Wrap your head with this material...

 For Christmas, I found my first silver hair, then more and more and more of them. They're hard to detect in the ash blonde surrounding them, but they're there. I saw them in the fluorescent hotel bathroom in Mexico. I have two reactions. I am elated at the idea of winning the hair lottery with first a beautiful color of blonde hair followed by the best color of gray.  And I am thrown by the idea of not being blonde and the way it chucks my identity around like I've just found myself in a rock tumbler. 10 years is what it takes to go gray. 10 years bouncing around, aging to old.  What if you don't recognize me or think I'm beautiful anymore? What if it means you don't know me? And the most bizarre is the idea that I don't know this self I am set to become. I'm the person who still jumps off cliffs and dances and blares music.  How do I reconcile that concept of self with a silver haired woman? I'm not cute and quiet and docile. I don't bake cooki...

 We're in Mexico. The kids are watching TV. "Is that a soap opera?" "No, it's The Smurfs!"  

 I'm writing again and it's good to be in another world in my mind. I build it from scraps that interest me. A sound wave I ride into another 3D world created by sounds themselves.  Climb a tree with giant knots and consider how your foot fits into its crooks and know the reds in its bark even though you never left the library. I smell the cedar.  Anywhere's exactly where I needed to be for the story to come free. Sometimes I hunt factoids and digest them instead of weaving them in. Sometimes, I put them in a box to save for wrapping up just right in story and language. Tissue paper placed just so, box-lid laid down slow. And don't forget the bow. This tale I'm weaving is becoming a scarf over my head protecting me from thinking too much about the unraveling world around me. I will pull you in, give you a cup of hot story tea, and you'll drink down the magic wending its way through these threads. I have lost myself entirely here and good riddance too. Attachment...

 I wonder if I can delete myself from existence. I wouldn't have thought so but since deleting social media and then losing my job and not checking email, not needing to do things, I kind of wonder. My days have no bustle to their beginnings now, no one needs a thing. I made whole life plans that grew and built and tumbled just as quickly and it made not a dent in the world of downward turned heads, necks not even sore from staring at phones. I never bothered to tell most people I wanted to move, I was interviewing for jobs, I was thinking of leaving my life. No one ever knows what's happening with me now other than the people who live in my house and obviously there are days when they don't either. They have their lives and I don't need to share what is happening in mine. I watch theirs turn like the pedals on bike spokes and I sip coffee, watching. Sometimes the quiet and anonymity of that feels good, freeing, calm. Other times I realize that my quiet affects no one. ...

 Shelves full of books full of pages full of lines full of letters full of punctuation full of space and ink and wood fibers and glue and stain. the brain folds like this gray matter full of cells full of fluids full of dendrites full of electrical impulses full of chemical reactions full of neural pathways full of axons reorder the axioms reconnect the s  p   a   c   e s  the letters  the words the books the shelves  it becomes a new space, a new idea, an entire brain of story is electrified on every shelf I think of this swishing my head side to side under water every bookshelf has a world of currents, an infinite potential flow of ideas flashing across time and space I tuck a few into the folds of my mind Wrap my head with this material and spend a time with it or hopefully a lifetime

 I do this activity with kids where they choose three colored pencils blind and then we take them outside on a slow walk and then a journaling spot to find where the colors are. Today I did the activity too. Examining my colors, the blue not quite cobalt sends me squinting to the sky. Where in the depths of light trapped by that dome is this exact hue?  When I hold the pencil up to it, the sky is at once within my grasp and an unreachable horizon extending away from the sharpened tip, blending into now, my phone case... the refuse of an old newspaper's print. Indigo, Inego, An Ego A royal purple filled with pride. Ancient garments worth so much in their day for finding a way to dye cloth this color. It's at my fingertips, the fuzzy floral petals' veins brushed through...undersides of petals undersides of rose petals, pink rose quartz is too easy an answer. It must be in the pinks of my own flesh. Live tissues healthy with nourishing fluids and blood. Pink, pink like cartoon...

 There's a tiny hole, just big enough to put a pinky through. The fabric of my life is wearing a bit thin, loosening to let my skin out and let me find a new shape. It's tiny, but unraveling goes quick. There are just 21 days of work left before I'll need to rip the rest of the way loose and decide how to patch myself up into whatever is next. I feel the tugging of quantum strings pulling me in a variety of directions, some resonate louder and stronger while others, a drawing constant hum. I'm afraid of ending up naked, no job at all, forced to live in my own skin and remember how it feels beneath a summer sun. The sun will feel good but standing naked feels too vulnerable. I've avoiding facing the 19 days as a need to say goodbye when I'd rather simply ghost. But today, now that there is a spring warmth on my skin, that tiny hole feels like it will grow to be enough. I will grow to be enough for whatever comes next and the patch will fit just fine. Or I'll ...

What I've loved about my job is the ever-expanding sense of kindness I feel and the joy at interacting with kids, person-to-person, mentoring them and feeling like an aunt or an older cousin. I've grown more from this job than any I've yet had.  But as much as I love it, keep growing from it, I also need something...different...in my life. More than me, my family needs something different. The itch for change has been scratched too softly and has grown to a larger-than-life rash. Healing will have to begin soon. So I have decided not to return in the fall. It hurts to say goodbye and I lie to myself about not coming back for a beloved student's senior year, nor others' sophomore years. I do not allow myself a countdown because that would be to admit it will end and I've always been the kind of girl to ghost a gettogether, not the kind to say the proper series of polite goodnights.  When I travel to my hometown there is a social routine in The Goodbye in which pe...

I teach a sex ed course to 8th and 9th graders. This week, we covered female anatomy and puberty and such. When we got to the Fallopian tubes, the kids couldn't stop calling them fallafel tubes.  An aside, a couple of years ago, my then six-year-old son had determined that he was going drive a fallafel truck to visit his friend. So I pictured him all cartoony in my fallafel tubes on the way to gestation, hatching his plans. This gave me the giggles and I couldn't stop picturing female anatomy as a production line for fallafel.  From there, I mentally devolved into terms that I also don't like or have made fun of, like vaginal barrel which I think should forever have '...of monkeys' attached to the end. As in, 'vaginal barrel... of monkeys' (terminology especially apt in pregnancies with multiples).  Then I accidentally had my adult filter off and told them about how menarche, the term for a woman's first menses sounds, to me, like the meanest butterfly. ...

 Gavin asserted at dinner with my dad that he knew the other  b-word.  My dad goes, "You mean like what I am?" And as I was explaining he meant because he was born out of wedlock, Magnus goes, "Oh yeah, boomer" When we were scrolling through the news about the insurrection in D.C. Gavin saw the acronym GOP and asked what it is and I told him it was the republican party or "Grand Ole Party" and Magnus goes, "Oh, I thought it was Grumpy Old People."