Not what I meant to post today:

August 14

I really need to post these things when I first write them. Otherwise, they just keep expanding, or being usurped by new ideas or freaking events. I hate to push patience, suspecting that not so many folks have days to dedicate to reading my brain. So I don’t like to go long. And I do hate to post anything these days without giving you something to look at though. And messing with images is a deep time investment. I love it. But it’s costly in the face of now. So I’m slow. Such a deal.

Funny little thing: this morning, I had a tiny self-vision. Here I am, moving at light speed – trying to get all the genealogical stuff I brought home from my dad’s (saving it from otherwise-oblivion) organized, scanned – at least really looked at. Plus the fam and the horses and the dogs and the bills. Minus the house, poor thing. But if you could put filters over your eyes, you’d see that behind it all, I am somehow frozen. Like freeze tag. A translucent shape behind all the movement, holding – holding – holding while Murphy is gone, while Ginna is gone, while my mother and father take hesitant, reluctant steps forward into a part of life none of us believe will ever come to us. A place I am headed for myself, soon enough. I find myself afraid.

Noah, my great great grandfather.

I see the psychology in my mad dash to Blurb all of these pictures. I have pictures of my grandparents and great grandparents and great, great grandparents – people whose lives are like a strap, anchored in an age that had just seen the ravages of the civil war, and laced forward through the Victorian age and the discovery of light bulbs and toilets and cars and refrigerators to fasten around my waist.

My Mother Tyner, born in 1868, met her husband in a buggy race into town. She lived on to see the Concord make New York to Paris in three hours. Is it significant that I, myself, have lived to see that headlong achievement get ahead of itself and die on the tarmac? I hope not. But it seems likely.

Musa, his daughter.  Nellie Wren’s sister who died young.

Maybe I think that by scanning these photos (stiff photos made by primitive but very precise cameras) I can stabilize the time? Stop it from pulling away backwards? That by touching the faces of people I have never seen in life, but who are tied to me by blood and humanity, maybe I can bring us closer in reality – like pulling the strings on the mouth of a velvet bag. I think about the pictures of me (the few that have been taken – ugh) left behind for the new real people to throw in a drawer until they, too, realize that time is linear, that actual reality does not grind to a glorious halt in their thirties. Will they sense how I felt about their own fathers and mothers (my children), their grandmothers and grandfathers (my children even later)? Will they know that once I breathed?

I am suspended, then, maybe waiting for a sound, a music that might make sense of my mother’s situation, that might make her crash only a movement in the music, and not a predictor of the threatening, inexorable finale of my own life.

I suppose that could have me poised on the tip of hope.  Waiting in the air for the ground to stop shaking.

My dad.  Aha, you are thinking, this is where the horse thing got started.  But no.  Take a good look at the boy’s face.  He hated this pony.  I think it’s a rather fine pony, myself.

The outside of me would be moving at lightspeed no matter what the future might hold. Can’t help myself. Maybe if I took a good look around, I’d find myself farther from the great drop-off than it seems. Murphy will come home, probably, as Cam did, to find the love of his life and himself suddenly become the father. I find all of this a little puzzling, really. Maybe a lot puzzling.

I end with a question for you: my mom always kept a spotless, simple, plain, lovely, organized house. I have a mussy, filled with raw materials and half-finished projects house. It’s dusty, and the windowsills do not bare close examination. But it’s basically kind of clean and organized. Bed isn’t made. Laundry not folded. Documents and photo books and bareback saddles in the oddest places.

I feel very guilty about this. When the kids were little, aside from Fischer Price and its ilk, this house was like my mom’s. Not a crumb to be seen. But now, I’d have to stop to achieve that. I’d have to not write stories and not scan photos and not mess with fabric and not train horses to stop and fold what I can just as easily grab off the back of my poor, baby-less bedroom rocking chair.

But is it okay to make that choice? Is it wrong to have a few un-formal things lying around the living room and dust on the lamp shades? Is it more important to have the house Better Homes and Gardens presentable than to not stop seeing the dust and live instead in relationships and creative projects?  We’re not talking Call-in-the-health-department mess in my house, by any means. Just a mild case of Chaos.

 I just wonder what you think.

Oh, and there’s a snake in my house. Not my fault: Little Cam, our nephew, asked G to catch him one in the yard, and G, a little sick the past few days and ordered not to work, finally remembered to do it – a tiny garter snake about eight inches long. Like a kid, G brought it into the house, put it in a number ten can with friendly foliage, then placed it, topless, in the middle of the foosball table.

Of course, it escaped.

We took the table apart, looked all over. But now, on top of everything else, we got fauna.  Not that I mind especially. Those snakes are really cute and all.  I’m just afraid for the snake, especially with these wolves that live here. I think the house is actually too clean for the little snake to grow into an allegator.

But I could be wrong about that.