Thirteen years. How can it be thirteen years?

The evidence is everywhere.

I have a thirteen year old boy. A week into his teens pimples sprout from the end of his nose. Evidence. He smiles a tiny smile when he speaks of Taylor Swift. He talks of "you know, IT" when he means sex.  

Evidence.

Dad is gone. Thirteen years today, though I can still feel tears pushing hard against the back of my eyeballs. Not all the time, of course. But I miss him.

My daughter says it's easier not knowing him. She says she misses him so much that if he'd actually shared space on the earth with her, it would be almost unbearable. She is still grossed out by kissing. She's still carrying her stuffed rabbit with her to bed. She is also taking selfies of her pouty face and flipping her mane of curly hair like a wild horse. She is walking along the sidewalk with long legs in cowboy boots and watching her reflection in store windows. Evidence.

We live with ghosts. Evidence. What came before and what made us into who and what we are.

Always possible to change. Always possible to grow.

I've been trying to clean out the garage, empty my closets, purge my drawers. But I get caught up in remembering. It's hard to let go of everything. 

I am looking out the window today, looking out into the yard, but looking farther than the back line of trees. I'm looking out the window and seeing the last thirteen years. I became a wife and a mother and a writer. I am seeing my future and my past twist together and it is a marvelous thing. All happy, all sad, all everything at once.

I am missing Dad. I am loving my children. I am grateful for my family. I am in love with my husband. It's chilly in my house and my hands are cold, but the sun is high and bright in the sky and just along the driveway, a line of red roses bloom. 

I'm having a hard time looking at the world today.

So much violence and sorrow.

I put down the newspaper and walked away from my screens. I went into the garden with paper and paints and pencils. I looked closely. I saw the lettuce, the rabbit statue, the basil and one tiny white flower. Yes, those are Nerf bullets, but they could be beetle bathtubs or tables for a fairy banquet.

I sat and drew one small beautiful place and while I sat, the light faded and I had to color the sunshine from memory.

Woke up with a mosquito, two dogs and a moth. So much nature rattling around in my house. We all went outside and found the moon still up, the sun painting the bottom of the sky and the whistle-screech of a hawk echoing through my quiet neighborhood.

It was a lucky moment. The exact moment before the quiet of the night gives over to the buzz of the day. We live near the 5 Freeway and although we don't always notice the dull roar of traffic, it's hard not to notice it when it breaks the silence. I have this image of cars lined up to the south and to the north of my house. In each car, the drivers yawn and stretch before starting their engines.

On your mark, get set, go.

The car engines rev, the refrigerator starts to buzz, the cable box makes its muffled clunk and whir and the hawk flies higher and higher to escape it all.

Yesterday, my mom sent me a picture of a snake. She'd found the snake caught in a pile of things and had spent some time working to set it free. She felt guilty for the leaving the things that caught the snake.

I feel guilty for driving my car and for running my refrigerator. I don't water my lawn because I feel guilty for wasting water and then I do water it because I feel guilty for killing my plants.

Saving and setting free is a constant business.

The mosquito lives despite my attempts at destruction.
The moth has folded its wings for the day and the dogs have gone back to sleep.

I hear the rattle and thump of kid feet upstairs. Traffic outside the house and inside, too.

A helicopter has taken the place of the hawk.

As I make my way through a world filled with traffic, dogs, bugs and kids, I will try to remember that peaceful space between silence and sound. I will let that memory float me through the day.

Gathering around a table.

This morning, this message arrived in my email inbox:

I have hired Plycon Transportation Group to help me pick up and deliver the subject table. I noticed you are a published author and wonder if I can send you a check and have an autographed copy of your book "Leaving Tinkertown" . My grandmother who raised me when I was young suffered from Alzheimer and I could relate to your story. Besides, it’ll be nice that when my family comes to visit and sit at the table you sold me I can show them your book and tell them a little bit of history about the table they are sitting at.

What a small and wonderful world it is.

Here is the thing: this table has been sitting in my garage for months. It’s a nice table, one with what my interior designer friend calls “provenance,” but it’s too small for our family and our dining room. I’d researched what it was “worth,” but no one offered to pay that much and so it has stayed with us.

Yesterday morning, while on my morning dog walk, I happened to run into a friend. She was also walking her small dogs and while the small dogs sniffed each other and barked ferociously at larger dogs, we got to talking about all the concerns of middle age: insomnia, stifled creativity, clutter…

“I have these two chairs sitting in my painting studio…” she began. “They are worth a lot…”

“But no one is paying that much.” I finished.

“Someone offered half what I’m asking,” she said. “I should have taken it, right?”

What is more valuable: space or objects?

If she had more space, my friend could spread out her paints. She could work on a larger canvas and not worry about smudging the “valuable” chairs.

I told her about my table.

“I’m going to let it go,” I said.

When I got home from my walk, there was an email from the site where I had listed the table. Someone had made an offer. It was twenty-five percent lower than my already discounted asking price, but it was an offer. I countered with a 20% discount because although I am trying to purge, I am also working on creating firm boundaries. The buyer accepted my offer in a matter of minutes.

It was nice to feel like the universe was giving me an answer.

That would have been enough.

And then today, this email. A connection. The idea of a family coming together around my table. Our table. Sharing stories. Our stories.

What a small and wonderful world it is.

"What do you do to be present?"

This is the question a friend asked today.

I felt a little angry when she asked and she might have noticed a change in my face because she quickly added, "I'm asking myself this question, too. And I don't know if I have an answer."

I told her how I'd been walking the dogs. We have an older dog and a young dog. The older dog likes to spend a lot of time smelling things. She wanders, nose to ground, inhaling the world. She thinks about peeing. She decides it might be better to pee a little further down the way. She takes a few steps and she ponders whether this might be the spot, decides "no" and moves on.  The little dog rushes forward. He pees on everything, walking on three legs, holding the third aloft to let the stream fly. He's all about moving on.

The older dog is on one wrist and the young dog on the other and I, stand on the parkway arms stretched out like a scarecrow. This can be frustrating.

A few mornings ago, I was standing there, arms pulling out of their sockets, being pulled forward and back and making no movement at all, and I felt really angry. I was impatient to get on with my walk and, after that, the big list of things I had to do that day (order khaki school uniform shorts, return the last batch of khaki school uniform shorts, buy toilet paper, find the little plastic back to the television remote, clean out the fridge. I had a novel chapter to write and that scrapbook from 2013 to finish... there is always something.)

In the middle of my impatience, I noticed this pink cloud. It was small and the color of abalone shell. Beautiful. I noticed a batch of the tiniest mushrooms sprouting out of the lawn in front of a grey stone house. I noticed the way the Magnolia roots look like the knees of elephants lifting out of the ground. I realized I hadn't been looking at the world. This whole, lovely summer of heat and strange humid air has passed in a blur. I've been like the young dog, running on three legs, barely attending to my own needs before I zip ahead to the next destination.

I made a plan then: let the older dog lead the way. As soon as I made the plan, my irritation evaporated. She snuffled around in the grass and I stared at the sky, the leaves, the flowering trees. Flocks of parakeets squawked overhead and a radio played classical music in a kitchen above the street.

This is what I'm doing to be present. When pulled between two forces (I've got two dogs and two kids, so there's plenty of options,) I'm going to try to go with the slower one. Let's take our time, see a thing or two along the way.

I cooked dinner tonight. I looked to my old friend Yotam Ottolenghi for an answer to the cauliflower in my veggie drawer. I chopped some beautiful tomatoes, scooped sunshine that is turmeric from the jar and made a meal for my family. It was bright and quiet in the kitchen and I took my time.

The book is coming!

It's been ages since I've written here (or anywhere for that matter) and strangely, the reason for that is that I wrote a book.  Once you've written a book, it seems that all writing stops while you figure out how in the heck to get folks to read that book.  To that end, I've been making lists and calling friends and generally asking a lot of questions and forcing myself to emerge from the cozy, little hermit house where I feel most comfortable. 

Yes, it's scary. 

But it's worth it.

I love my book.  I worked my head off to get my book to look and feel like a book.  A lot of kind, smart, generous people helped in this process and I owe it to them and to me and to my book to get it out there. 

To that end, I ask that if you're visiting this page, why not FOLLOW it?
And if you already follow it, encourage your pals to follow it too.

You can click on this link to get a gander at the fancy book cover and read some of the nice things people have already said about "Leaving Tinkertown."

Thank you.  I say this a lot.  And I will continue to say it.  Thank you.

So Long, Big Dog

I remember the day my brother brought the little dog home.

"Here," he said, "Look what we got."

He lowered a squirming, velvety black puppy into my sister-in-law's arms.

"What did you do?" she asked.  But she was smiling.

It is hard not to smile in the face of my brother's delight.  He is, like our father was, prone to extreme exuberance.  As I am.

"It's always a surprise being married to a Ward," my sister-in-law said once.
"You can say that again," agreed my husband.

We are exuberant and excitable.  Our emotions run high and hot and wet.  I say this for my own self, because I don't like to speak for my brother: I sometimes don't think things all the way through.  I love a good surprise.  I love to get a reaction, but on occasion I dismiss the long term effects of this need.

My father sometimes traded work for old wagon wheels or a batch of antique ice tongs.  He'd drive up to our house with a pile of deer antlers tied to the roof of his truck and step out grinning.

"Check that," he'd say.

My mother might have wondered where the grocery money was going to come from, but she couldn't deny the simple fact of his pleasure.

My brother's little black puppy grew into a big, black lab.  Edgar, in true Ward fashion, found the wonder in his world.  He chased flashlight "fairies" and soap bubbles and wanted little more than a good belly rub and fine friends.

He will be missed, this big dog.  But he is in good company.