the last blue iris

 For the past week, Rob and I have been up in the mountains, writing. We have done this every summer since we moved in together. One of the benefits of marrying another writer is that we both understand the importance of long interrupted alone time, and we met at a writer's conference 14 years ago. Anyway, with a few exceptions (pandemic, cancer treatment, children in crisis) this week has taken us to the Oregon coast (my choice, as I love the ocean which is the closest thing I'm going to get to Lake Michigan) or up Mt. Hood along a river (Rob's choice, as he's not a beach fan). The past four years or so we've stayed in the mountains, as it provides both water (necessary to me) and woods (necessary to him). For a few years, we took Mr. Bill, our geriatric dog, and for most of the summers it was a distraction from the terror of having J. 2,000 miles away. And now that I don't have six or seven mandated weekends in a hotel or rented house due to traveling with J, ...

 After a 7 hour recording session, performance season has ended. Since the end of April, I've been in back to back opera and choir performances, on top of work stuff, on top of general life stuff, and then last weekend the academic year ended and so did performance season and for the past three days I have been unregulated. It doesn't help that I'm also having my period, which at 49 is both insulting and also deeply unpredictable. After almost 2 decades of barely any period (thanks, birth control, eating disorder and working out too much), it's like I'm 15 again. Anyway. My anxiety ahs been growing steadily since I woke up Monday morning and suddenly had nothing in front of me but a long summer, mostly empty work days, and for the first time since J graduated high school, he's not at home. He's happy--at his apartment, taking online summer courses, not working yet, but I'm unmoored. this is also the time of year that, between 2014 and 2022, was the worst...

 For most of my life, I have been obsessed (either consciously, or subconsciously) with being as small as possible. My mother--daughter of a woman the size of a bird--paid particular attention to the bodies of her daughters. It's not that we were encouraged to be beautiful--that was a thing for other people, it seemed, not us--but we were encouraged to be small. I've read about mothers who were on all sorts of fad diets, but that wasn't my mom--our house was full of junk food: doritos and miracle whip and chips ahoy. In fact, if you ask her about healthy foods she'll say they are disgusting. Tofu? gross. Vegetables? not for her. But she says, even now well into her 70s, that she is never hungry. As a child i remember her breakfast being a Marlboro Light and a Pepsi. She chain smoked well into her 70s, after my dad was diagnosed with heart failure and he stopped drinking and smoking, after my dad died at 72, and after she was diagnosed with macular degeneration, glaucoma...

 Tonight, I convinced R and J to walk down to Peacock Lane to see the lights. A little fingernail moon was hanging in the southern sky, and the Big Dipper scooped up a bit of the east.The sidewalks were packed; families, young adults, toddlers, teenagers, women in hijabs and others in miniskirts and so many languages other than English being spoken and two hotdog vendors and men selling ligthed ballons on sticks. I am not a crowd person, but we live nearby and it's a Portland tradition and because three out of the four of us are home, it seemed the thing to do on Christmas Eve. As we walked through Laurelhurst, we saw families sitting around tables eating Christmas Eve dinner, bottles of wine being passed around the table, dinner smells and woodsmoke smells drifting into the night air.  J has been home, in his room, for a week now. It's been a hard term for him and I'm incredibly proud that instead of thinking he had to sit out his anxiety and loneliness in his apartment, ...

 In so many ways I have built the life I have always wanted: I come home to a safe house, my child is content in his life, has a community (stayed out far past midnight at a park watching bats darn the sky near the river with friends); I sing, I am doing theater again, I run--though less than I did. Summer is starting its long, slow lean toward fall. We aren't to the hottest parts yet, but the lawns are all yellow and the light is pink at night and baby orb weavers have begun building webs everwhere. I walk down the stairs with a spider stick each morning, carefully unknotting one end of a web from one side of the stairwell, letting the little orange spider clamber into the rosemary. An  hour later, the web is back. Some are slung twenty, thirty feet above the street between the deodar and the yellow cedars.  In three weeks, R. and I head up the mountain to write. I love that week, our world just river nad tree and scree and words. In less than a week, I need to put down ...

 When J. was young, and I was still teaching, summer was languid--long hot days in our little Moorish apartment or in the house on Grosse Pointe, cicadas and humidity, trips the Lake, long hours we spent simply being with one another, hot and sticky, pointing the hose at the dogs, lying on the basement floor while tornado sirens wailed over the green skies. There were also those nights that J. would be at his father's where I would drink myself into a stupor, sit in my office or the little front porch or at the dining room table watching evening seep up from the reservoir woods, write poems or blog posts, so deeply sad and lonely but also free. Then, I often felt guilty for the few days or hours that J. would be gone and I would be young and free. I went on dates, or spent the night with various boyfriends, went to movies or played poker with H. and D. I knew none of that would be possible if I had J. all the time, but I wished for it desperately. Summer was a stretch where he was ...