me when there's company. Her rusty morning yawn, the tell-tell sign it's time for coffee with the neighbors. Her "enough is enough" random slamming....my wooden meterologist.

The handle is way up high. Hippie Mom's answer to the baby gate way back then....I look at it now and wonder what I was thinking.....Boogie men and seven year olds could never enter without bellowing at the gate first?

She's old. And tired. And sitting in the Sunday grass with the neighbors, I wondered at her longevity. How long can a screen door last? Blowing in the wind, knocking about in storms, opened and closed a thousand times, covered in a lifetime of fingerprints.....arms wide open.....

Tonight when I came traipsing in through the dark and yanked, she didn't budge. I panicked. Yanked again. A little harder. Ka-bump! She gave way. I scooched onto the porch and she slammed. Yeah, just like her. But something felt funny. The way she resisted. Scrunched her toes into the sandy floor and wouldn't budge. I turned around and pushed her. Nothing. Pushed a little harder. Nothing. Shoved her! KA-BUMP!, I went flying back out into the blackened driveway
head first into my neighbor's smile.....

"We put magnet's on her!"

Cinderella, and then some....

"You gonna sit with me for New Year's?"
"Course I am"
"Dressing up again?"
"Yeah"
"Did you already get your dress?"
"Yup"



"Is it long?"
"Mmmmm....hmmmmmm"
"Pretty, huh?"
"Mmmmmm...hmmmmm"



"You wearing those boots?"
"Yup"
"With your dress?"
"Yup"
"Are you kidding?"
"Nope"



"Okay"
"Okay"



"Can I have the first dance?"
"Yup"

Somedays, I'm not perfect......

Not even close.....

And I can whine like a lost train freewheeling it down the side of an untracked mountain.....

This would be one of those days....

The cats threw up on my markers....

Yes, Virginia......

I started. Don’t say a word. I know it’s early, but it just felt right. I plugged my little vintage fireplace in, with the crackling snapping tinsel twirling on a shish-ka-bob skewer, and hauled the tree onto the porch…..and then....Ta! Dah! Years of mardis gras beads dangle from her fronds, and tethered there, like winter wind chimes….our ornaments…..plaster molds of little hands, kindergarten pictures in macaroni frames, my Mama’s glass church…..ballet slippers, an American flag from Desert Storm, a slice from the trunk of my very ever first Christmas tree….coasters from the corner bar…the cork from "that" bottle of pink champagne...

It felt like Christmas today, so I stayed in my pajamas and sock feet and blasted CD’s and smiled. I emptied the Ho!Ho! Closet onto the hall floor and giggled. I wrapped and wrapped and wrapped. Laughing out loud in my empty house. The tradition continues, and like love, it grows…..

Pass the trash….

Shopping in my cupboards, my closets, my kitchen garbage can……

Time in a bottle rocket.....

Five: I have a new lunchbox and a thermos filled with Nestle Quick tucked under my desk. I can't stop thinking about it, all through Dick and Jane. We take turns stuttering through the pages. I daydream. Dick and Jane go to the candy store. I wanna go to the beach....and slurp my Nestle Quick through a straw, blow chocolate bubbles....

Eight: I'm dialing the radio station over and over again, on the rotary dial, shink,click,click,click,click....shink,click,click,click....shink......I'm going to win the red Batman Hotline, who wants this silly pink Cinderella thing? I don't win it. Mom buys me a pink batman sweatshirt instead.

Eleven: Ronnie stuffs the giant velveteen valentine in my construction paper heart. I pretend to faint. I want to shave my legs and let my bangs grow out. He gets suspended from school for having a Beatle haircut and his picture is on the front page of the newspaper. All the other girls faint.

Yesterday: I'm thirty two. In love for the first time, dancing in the kitchen to Fine Young Cannibals, clinking! with pink Champagne in dixie cups. Skinny, Persichetti and I are working for beers at the beach, parading around in macrame'ed swimsuits, reading palms and telling fortunes. The babies are beach bunnies, pink nosed and brown toed, naked from the waist up. And life is good....

This morning I wake up in a blur.....
On a moving sidewalk... slipping, sliding, speeding, flying.....
Yesterday, today, tomorrow, all clanging by, flash framed out the Amtrack window....

No wonder we had to change the clocks....the sun is setting and rising and rising and setting in a never ending circle.....
The contest.....

Who can be the first to reach the finish line......

Babies, like lovers.....

Arrive when you least expect them. I'm gonna be Mimi again. A little sooner than we thought, we're gonna be blessed with toothless grins and sleepless nights, first words, first falls, first "blow me a kiss"es..... meant-to-be's......

And so....Friday night we did the Drano test. Yup, made the midnight run to 7-11, "Nope, they don't have it" "O.K., try Walgreens, they're open 24-7" "Ok, they've got it...gel or foam?" "Hold on, it's been a long time, lemme look it up...." "Crystals, it's gotta be crystals" "Arrrrggggh....they don't have it. Are you sure it's gotta be crystals? " "Yep, you're half way to Walmart, keep driving"......

One thirty A.M.... And we're standing barefoot in the driveway, mixing chemicals and karma.....watching..... when....

KABOOM!

It's a boy!

If they don't believe me, I'll do the pencil test.....

Wild horses and other love stories

Pregnant for the first and only time, with my youngest child, I had traipsed the eight city blocks with Haley on my hip. Not quite one yet, bundled in an acqua blue hoodie, and pantaloons, she was all moon-pie eyes as we crunched past the spectators. She cheeky-faced laughed at strangers waving, using her chubby little index finger to point out a million fascinations. I found the perfect spot on the curb, and plopped us down. Arranged the tokos cords just so.....

Haley's first parade! And here I was tethered to a little black box, carefully monitering Jonah, oblivious to us all, lounging in my womb. "Yeeeeeeaaaaah"! She pattycaked at the neon floats, middleschool cheerleaders, majorettes. "Yeeeeewwwwwwh" she squeeled at the painted poodles, the ballerinas, Uncle Sam on stilts. "oooooooohhhh" she whispered at the clomping of the saddled horses, the 4-H'ers on their backs. In the cool evening light, she ooooooed and awwwwwed at each set of legs tromping by....And then I heard thunder and groaned. We were perched lakeside and the crowd was twenty deep behind us..... I stared at the heavens, thinking "not now, please"......

.....and so I almost didn't see it, the giant shadow raising, higher, faster, mesmerized by Haley's chant...."wooooooooooooooweeeeee"....

...almost didn't hear it, the frantic rider commanding "Whoooah, boy, whooah"!

I scooped her up from between my knees and started spider crawling backwards into the crowd, the noise so loud...them, him.....the thunder. I couldn't do it. I knew it. Couldn't save my baby this way, so I threw her as hard and as high as I could...into the arms of the only eyes that had locked with mine. The eyes of a stranger.

The brawny arm that snatched me up one handed and lifted me through the crowd, had no voice, no face. I'll never know his name. Only that he swept me out of the horse's path, and left me, once safe, lost in the roaring crowd. I screamed. No one heard me. I started to crumple. To shake. Where was my baby?

And then ever so slowly, above the moving masses, chubby little index finger pointing...rising on the palm of an Angel, was Haley, laughing.