I remember it well.

Good afternoon to you all,
Today is a day rising heavy in my heart. It is a good day, a beautiful day - the weather could not be any more my cup of tea, I sat in the sun just now thinking that I was born long before my body - I heard stories from my past in the wind.
It is fitting I believe, that this beautiful day serves as a reminder of profound moments and events from the past.
It seems only the only proper tribute to the days gone by, the beauty I mean. Such perfect beauty rose with the sun this morning.
Today is marathon day in my beloved Boston. Sitting behind the road where I stood as a child excitedly watching the thousands of runners pass me by, are my Grandparents. They are together in the earth, a plot by the runners route. I remember as a child visiting that plot, visiting the the grave of my great grandparents who are also buried there - I was always disturbed to see the names and birth dates of my Nana and Papa with a dash and open ended marble. Hard to accept death is part of life when you are seven and your Nana and Papa are your whole world.
I always protested looking, I gazed out beyond our family names and instead made up stories of life and death for all the other names carved in neat rows - any name but our name.
My Grandfather died on marathon day two years ago - like the the beauty of today, I found his timing to be appropriate.
While thousands ran the streets of his city, he spread his wings to fly.
It is also the weekday early opener for the Sox.
He loved baseball and Boston, like I love words and sunlight.
I am homesick today, missing my home, the sound of sneakers with soles worn down after the brutal climb of heart break hill.
Surely there is something about a Southern girl Amos, but there is also something about we Boston girls.
We appreciate the saltiness, we sweat it out from our pores.
Today I miss my home, I miss the walk up lake Street, I miss the little white cups littering the roadway, the people partying on roof tops, the collective cheering of Bostonian 's, the salty sweat that would occasionally whip me in the face as I passed a cup to a thirsty and grateful runner.
I miss my roots and feel them begging for a feed of old dirty water.
Today is also the anniversary of the Virginia tech shootings. A day I will never forget.
I was in Washington DC on the windiest day ever, I was with my family and my extended family, the Dyer-Mitchell clan.
Of course because it is always something, Mary was blown down a set of steps at the Arlington National Cemetery, we spent the remainder of the day in an overcrowded (wind injuries?) emergency room.
It was there that we witnessed the events in Blacksburg unfolding, the giant TV in the waiting room flooded with images of confusion and death. I remember that we were shocked beyond comprehension, still feel that exact same way.
Five years has passed.
My wife is at ground zero today - I have received a text from her, a photo of the new memorial that has since been constructed after our visit on my 40th birthday.
Somehow I think her being there is in line with the theme of the day.
I am a person that never forgets. My memory is as expanse as anything I can think of that is wide and deep, I am a watcher of life, a detail seeker, an imprint maker.
I remember everything in fine detail.
I remember my childhood, the marathon year after year, the sound of the Sox opener on the radio on the front porch, my Grandfathers voice on our final goodbye, the emergency room in DC, what I said to the man who gave Mary the wheel chair, walking across the street fighting a gust that wanted me for a victim, the blue floral shirt I bought that day, the sounds of screaming and confusion and crying coming from Blacksburg. Dave Matthews backing away from his mike for the Hokies to take center stage by candlelight, to sing their words of wisdom, conviction, healing - "don't worry about a thing cause every little thing is gonna be alright."
Ahhh this day is heavy and light.
I remember and I guess that is all I really wanted to say. I remember and I NEVER forget.
xo

girl has gumption.

Good Sunday afternoon my loves, I hope that you all have had a glorious day thus far. Me you ask?
As a matter of fact I have.
I woke up this morning to face hours of biology projects for my final portfolio and although that is NOT what I wanted to be doing, there was certainly a sense of relief in beating the demon down once and for all - this damn class has me procrastinating and avoiding the work all semester - I am just plain not science minded.
First task at hand was to write my contribution statement which will close out my portfolio, it is essentially the period at the end of the book.
It was supposed to be short and sweet, HA - not when it's an opportunity to write in my voice - I went on and on, three pages long. I began the process, assuming that what would pour out of me was a heart felt apology letter, trust me my BIO professor is due that courtesy.
Instead I found myself writing about the challenges I have had to overcome within myself to actually get through the last three years in pursuit of degree number one. I shared with Dr. Willis the phoenix rising from the ashes of the her self inflicted burned down life/self confidence story. I ended by saying that although my contributions to college science were NOT what I am sure he had hoped they would be and were certainly NOT what I had set out to achieve, I had achieved what I was capable of, none the less. I told him that my greatest contribution to biology was outside the classroom, started in my womb and now stands upright times 8 - motherhood is in essence biology - I have had more DNA molecules multiply than most - that, and also I have served as an example and an inspiration to my fellow students. Both in what they should not do (put off their education until middle age when real life is at it's realest) but most importantly what a person is capable of accomplishing despite a bazillion obstacles.
I am not at all sure that he will accept it (I do have a way of ignoring directions) or that he will appreciate it and most importantly as I teeter on the edge of failure, that it will get me a passing grade.
But, I wrote in truth about MY contribution to biology.
I felt satisfied and I guess pass or fail, I have yet again, satisfied the requirements of truth and my own spirit. In the end, this is always what is most important - I have learned this lesson most of all.
Sitting on the table beside me is my graduation notification. If I pass my Spring classes, I will graduate Summa cum Laude - the highest distinction, my GPA I have learned in the group all the way at the top.
Not sure I will pass BIO, may have to repeat the class and get my degree in August, praying that I can pull the final out of my ass and be done with all this science nonsense. Only time will tell.
Regardless I am fanning my feathers like a peacock today, letting all my colors show.
The pretty, the ugly and the variations in between.
It is all those subtleties and extremes that brought the words Summa cum Laude into my life.
I have fought hard and steadfast, been throwing punches underwater struggling to rise for air.
The air feels nice at the top, the view is amazing.
I am NOT, mind you, tooting my horn or running my big mouth.
I am proud that I have finally done what I set out to do a million years ago before the water ran over my life and drowned out my dreams.
I told Dr. Willis that I may never do anything at all with my degree but hang it on my wall amongst my family photos - if that is all that ever becomes of it, it will be if nothing else, amongst the most beautiful company, my proudest achievements hanging together.
Now I sit, for a moment writing to you all, a glass of cranberry juice on ice, my bare shoulders in a strapless sundress the fresh air and a thousand bugs blowing in the open back door, Jason Mraz singing to me about 93 million miles -
I feel satisfied.
I FEEL SATISFIED.
It is a strange new world.
Blessings my friends and as always, all the perfect love in my heart.

Free Bird

Good early Sunday Morning to you...
I think I am quoting my professor here or maybe it's Frost? - loosely too - "writers are the great observers of life"
I woke up about a half an hour ago with my writer in full on observation mode, the mouthy little birds could no longer be ignored...
Birds are big in my life - always have been.
My Nana used to whistle to them on the back porch while she hung laundry, she had unparalleled bird call abilities when she made her mouth in a tight O.
And with the tears that just shocked even me, I can no longer list the bird references with my Nana - because... I realized just now that she is really dead and this reality is messing with my ability to pretend she is just in the next room drinking a cup of tea and writing out a birthday card to one of her favorite neighbors, or Niece's or her best friend from high school, Helen....
Jesus Deb, this is why you are so easy and so hard to love.
I just wrote that down in my notebook of realizations I have been as of late toting around with me.
When I observe an encapsulation, a perfect example, a snapshot of nakedness of me, a profound truth about myself - I jot it down for momentum in the race to change before it all just fades away into a morning mist where my Granddaughter misses me into pretending I am still walking and running my mouth amongst.
My mind is a poem, lyrics to a never ending song.
I can't help it, it is how the genetics worked out - somewhere in the gene pool a mind like mine existed.
I just had a full on fantasy about where genealogy could lead me....I wish I knew from what fossilized rock record I sprung.
See... I could have just gone on to write a brilliant blog about my ties to Marie Antoinette.
My mind streams thoughts like the running billboard in Times Square, you'd have to unplug me from the power source to get it to stop -
Please do not unplug me.
My boyfriend calls me "mouth" - I smile when I get the texts that say "you have quite a mouth, good thing I love you so much"
Then I will say, "oh don't you worry, I can be quiet if you want, like dead silent, so silent that the nothingness will become deafening" and he laughs at me,
because although my mouth is certainly exhausting and challenging, it is poetry and music and somewhere deep in his man cave of a heart, he knows that he is lucky that my song sings a chorus of him, scraps of paper will absorb his ink.
But.... I admit it - I do have the biggest mouth, in fact...that is the most consistent thing throughout my life that has been said about me. It started in Pre-school "she's a sweet little thing with so much to say!" and has never ceased.
Here's the thing....
I know it is hard on all of you who have to listen but.... Next time it's quiet and you realize it, imagine that you never picked up the phone again to hear me say "I love you"
Ouch. I know that smarts a little.
So deal with it all y'all.
This morning when I woke (long before my alarm), the birds inspired me to pay attention rather than dream away real moments.
I listened to them as I lay there, my open windows carrying in every "you get back in that nest right now mister" "Honey really, I just brought home two damn worms five minutes ago", "Ah sweetie Mommy loves you", "Oh hey there neighbor Cardinal, you hear Mr. Woodpecker this morning banging away in his yard at the ass crack of dawn, doesn't he know it's Sunday?" and so forth and so on.
If I didn't feel a sudden need to blog I could have lay there all my life and just listened to the birds who talk as much as me.
It's nice every once in while to just hear the minds of the birds and give my beak some down time.
I love you Mary, I love you Bob - I love my kids. They are the ones who know about my mind/mouth the best, have to deal with the incessant running of it, the stories, quips, flashes of road rage, sarcasm, gutter talk and annoying ever present moments of self doubt.
You are all so perfectly perfect for your respective positions, I think the pieces are beginning to fit nicely, the corners seem sturdy enough to support the middle.
and... there I go again - my mind blogged another complete entry on construction metaphors for love.
Why do Kevin and I not write more songs????
Okay... the morning sands are slipping and I must go - I have no idea what direction I went here - I know not of what I have rambled.
I know it began with the birds and ends here with both an "I'm sorry" and a cocky smile and a "you're welcome"
Have a blessed and beautiful day xoxo

I set fire to the poles.

And as I posted that...James Morrison came on the running play list and I was flooded with a memory of an awkward young couple holding clammy hands to my right and Mary over my left shoulder in an electric blue skin tight dress talkin floor talk to an African American security guard who made Taye Diggs look like Bill Cosby.
My life is pure magic - Viva Las Vegas Rand McNally.

jasmine in my mind.

Yesterday as I sat in Biology wanting to slit my wrists over poly peptide chains and my inability to give a shit,
my phone buzzed in my lap and indicated someone cared enough to save me...I looked, expecting it to be Bob, to find,
that it was my wife.
The rescue squad - the island of reality in an ocean of amino acids, polypeptides and diarrhea....
The text read "You're the woman I love"
Without skipping a beat because why would I,I typed in the folds of my too short sundress,
"You're the only one that can love me back to her"
For those of you who are not Jason Mraz inclined - you will completely miss the beauty in that exchange and the fact that it took about two seconds flat to occur.
Jason Mraz's new song is about a relationship - a man who will love the woman in his life back to the woman he loves when she has lost her damn mind and decided she might hate herself, finds herself her own worst enemy....
That is my Mary, the one who can love me back to the woman she loves...
And.... she loves me.
Like no one ever has.
And....the thing about that, - it is a reciprocal respect and equal need that brings us there.
I may be the beautiful mess, but without my mess she would have no one to pick up shards of glass with.
We do what we do and it is like nothing I will ever do with anyone else - and that is amazing, unbelievable, an honor bestowed that hangs a shooting star on my chest....
I am missing my wife, missing my home, the place of lush gardens, moments stolen under the apple tree, the cool blue calm, the raging seas against the machine of society lost to true importance, the birds who love their chicks and sqwak to each other about babysitting the nest and fishing dates in the early dawn, the slick of the rained on green deck, the taste of salt air mixed with tequila and too many marlboro methols, the constant complaints of stomachs stuffed beyond gluttony to plain ridiculousness, foul language that would make truckers see beautiful-smart women in a whole new light, the repetitive requests and laughter of the luckiest most real children in the world,the sun room where we go to die of too much goodness on love seats that warp a body into it's natural state,the place I long for - Prospect Harbor, all the way at the end of the world.
I just realized the other day that at the end of that song Dave says something about cutting through the reeds - really? Really Dave?
I am going there in June, going to spend like ten days in heaven and although I want the days in between (very much so) - I kinda wish it was now....
I am anxious to get on with it already - need an early misted run to the lighthouse so I can stretch by the big rocks while I gaze across the water at perspective I only gain while running or smiling for a photo.
I need that perspective like I need air.
I miss my air with my feet on the ground and I miss the air in her brown green yellow eyes.
There will never ever be enough days to this life or this love story.
Miss you wifey, miss comin' home to you on a summer breeze.

"she'll have a shot of Jameson and a glass of red"

Good Morning my friends and readers,
I write to you this morning from a sunspot behind the window at the 41 homestead, my only home which remains a place where I will again eagerly return. Beyond the sparkletasthic rays that explode from the glass, the ground is white and icy. The trees shoot to the sky like cupids arrows straight into the heart of God. And my Nana, my Papa, my Da, my lost love. I hope there is a gated sanctuary, and that they can see me all kittened up in my warm place. I hope that there is something beyond all of this, I am just not convinced that anything can surpass the perfection of all this beautiful madness and tedious yearning. Jesus I am in a state...
My wife, who always knows how to handle/manage me, has been feeding my soul and my liver. She has ordered up the Irish whiskey as is if it is water and I am desert dehydrated. She gets the drought of my spirit better than anyone - championed the wrongness of my invisibleness - understands more than she did before even, why she can NEVER ignore my calls. Even if on my behalf, defense, wonderment. I love her for the mothering - I would be no where, the sun would seek me out lonely, a childless Mother and a barren garden.
Instead I am safe, even though my old life has ended. The prologue to the bird cage door unlocking.
My Nana was lowered into the ground yesterday, I sat in the car plot side and watched as the men unfurled the straps of my life. She disappeared below the hard frozen earth and Debbie went with her, into the endless dark.
I am okay - I am relieved. Her suffering has ceased, the fear is gone from the amber - in the wake, the flecks of the frozen past can shine again - the pain and beauty has beat out the fear in the end.
I thank her God for that - her beautitudes are earned and worthy.
I am watching Adele live in concert - the tone of her voice sings of truth and a scrappers inclination. It feels right right now, like Gumption is in full force atmospherically speaking.
You gotta ultimately know your own name and go your own way - regardless of doubters persecution.
I am grateful today that if nothing else, I have been PRESENT in every waking moment of this life.
When I was drowning, I let the water rush into my lungs, let it steal my breath before fighting to surface and breathe again.
I have let this life have it's way with me, like a lover helpless to her partners divinity.
Back arched, eyes in the back of my head, limp the stiff - I have let it all have me.
I am thankful for that and thankful that I know my own name in the morning.
Mary said yesterday, I speak in tongues.
Proof positive.
Some of you will get me and some of you will say "what the fuck is she talking about?"
I love when I squint into the sun and blink and perfect circle rainbows dance in time to the music.
A miracle of my moment.
I went to my childhood home yesterday, I ran the steps as I used to - fuck the owners, I refuse to ask to climb the steps of the house that built me.
As I came down on the bottom, I realized that there are seven steps. Six wood and one concrete.
seven...
I always jumped off the bottom, two footed land.
I will miss that dismount for the remainder of the flight.
Adele is singing a song she wrote for her best friend - funny, Mary can tell me I am Scarlet O'Hara but she'll still heat the buckwheat, even if while disapprovingly scowling.
Because of her the sun will never miss me.
I have more to say, but my head just shut off. I thought of Bob Selph's salt and pepper hair and brown eyes and smiled.
I think I will sink and succumb.
Love to you all.

Now and at the hour.

There are no words for what I feel right now.
I am sitting in the wooden kitchen chair I always sit in when I write.
I feel the firmness on the underside of my thighs, feel the familiar prop of my toes, like a dancer, upright and stiff.
My body is here, I feel it, know that it exists.
I am only aware however that I am real by the extension of my limbs, the contrast of feeling, them to the wood to the floor.
I am in preparation for death mode again.
My eyes burn with tears that fill and then seem to dissolve before spilling.
The inside of my nose tickles with anticiaption of the real cry,
the inevitable, unstoppable tidal wave of grief.
There are no words for what she has meant to me.
Are not enough words, no perfect succession, pairing, poem or song,
that can ever, will ever spell out the gravity of this love I feel for her.
I am confident there are no words,
not even my own.
And here come the real tears now.
I wish that I could tell her one more time, although it has all been done and said before.
I wish that I could squint past the sunspot on the back porch peer into her amber flecked eyes and say one more time "Nana can I throw the bread ends to the birdies now?"
I wish that I could hear her whistle,
hear her say "see you later Alligator"
taste her macaroni and cheese.
Drink a cup of tea.
Have her reach in to feel my feverish forehead.
Hear the tea cups in the dining room rattle as she strides the floor towards my room.
Call me tweetie.
Call me Deb-or-ah Ann.
Hold my little hand.
Eat friendlys ice cream.
Go to the Holiday bazaar at the Knights of Columbus.
Watch her set the wishbone on the windowsil to dry.
Make gravy.
Get her a kleenex.
Watch her blot bright red lipstick.
There are so many moments from the last 41 years of life that I wish I could return to, if even for just a second, a flash of what was, one more "take a look at me now Nana" - just one more time.
Once more before it all changed, once more before she leaves me now.
I would not stop her, if I could.
I want her to go.
But I want her to stay inside me too.
I want to be little.
I want to be her Granddaughter forever.
I want keep every single kiss, every single smile, every wink.

My safe place is leaving.
Where will I go?
Who will pray for me now?

And I can hear her in my head, "offer it up."

She taught me to be gentle.
She taught me to be kind.
She taught me to write letters and send cards.
She taught me to be proud of who I am.
She taught me selflessnes.
She taught me to be respectful.
She taught me to cook.
She taught me to act like a lady.
She taught me to love.
She taught me to sing.
She taught me about dignity.
She taught me to have grace.
She taught me to knit.
She taught me to swim.
She taught me to do everything I know.

She made me every good thing that I am.

I am glad that I named my daughter after her. I am thankful she lived long enough to see her great grandchildren, thankful she was able to say "Emma Claire" while beaming with pride steeped in family tradition.
I am glad my stew tastes just like hers and that I don't flip my omelettes.
Her violet is bright purple now, a purple so saturated the color seems unnatural.
It's fitting.
You got to win a little lose a little and always sing the blues a little, that's the story of, that's the glory of love....
It's the ebb and flow, the giveth and the taketh, the balance - I know Nan.
It's always about the balance.
41 a big year for me...
She saved my life simply by living hers.
Thank you.
I love you.

There are no words for you Nana, none that strike any kind of dent.
All I can think of are these...

Our Father who art in heaven......