Our hamster died this morning. Or rather, I found our dead hamster this morning. She hadn't moved from the little nest she'd made in the shavings last night. Hadn't moved from the spot where I'd last given her a gentle goodnight pat between the shoulder blades.

"She seems a little slow," I'd said to my husband.

"Are you poking her?" he said from the next room.

I removed my hand from the cage. "Not poking," I said.

"Let her sleep. She's sleeping."

It's been established that I'm a worrier. I worry. Sometimes for nothing. Sometimes I wake up to a dead hamster.

Her name was Sunshine.

My daughter sobbed when I told her and then she wanted to touch the little body. She wanted to stroke the soft, black fur and she wanted to have a funeral.

My husband went somewhat sheepishly to the garage and returned with a small box that he'd quickly emptied of deck screws.

My daughter drew a small picture -- herself: stick arms and curly hair, a big upside down "u" for a mouth and Sunshine like a small, prickly pickle next to her.

We dug a hole in the garden and my son said "This is just like a real funeral." When Sadie didn't want to put the first shovel full of dirt into the grave, Theo took the shovel and did it with a gentleness that belies his seven years. He put his arms around his sister and said he liked the way Sunshine's whiskers had wiggled.

Later, Sadie took her little dry erase board and asked me for each letter of the word, "Sunshine." She drew hearts above the word and beneath it, in a small rectangle, the little hamster. She showed me the picture and made a sad face. Not the sad face of this morning, but the practiced sad face of a dramatic child. Seconds later, she'd erased the whole thing.

The next drawing she made was of the new hamster, (for of course there is a new hamster) complete with her white spots. Above the new hamster, she draws a slightly smaller version of the old hamster.

"Both," she says.

She loves them both, her memory as easily wiped as her dry erase board.

The new hamster's name is Flowersheartsandstars. I love her less than the first hamster. I know from experience not to attach to so ephemeral a creature.

Small body, warm last night, stiff and cold this morning.

A new year

On Friday, my yoga instructor spent our whole class talking about sweetness. It's Rosh Hashana and it seems apples and honey are both literally and figuratively on the tip of nearly every tongue.

"Sweet," she said, guiding us into our first forward bend. "Sweet," I whispered to my tight hamstrings and cranky neck. "Slow," she said. "Like honey."

I bent over, thought of dripping honey, the slow undulation of syrup and the guy next to me popped down into a quick push-up before bobbing back up. I was working on languid and he was pumping away with the regularity of a piston. I breathed slowly and he exhaled loudly and did a couple more push-ups before lowering down into chaturanga dandasana.

I tried to channel sweet and slow, but eventually, I found myself going fast and loose. In the way that my chewing grows more rapid when I eat with my children, I found it almost impossible to slow down with this machine next to me. At one point, he and I rose to standing and spent a good two beats with our arms in the sky looking at the relaxed, folded bodies of our classmates.

I started to develop a very un-yoga-like hatred for this guy.

Of course he turned out to be my partner for stretches.

The first stretch had me on my belly, knees bent, my hands around my ankles. He was to sit on my feet and pull my shoulders back. If it's tricky to imagine, it's trickier by far to do comfortably when the grumpiest guy in the world is sitting on your feet and pulling your shoulders back as though he were reining a team of runaway horses.

Still the hatred.

And then we switched. And he was confused and I could see how tight his shoulders were. And he mumbled something about "not knowing why he was even there." And then, I put my hand between his shoulder blades and helped him slow down. Anusara yoga is about opening up your heart. A sweet sentiment if ever I've heard one. Sometimes I'm kind of grossed out by all the heart opening, but I get it. It's not easy for to say "soften your heart," without feeling a little silly, but when I actually do soften my heart, I feel better. My shoulders, tight little monsters that they are, relax. I feel calm. It's all good stuff. Perhaps because of that open heart, I suddenly liked this guy.

And, more importantly, I realized that his rhythm didn't have to be my rhythm. And that can apply to lots of things. Not just yoga. My kids can run around and scream their heads off, but it doesn't mean I have to. Just because there are folks who have found their "in" to writing at twenty or thirty does not mean I can't do it a hair past forty.

These are good things to remember at the new year.

The Jewish new year coincides with my children's return to school and is therefore a kind of double new year for me. I am back to work. Trying to practice every day. Sweetly some days, fast and furious others. But trying to set my own speed.

One of these days...

So, I got this note from my agent and she says she's a bit "stymied." We've sent my book to lots of publishers and though they've all been incredibly complimentary and encouraging and impressed and excited, not one of them has been able to see clear to publish my book.

I got pretty darned sad when I read her note the first time. The next day, I read it again and I felt disappointed. I went to the bookstore and right there on the "new arrivals" stack were memoirs by a cat and a dog (sure they were told to humans) but for the love of Mike, cats and dogs can get their furry little mugs on a book jacket, while I, the woman who helped look after her dad AND her grandmother while they simultaneously suffered from Alzheimer's disease can't catch a break. This is where the wallowing in self pity part began.

But then, a couple of days later, I started to think more clearly. I can do this. My Dad was the guy who boasted about building his own roadside attraction without a government grant. He was the King of DIY and, that said, why shouldn't I take a page from HIS book when trying to sell my own. So, I'm looking at other options. There are lots of possibilities.

All I can do is keep writing. All I can do is keep moving forward with an open heart and the belief that what's supposed to happen will happen. All in good time.

So, I've started another blog. Yes, it's true I'm not so regular with this blog, but the new blog has a theme! It's called Dearest You. Borrowing from Neil Young, "I'm going to sit down and write a long letter to all the good friends I've known." One of these days might as well be today.

check it out http://youdearestyou.blogspot.com/

First day of school. Whew!

Immediate relief followed by a wave of nostalgia, longing and generalized weepiness.

My daughter walked into Kindergarten like Sarah Bernhardt taking the stage. Despite an unscheduled fire alarm, despite a weeping mother (nope, not me) leaning against the door frame of her classroom, Sadie was fine. We saw her through the fence, heading out for the fire drill, hand in hand with some tow-headed fella in a striped shirt. She looked like she belonged.

My son, dove into second grade head first much in the way he dives into everything. I could see his big smile clear across the playground.

Afterwards, my husband and I drove to a strangely silent house. I swept and vacuumed. Paid those bills I've been trying to get to and organized the closet and then I just sat. The next nine months opened up wide to me. I'm filled with ideas. I've got seeds in the raised beds and stories in my brain. I'm ready to go.

We picked up the kids after school and celebrated a successful first day with frozen yogurt. Sadie said a boy had "snatched" some of her crayons and Theo wished he could take the walkie talkies to school so she could alert him to bullies.

"What would you do if she called," I asked.

"I would come and tell that guy to give back her crayons," he said.

I got misty eyed. My husband did too and then he ordered an extra sundae for us to share.

It was a great, great day.

It's been just about a month since my last post and in that month the weird, white larvae in a jar on the counter made it's last transformation in the long trip from meal worm to darkling beetle. The creature, christened "Isabella" by my daughter started as "live bait" about two months ago where she (he?) was scooped unceremoniously from a cardboard box full of wheat germ at our school science fair into a chinese takeout container held by my beaming child.

Oh, glorious worm.

When the take-out container seemed less than escape proof, we moved the little guy (gal?) to a spaghetti sauce jar. We were careful to move the remaining wheat germ (food and housing) and also added one leaf of lettuce from our garden.

The next day the worm had disappeared beneath the lettuce and for two days, he didn't come out.

"He's dead," my husband said.

After a quick Google, I returned certain. Meal worms are stiff and dark brown when dead. Ours, though unmoving, was still creamy colored.

In a few days, the critter emerged sporting longer front legs.

A few weeks later, things looked bad.

"He's dead," my husband said.

"Her name is Isabella," my daughter declared. "He's just fine. You don't know anything."

I hoped for the best and added a newly harvested baby carrot for good measure.

Eventually the worm turned into the kind of creature I'm certain Stan Winston turned to when looking for inspiration. If it had been any bigger than an inch, I'm not sure I could have slept through the night. Pale and still, with a bulbous head and tapered abdomen, it slept all day, it's arms folded tight over it's chest.

"It's dead," my husband said, holding the jar close to peer inside. Moments later, he shrieked and returned the thing to the counter. "It moved."

For days, it lay in a kind of half suspension, twitching as though dreaming of... what? A juicy leaf, a pile of wheat germ? Another meal worm? Longing for legs, longing for movement?

And one day it emerged from the pale crust, a beetle. Rosy colored at first, but totally beetle like in every way. No sign of the worm left at all.

"It's the best day ever," my daughter announced. "It's water day, I'm wearing my favorite dress and my darkling beetle has hatched!"

It was a good day. There have been lots of them.

We let the beetle stay in the jar until it turned black. We celebrated his arrival with a wedge of fresh peach and then we set him free in the garden to go on about his way.

This summer both of my kids are growing. The inch of bare skin between the waistband of Sadie's skirt and the hem of her shirt let me know just how much. Theo's lost a front tooth and the gap gains him a year at least. I'm a year and a month older -- more flexible and less. Looking around at the changes and marveling at how fast time passes and how glad I am to be here no matter what.

In honor of my birthday, a short list of things I like about myself:

It is very easy to make me laugh.

My collar bone.

My curiosity.

I make good cookies.

I'm a good reader.

I have great friends.

I say yes more often than I say no.

I make up really silly songs.

My big, white, Chicklet teeth.

I am forty-one.  I feel pretty, darned good.

This weekend, I went into the woods.  In the company of old friends and new ones, I pitched a tent and cooked food over a fire.  I washed my dishes in a white plastic tub while the outdoor spigot splashed mud around my ankles.  My children climbed trees and rocks.  They stood on picnic tables and hooted at the sky.  My children ate perfectly toasted marshmallows and marshmallows that were burned to crisp black shadows.  There were crickets and stars in the black sky and the sound of wind in the trees.  

The first morning, I woke before the others and went out of my tent into the clearing.  On the cement tables there was scanty evidence of the night before -- a few tin cups bearing the sticky residue of red wine, a sticky smear of melted chocolate, some silverware that had not made it into the wash bucket.  The sky was light, but pale, sheltered from the sun the way a face can be light but pale under a parasol.  I stood and let my ears open to the silence.  On a day to day basis, I feel like my hearing tightens against the city noises and even to the sounds of my own children.  When I find myself in the company of silence I need to relax myself into it the way I might sink down into a hot bath.  Staying still and letting my ears open, I heard birds, the rustle of leaves above my head and then a louder sound.  Immediately I looked to the sky for helicopters, up the hill to the road for a car, but found nothing.  The more I listened, the louder the buzz became.  I stood under the largest tree at the edge of the clearing and the buzz grew louder.  Bees.  So many bees they roared like an engine.  So many bees I half expected to see the pale morning go dark, blotted out by their small velvety bodies.  It was a little frightening.  

But the sun continued to rise and people emerged from their tents.   Our children spilled out into the clearing, billowing dust into the air and the buzz was lost beneath all the human sounds of breakfast and teeth brushing and ball kicking.  The bees appeared in groups of two or three to lap at the syrup on our plates or land with relish upon a strip of bacon.  The storm of bees never came.

I think of this storm now that I am home and the sound of traffic is keeping company with the tap of my fingers on the keyboard.  I hear the pages my husband turns in his book and the deep breathing that makes me almost completely certain that my daughter has fallen asleep.  We are safe here, safe in the noises of our life.  The click and whir of the dishwasher, the cat's claws against the wood floor, the creak of my knees as I cross and re-cross my legs.  These noises are familiar and comforting.  

The storm of bees never came, but there was something unsettling about the possibility of the storm.  This is true of a perfectly pale morning and, in the woods, I found it is true for people, too.