Gwan won

How long will you dance before finally growing weary and sit down to rest? In rest, you disappoint your partner, in the waltz, you lose yourself. A quadrille is what you need. An opportunity to somehow be both together and apart. You ignore the torn hems and scuffed shoes and try to enjoy this distracting…delight. Is it? A delight? The tears and scuffs grow in your mind until they are all you can think of and so, you finally sit down. Your partner is disappointed. But so are you.

Falling out of favor

When the moment arrives that you realize that you’re no longer the chosen of your beloved, you chuckle a little in disbelief. A tiny “oh“, is all you can muster. And then the tailspin begins. You start replaying in your mind every interaction in reverse order trying to pinpoint when the turning point was. Or had it always been this way and you were too besotted to notice?

You’d thought you were both working on the same puzzle. Turns out, yours was crossword, theirs, jigsaw. Or you never really worked on a puzzle at all but you pretended to because you were in love. And that’s what lovers do.

The worst of it is when you reach this point before they do. You don’t want to bring to fruition what for now feels like it lives alone in your head. But it so clearly lives in your bed, too. That minuscule nearly invisible pea reminds you that there will be no rest until you both arrive at your destination. And that destination is hurt.

On dreams

Not for the first time, I dreamt last night of my grandmother’s garden. I drifted through her house, opened the Dutch doors and stepped out into one of her many lush tropical gardens. I was checking pumpkins for ripeness. Even sleep cannot break my connection to the natural world: the advent of fall means I have been engaged in this particular pursuit during my waking hours, too.

Surveying the garden for its bounty makes me feel infinitely connected to her. My earliest memories are shaped by my remembrance of running to her bedroom at dawn, looking sleepily out her louvered windows and seeing her tending her garden. Watering the flowers, weeding the beds. I had no idea as a child how deeply important this ritual behavior would become to me. If there is prayer, I find it among the flowers. If there is peace, it’s in the ginger step of my feet on the ground and my hands in the soil and the swish of my housedress (another ode to the women in my life)as I float between the rows.

24 hours of happy

VB native Pharrell Williams has created the world’s first 24 hour music video. Hear the infectious song and see the dancing here. And have you seen his youtube channel iamOTHER? My favorite series? Definitely StereoTypes. Happy Friday!

The last item I purchased…

was a garbage can. We have some kind of weird garbage can issues going on around here. Three lids have disappeared completely. How does a trash can lid go missing?? A fourth lid broke off. So yes, we are on garbage can #5 since we moved into our current home three years ago. I have a feeling our youngest kiddo is responsible, but I have no proof!