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yesterday morning, about 4:15, i woke up with a start.

heartburn.  pee break.  adrenaline.  chomped down a few Tums, had some water, tried to quiet my mind, to plump the pillow and slide back into sleep.  no chance.  got up and watered all my plants instead.

nesting?  nah.  first day of a week-long writers’ conference.  Ann-Marie MacDonald, live and in the lovely,  sardonic, talented, like-to-go-drinking-with-her flesh.  Carol Bruneau and Anne Simpson leading faculty workshops, in intimate groups; real live agents and publishers sharing advice.  peers – or rather, People Who Are Not Really My Peers as They’ve Already Written Novels – to share work and consort with.  all at a gorgeous resort, twenty minutes from my house, with fantastic food.   basically, candyland for anyone who aspires to be a wordsmith.  or who likes chocolate cake and good vocabularies.  since i found out in late July that i’d been granted a bursary to attend this shindig, i’ve been drooling…and intimidated, but mostly drooling.  looking forward to this has given me a focus other than the coming baby to set my sights on, to fantasize about.  and so yesterday morning, i was just all atwitter with anticipation.  i figured.

the first day of the conference saw me away from my house from 8 am to 10 pm, a first since long before the whole bedrest epoch began.  i came home exhausted but delighted, full of ideas and stories and a dessert so rich and high in my gorge i considered writing it its own poem.  i did jot out a few scenes on my actual topic, and fell into bed weary and richly pleased, grateful for this opportunity.  proud of myself for pushing myself to actually try such a bold thing as running in these heady circles.

about 4:30 am, i woke up with a start.

heartburn.  pee break.  adrenalin.  and a weird, non-rhythmic dull ache in my lower belly.  swallowed the usual suspects, tried the whole sleep thing again, gave up.  got up, did a couple of loads of laundry, folded all the baby sleepers, organized our finances.  no longer all atwitter with the first-day jitters, i forced myself to actually take stock of my state of being.

nesting?  um, i think so.  i am not a morning person.

i was hanging curtains – quietly – in our bedroom at 5:55 when Dave turned a bleary eye on me and muttered, “that’s a sign of labour, you know.”

yep.

33 weeks, 4 days.  still too early, but not so early that there’s significant long-term risk to her if she comes…just a rough start, wee thing, and possible complicated weeks in the NICU.  they will no longer stop labour if it starts in earnest.

the dull ache subsided about 9:30 am, in the midst of the writing workshop’s group feedback session.  i had to skip a session of the conference later in the day for this week’s appointment with my OB; cervix short, soft, thinning.  it appears ye olde cerclage stitch is letting go…or at least a loop of it has already.  and if i have any contractions or further aches at all, from here, i’m to go in and we’ll take just take it out.  i may be fishing-line-free sooner than i’d imagined.

or not.  the way my body’s been cleaning itself out, the way it feels like it’s gearing up without me, i’d guess yes.  except i’m usually wrong.

oh world, you clever little trickster.  sure, this is the only week out of the past six months when i’ve actually got other plans that don’t revolve around gestating.  is it really necessary to remind me of my small, snivelling place in the universe by threatening my still rather itsy-baby baby with imminent arrival when we’ve come this far?  is it truly that entertaining to deprive me of sleep right when ye olde brain is actually on call for regular all-day usage for the first time since, um, March?  must we play this little maybe-we’ll-go-to-the-NICU game when Oscar’s sitter is actually on holiday all next week and Dave’s dad’s in the hospital, rendering Grandmaman unable to come to babysit?  seriously?  you’re funny, world.  i get it.  i don’t run the circus ’round here.  you’re the boss, and i salaam to your charming sense of humour.

but could we just wait ten more days, or so?  September is such a lovely month for birthdays, i hear.  and Ann-Marie MacDonald has a reading Thursday night at the library.  it’s gauche to break your water at the library, world.  got it?

please. let her stay safely put.  or at least let me sleep, while i practice trusting my body to do what it needs to.

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this whole nesting thing – which goes waaaay beyond my usual OCD issues regarding tidiness – still appears to be having its wanton way with me.  i just sorted a bunch of outdated files.  my recycling?  you could eat off it.

i’ve never had this before, not really.  for those of you who have been similarly possessed by forces of frantic evil…is there any truth to the rumour that this is a harbinger of things to come soon?  what was the time lapse for you between the onset of Stepford Wife symptoms and the arrival of bebe?

somebody tell me a month, ‘kay?

(and then shoot me when six weeks from now i’m still pregnant and eating my words AND my screen, and the world is cackling bwah ha ha ha ha.)

pssst.  i have a secret.

i think i’m having a fabulous summer.

yeh, i’m more or less unemployed, with legs as weak as paper matchsticks and a belly the size of a Volkswagen.  yeh, laundry is frequently my most impressive daily accomplishment.  and stool softeners and Tums are my dearest, most beloved companions these days.  i am a glamour queen beyond measure.

but…with all this time off it’s been the first summer since we moved back here to this island vacation destination that i’ve actually had any time to spend with the myriad of people who descend on the place in late July and early August.  i had coffee with a girl i haven’t seen since high school, spent an entire afternoon taking up space in a restaurant with some fabulous women i don’t see often enough, discussed life, the universe, and everything with old friends from Korea, visited with aunties and a bunch of other people passing through in the seasonal glut of tourists and homecomers.  i’ve had time to pay attention, to linger, to collect myself between visits.  turns out working is hell on the social life.  i suspected as much.

tonight, Dave & Oscar & i are going out to a friend’s cottage for the night.  i’m not a lay-in-the-sun girl, but the beach at night?  some part of me was made for the beach at night.  dunes and cool night sand under my feet, stars, the crash of waves a few metres hence, a bonfire.  we’ll put O to sleep and then, with a few other parents, take turns minding the store while the rest abuse some old guitars down on the shore.  singing, maybe.  the mutter of side conversations and laughter.  but mostly just the licking, crackling flames and the ancient wonder of a fire…the first tv, the first happy hour bar, the first church of the human soul.

i’ll probably be the only one sober, and i’ll get tired first and lay my head down on Dave’s lap and worm myself into a little nest in the sand and become quiet, but my eyes will be open, rapt and locked on the glow of the little sparks dancing up into the blackness, until i waken cold and shivering when the party ends.

how is it that memory can feel more vivid, sometimes, than the present?

i am in Halifax, but not in the hospital…i am on a vacation of sorts. it feels more like time travel. i wander here in a soup of memories, bright and disconcerting and surreal, expecting to encounter former selves around every corner. these conjunctions of days and years all jumble together, knocking me off balance. the disequilibrium keeps catching me by surprise.

i am here alone. or not alone – my college roommate and i are crashing here together – but without O, without Dave, without responsibilities…just me and Susie, painting the town red. nineteen years i’ve known this girl, this woman, this friend i seldom see anymore. she’s a doctor now, which is promising if this now-31-week bebe gets any saucy ideas, but she still makes me feel seventeen again, goofy and light. and known. we pick up the common threads between us easily, gracefully, as if the time lapsed is only stories to tell. we are here for the wedding of another college roommate, entertainingly scheduled eleven years to the day after my own wedding, in this city i lived in during that marriage. i was packing to move from this city – packing up that marriage – when i first sat with Dave on my kitchen floor eight years ago yesterday and realized, hell, i am in trouble.

so i am seventeen and twenty-eight at once and yet very much the thirty-six-year-old mother and mother-to-be, as well, because the fact of this burgeoning body is not something i can leave behind for a weekend . and it is August now too and encroaching on what should have been Finn’s birthday three years ago had he not been born in this place and gone, all too soon, and so those shadows walk along the calendar with me this time of year, inescapably. and being on my own, sitting yesterday morning in the anywhere space of a Starbucks with no agenda but my journal to write in, called up all sorts of other echoes, other selves who’ve sat for hours with a black pen over an empty page, people-watching. lost in Vancouver, bewildered by the concrete and glass and the low, oppressive clouds, feeling alien and broke and hopeless. trying to make my way through weeks in Ireland on my own while i wished myself back in Korea with that troublesome Dave whom i looked for around every corner, no matter how many half-worlds separated us. Bangkok, Zurich, Istanbul. all places i’ve sat by myself in coffee shops and marked time and impressions on a page and tried to leave some trace for myself of a now i knew would never last.

i danced tonight, at the wedding, me who’s barely walked in months. When Doves Cry, Prince. because i could not stay in my seat. because when i was twelve this song was the first that gave me little flutters of what i’d someday understand as sexual awakening. because touch if you will my stomach, feel how it trembles inside brought different flutters now, as if that promise of twelve had come to full fruition and for the first time all weekend all those myriad, disconnected selves had consolidated into some, brief linear trajectory i could trace and own, and catch sight of myself in. it felt amazing to move, to rise. i was a sight, i’m sure. but i felt beautiful.

like Cinderella, i left just before midnight…to come back to an empty bed longing for the ghost of that boy who sat on my kitchen floor eight years ago to materialize, to make this vacation more than just a respite from the day-to-day our lives have become together and make the kaleidoscope whirl of all this memory less lonely, less strange.

last night i rambled through the neon streets of a nameless north Asian city, lost and utterly foreign and happy as a clam.

like any dream, it made no narrative sense. i was simply elsewhere, escaped, otherworlded. it was vivid, a montage of sense recollections and body memory, smells and sights and pace all propped up like rusty actors on a stage that seldom has much call for them. they fought for their star turn, elbowing in on each other in rapid succession, costumes dusty but still perfect in form, bizarrely familiar in their forgotten but once-intimate Otherness.

it was day and night both in this dream, and Seoul and Osaka and Beijing and Busan and Daejeon all together…a hundred human habitations of relentless urbanity merged, distilled…all these but never Shanghai, nothing so recognizable and coherent to the occidental eye as the grand old Whore of the Orient with her Art Deco facades. there were piss-ridden alleys and sterile fusion bars, ten-lane thoroughfares with whizzing cars and motorcycles and scooters, both sides of the street jammed with a cacophony of lit signs that disdain all notions of harmony and makes Times Square look tame. i do not know what they hawked, in my dream, but then i never knew what they said when i was there, either. the in-jokes of signage were lost on me just as the Engrish hilarity of neon proffering “pork catlet” – cutlet – was presumably lost to those who lovingly promoted such wares. in my dream were colours, so many colours cutting into the dark in bright clean lines, blurring into a haze, and the graceful arc of the few old buildings that remain against the cigarette-box-design of the new, thousands of them, disappearing into the horizon in a sea of unending ugliness made vibrant by the tang of sugar or garlic or vinegar or liquor from the street vendors and the fetid waft of garbage and sewage beneath the open grates of the alleyways. and always, for months, the fallen cherry blossoms lingering. in the dream they were underfoot and all the paving tiles were shaped like diamonds.

girls with kewpie-doll double eyelids, surgically created but so ubiquitous that the under-thirties appear utterly genetically different from their elders, bestowed stewardess smiles upon me as i plowed along, eating up ground in this imaginary Ur-city too big to be outwandered. people thronged, fifty thick on the streets. fish flopped in plastic basins, pigs’ heads and carcasses with paws grinned glassy-eyed at me from market hooks. the modesty of appropriate dress perched alongside the gaudy love hotels, grinning at me, sex unmentionable yet discreetly everywhere, vending machines with cock rings displaying their wares like cans of coffee or goggle-eyed stuffed animals. cartoons everywhere. i felt a little, on waking, like i’d been in a cartoon, some strange cigarette-smoke and plum wine-laced anime tableau designed for aesthetic impact…but then remember that i always felt that way, there.

ah, the sometimes beautiful invisibility of being Other, of being so hopelessly and irredeemably different that there will be no true belonging, no amalgamation. all is pardonable or ignorable, chalked up to the barbarity of skin rather than individual indiscretion. no history, no ties. my feet were shod in army boots, then in the plastic bathroom slippers one would never sully with dirt from outside one’s apartment. but i went marching, marching, flashing through corner stores and chicken stands and grand public edifices to historical events i do not really understand, all in hard pink plastic footwear bearing homonculous-shaped toy rabbits on it, and my legs were strong and did not ache.

i could have walked all night long through those kaleidoscope streets, dreaming. and when i woke too early to the sound of “mama” echoing through my bedroom in my house in a town i have known all my life, i felt suddenly, incongruously homesick.

the almost-in-laws are visiting this week, tackling long-moldering tasks like painting our living room and recycling Dave’s overgrown beer bottle collection and helping build a playhouse for Oscar in the backyard.

bless them…they are very welcome guests. no, i’m not sharing them. renting…? maybe.

yesterday’s tasks involved a long list of doctor’s visits. in the morning, Oscar and his grandmother and i trekked to the ear clinic for a three-minute viewing of O’s inner ears that culminated in the decision to get tubes put in. in the afternoon, he and i both had separate visits at the hospital – his at the pediatric clinic for a follow-up on the immunity deficiencies he’d been tested for six weeks ago, mine at Labour & Delivery so my doc here could actually use the existing u/s machine to check my cervix along with ye olde manual grope. the u/s was unofficial, of course…because our province won’t pay for an OB from here to take a four-week leave to train in Halifax under the perinatology experts, and though the perinatology team from there are willing to come here for short sessions to train our folks, neither province can agree on who will pay their flights. the joys.

anyhoo, the hospital is a sizable edifice, sprawling and vaguely Memories of Star Trek in its design. since i am generally restricted from walking further than thirty feet or so, and since i’d already trod triple that just getting in and out of the ear clinic in the morning, i asked Oscar’s grandmother to drop him and i off at the front door, where we’d appropriate one of the wheelchairs that are so thoughtfully made available. she’d park, and then the three of us would wheel down to the bowels of the building where the pediatric lair clinic lurks, then waaay back up to the opposite corner where L&D is located.

the hospital, it so happens, is under a major MRSA crackdown these days. neon-green bottles of anti-bacterial handwash everywhere, and only one visitor per patient, nobody under twelve. i’d already made arrangements for O and his Grandmaman to drop me at L&D after his appointment and then beetle on home without me, because the birth unit is currently closed to children already born.

so when Oscar and i strolled in the big front doors and up to the main desk to wash our paws, i wasn’t shocked when the candy-striper in charge of the Very Important Bottles of Handwash glanced in alarm at the two-year-old and inquired, with officious panic, where we planned on going. she didn’t seem quite as relieved as i would’ve expected when my answer of “pediatric clinic” thus saved her launching into her spiel about The Rules and No Small Visitors, but we went about our germ-killing business without further conversation. until i asked her about wipes for the wheelchair.

she looked at me. she had very large, watery blue eyes, ringed in a silvery liner. they reminded me of fish.

wheelchair?

i explained that O and i were just about to grab a wheelchair. it happens that my mother works at the hospital, and had assured me that they keep industrial-strength wipes there behind the desk, so that the chairs can be wiped down between uses. having just seen a poor sickly soul deposited at the door in one, and having noted that neither candy striper nor commissionnaire had leapt up to clean the departed conveyance upon that person’s exit, i figured it was on me to wipe down my intended chariot myself. and were there any wipes, please?

is it for you? her eyes goggled at me, wetly.

the wipe?  no i came in clean, thank you very much, retorted the little voice in my head, but i told it to shut up. “the chair? yes it is, i’m on maternity bedrest, not supposed to walk…and i just want to wipe down the chair as the little guy’s likely to touch every inch of it and with the MRSA alert…” i trailed off. insert sweet motherly smile. show teeth.

Miss Fish Gaze suddenly morphed from Keeper of the Handwash to Guardian of the Entire Domain. she looked over the row of ten empty wheelchairs spaced out across from her, then back at me. but you walked in, she said, half-accusingly, half-stunned

my mother likes to lament that she tried to raise me with manners. i don’t think she has any idea to what level she succeeded, or how much i resent her for it sometimes. because i did not reach across the desk and beat that poor teenaged girl’s head into her little green bottles of anti-bacterial handwash until her fishy-eyes splattered all over the desk, no i did not. pity. nor did i grab my child, fling us both into the wheelchair and proceed to do loud papa wheelies all over the lobby of the hospital, which was clearly what Miss Fish’s tone insinuated that someone as hale and mobile as myself must have in mind. yeh, those maternity bedrest patients, you know what they’re like. yet i refrained. instead i cocked my head and looked her straight in the eye and said, “wipes?”

the surly teenage girl high on the power of her candy stripes caved. she handed them over, with the same misplaced self-righteousness that she’ll display forty years from now when she’s a bossy, squat matron shooing kids away from the plates of squares at some local church supper. i wiped down the wheelchair, settled myself and Oscar, and waited for Grandmaman to materialize. when we whisked past Miss Fish’s desk on our way to the elevator, i was tempted to reach out and steal a bottle of handwash from under her nose, just because.
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the appointments turned out well. my cervix has its eyes on the prize once again, and my doctor is making noises now about not even taking the stitch out until 38 weeks. since i’ve never carried past 36 and am terrified about going into labour with the damn thing still in, i kind of hope we can come to some further accommodation on that matter. but the fact that she’s even talking about 38 weeks is pretty amazing. and Oscar’s chickenpox vax apparently didn’t take, but otherwise he shows no signs of an immuno-suppressed system and is as healthy as an asthmatic two-year-old with chronically infected ears can be. all dandy. praise be.

now i’m just going to stay peacefully in my house watching Dave and his parents spruce the place up and fantasizing about ways to inappropriately and flagrantly misuse hospital wheelchairs on my next visit.

Oscar after his nap…soft around the edges, little body still bleary and warm.

i love this photo. alas, i did not take this photo. Kate came over for an afternoon a few weeks ago, and the lens she pointed at us offered up faces of my son i’d never seen before. she has a wicked eye. she also has a wicked camera.

i once, in the last days of film, invested a few years training my own eye to frame and capture photojournalistic images of the lines and structures and stories that hid in plain sight in the exotic places i journeyed…i have a photo essay of the sectarian murals of Belfast, one of the rooftops of Busan, South Korea, and one of the cats of Istanbul. but i never did master the details of focus and aperture and lighting enough to get my old warhorse K-1000 to take great shots of people, particularly children…they’re twitchy little creatures.

i’d like to try. Dave & i have been talking, and the truth is there’s not much we plan on buying for this new baby. some kind of nursing rocker, oh yes o aching, withered core muscles, oh yes…but beyond that, we’re into hand-me-downs and intend for O and Bebe to share a room, at least for awhile. so we thought maybe we might spend on this child in the place that second-borns – or second-brought-homes – get notoriously shortchanged: photos. we’re in the market for a good camera.

what we have right now is a little hp Photosmart R817…fine for snapshots, but slow, and the light and focus are never great. i want something i can manually adjust. i want something quick, that can capture a first smile rather than the blur of a turning head three seconds later. it doesn’t have to be top of the line. it doesn’t have to be the deal of the century, either. i want advice.

what’s your camera?  what do you like about it?  what doesn’t it do well?  got any recommendations?

ever since it dawned on us the other night how dire the situation with the runt tree is, Dave’s taken to watering it in the evenings.  birches are thirsty creatures.  we know that our weeding/nitrate-enriching measures – however highly recommended by Tree Doctor Google – likely won’t save it, but trying feels better than sitting back and watching it wither.

on Saturday, before bedtime, Oscar “helped” Dave tote the big bucket from the tap on the side of the house back to the shady corner where the trees stand.  i watched them, Dave adjusting his pace to that of O’s stubby, eager little legs, the big hand and the small balancing the handle between them.

it was Canada Day yesterday…and it was hot.  stinkin’ hot.  after a jaunt to the petting zoo with Daddy and Nannie, Oscar spent the late afternoon lounging in his backyard blow-up pool.  because his is a glamourous life.

i was parked in a lawnchair beside said pool, cooling my feet in the three-inch depths of grassy, chilly water, being busily splashed by my son.  Dave was drinking a beer. the big bucket with which the pool had been filled lay upturned beside it on the lawn.

when Oscar picked up the bucket and dipped it into the pool, i looked at him.  quizzically.  i didn’t realize he had fully mastered the zen art of water transference, so when he hoisted the bucket and trotted off with it and its contents most determinedly, i was puzzled.  i asked him what he was doing.

wawa dee, said he.

i speak Oscar-ese pretty fluently, but this took me a second.  i cocked my head and peered at him, and he repeated himself, a hint of exasperation in his voice.  like, duh, mama…wawa dee.  poor beleaguered Oscar, his parents dumb as muffins.  he gave up on me and toddled off across the lawn, heaving the bucket fully half his size along with him.

and he watered the tree, the dying tree, of his own volition.  his brother’s tree.

and his father and i sat with our feet in the kiddie pool in the hot sun, tears in our eyes…but of pride, not sorrow.

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in non-tree-related news, the lovely and literate Mad nominated century for a Perfect Post this month.  Mad, thank you.  a post nominally about children’s literature, nominated by a children’s librarian who doesn’t even really like Anne of Green Gables?  dude, you made me feel like a writer.   :)

pondering how to actually deal with things going right got me thinking about a random encounter i had in the grocery store a couple of months ago, back when i, um, used to go out.

i got told i hadn’t changed a bit, with a big ol’ perky smile thrown on the end of those words for good measure.  and i hated it.  because i don’t want what’s gone wrong in my life – and specifically, or for me, most significantly, the loss(es) we’ve endured in our road to parenthood – negated.  i don’t want that journey of coping and healing dismissed, written out of my history, my identity.  and yet neither do i want the role of garment render and teeth gnasher to become a crutch, an excuse for fearfulness, a cloak worn past its expiry date.

i has a new post up at Glow in the Woods.  all welcome.  :)

flipping through old photo albums while ostensibly tidying the den, i come across a collection of photos entitled “June 1998.”

ten years ago.

the span of time is not so shocking as the irrefutable visual evidence that i was not, as my internal clock testifies, a mere child a decade ago.  apparently i am not actually eternally twenty-four after all. in fact, i was not even twenty-four then…i was twenty-six, a year married, living in Halifax and working on my M.A. and holding down three part time jobs and utterly, totally confused about my place in the world and how to make my way in it.

to top off all that angst i had bad hair, the result of an unfortunate first encounter with highlights and the effort to grow out years of a pixie cut into something longer.  two brassy walrus tusks swooped down from my brow, framing me in yellow.  i refused to cut them because they were, well, long-ish.  note to self: yellow is not your colour.

there is an end-of-year-celebration shot of me and my students, a G.E.D class that i taught through the local community college, for whom i’d dragged my carcass into my car and out of town at 7:30 every morning for half the year, out to a free elementary school classroom in a fishing village on the coast, where we’d all tucked our knees up under our chins on the tiny chairs and tried to figure out high school math together.  i look at them and wonder where they are now, the stevedore who’d come back to school because his union would no longer keep him on unless he got the qualification, the girl who smoked so much she literally set her alarm through the night so that she wouldn’t wake up nicotine deprived, the local drug dealer, the couple with the three little kids, the woman who brought me her hand-me-downs through the year because she thought i might like some new clothes.

there is a random shot of me taken at the other teaching job i held that year, the one i hated in principle: tutor for one of those “we’ll fix your children” farms learning centres that pay their (fully trained, experienced, qualified) teachers ten dollars an hour and charge you twenty for the honour.  it was the first job i got when we’d landed in the city the September before, and i’d gradually dropped my hours down and down until i only had one client left…the little girl who appears in the picture with me, beaming into the camera.  Mercedes.  i stayed with Mercedes through the school year because i liked her too much to leave.  she was eight, a roly-poly, bespectacled imp with severe learning disabilities but a higher emotional IQ than almost anyone else i’ve ever met.  i adored her.  urchin-like, frumpy little fussbudget daughter of a slender, made-up mom who always seemed bewildered by the child she’d produced, Mercedes had me at hello.  she had more sophisticated work avoidance tactics than federal bureaucrats do – we’d open up our books, and i’d offer her a choice of what to start with when suddenly, with perfect guile, she’d peer up into my face through her coke-bottle lenses and inquire, just like the local biddy at a church supper, “now, how’s your Nannie?  my Nannie’s been sick, you know.”   and sucker that i am for Nannies, we’d end up in a ten minute conversation that had absolutely nothing to do with symbol recognition or basic multiplication but was often one of the nicest i’d had all week.  i secretly wanted to take Mercedes out for coffee and a smoke.

there is a photo in that collection of me on a back deck with a guitar in one hand and a bottle of Southern Comfort in the other.  the bottle is largely empty.  i appear largely smashed.

there is another photo of me singing my heart out over same guitar on same deck the night the cops showed up to ask us to cease the caterwauling.  most politely, they actually waited ’til our chorus of “Oh Lord, Won’t You Buy Me a Mercedes Benz” had dribbled to a halt before interrupting.  they were complementary about the singing, but the neighbours…well, you know.  besides, isn’t that song supposed to be sung a cappella?  our friends from Toronto were visiting that night and went home and regaled their friends with tales of the weird, friendly cops in the Maritimes.

there are a lot of pictures of me and my first husband.  we look pleasant.

there is a shot, smoke-obscured, of my friend Antony and i leaning back into an old, sagging velvet couch in the office where we produced two issues of a national arts and literature magazine, all uber-cool and sharp, clean b&w lines.  there were five of us who spent that spring and summer toiling in that smoky office before the whole venture went defunct, taking the third of my part-time jobs with it.  i was the editor.  i loved the work, the words, the creativity, the deadlines and the late-night meetings and the sheer freedom of it after four years spent as a teacher.  i disliked having to remind either of the cocky little upstart writers who’d started the whole deal that they would, y’know, eventually have to pay me.  one eventually did, right before he wisely bailed out of the sinking ship and moved to South Korea.  his name was Dave.

now, ten years later, i live with that cocky little twerp…who a few years and half a world hence, i noticed might be the love of my life.

time does crazy things to a person.

i suspect and kinda hope that the trajectory between now and ten years from now is a little more linear than the one that brought me here from June 1998.   my twenty-four-year-old soul will grow a little more aged on the outside, i suppose, and there will be the inevitable surprises and sorrows that mark one along the way.  but at thirty-six, i know – and accept – who i am in a way that would have been incomprehensible to the girl/woman searching back at me from that June 1998 collection.  and i looked at those pictures, and at her unlined brow framed by garish highlights, and thought, thank god i do not have to go back.

to the multitude who weighed in with ideas and experiences and just good wishes regarding milk and asthma and all that mad stuff…thank you.  so much.  we saw our family doctor (who’s not utterly opposed to the possibility of a dairy connection, btw, it’s just not his area of expertise in any way) on Thursday, and Oscar’s lungs are clear and good to go once again.  the doc too was strongly in support of putting O back on the rice milk for now and then trying cow’s milk again in a month or two once cold season is over and before allergy season begins, just to see if we can establish a pattern.  allergy tests will follow, but probably not until fall.

the rice milk O drinks is organic and fortified with vitamin D and calcium, so i feel pretty good about giving it to him.  while his diet isn’t heavily meat-reliant, he gets a lot of protein and actually gravitates more to protein foods than carbs, so i’m not over-worried about him having any protein deficiency.  we do give him soy milk occasionally too but don’t want to overload the soy in his diet as kids with dairy sensitivities often have the same reactions to soy.

and mostly, yep, i’m still just kinda hoping he’ll grow out of it.  so having all of you tell me stories of siblings and relatives and cousins’ pet dogs with terrible childhood asthma that magically went away in adulthood…that was like candy.  i love you.  i like to imagine myself a realist and i do prefer to see the details of what’s coming down the road at me, but clearly…when it comes to my kid, i’m all over the possibility of magical salvation, of having him snatched from the jaws of even very small, controllable, more irritant-than-life-threatening kinds of dragons.  and in the meantime, he gets tasty organics.  god, i am such a yuppie.

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and in the off chance that you spend your nights dreaming of rubbing elbows with my bourgeois self, some of us from eastern parts will be gathering May 16th-18th in bizarrely-picturesque Chester NS for our own highly-tongue-in-cheek version of BlogHer, since San Francisco is thousands of dollars away for us and July just…well…inconvenient for most.  Maritime BlogHer will involve absolutely no speeches, panels, or experts, but probably copious amounts of wine, beer, and chocolate.  i have first dibs on the chocolate, just so all are clear.  we’re numbering a cozy 8-10 strong, renting a B&B for the weekend, and…um…plan to hang out.  invitations are utterly open. :)

however, if you do plan to come and kiss fish (hey, it’s local custom, one has to be culturally sensitive) with us, we’ll need confirmation by the end of this month.  please join our facebook group (it’s the only one entitled Maritime BlogHer, easy to find) and let us know your travel plans so we can try to coordinate rooms and drives and all that good stuff.

and i can regale you with all the exciting things i learn about dairy and asthma in the interim.