{Original posted at Alphabet Junkie}

I am flying down the highway that Ralph and I used to travel, groggy with humidity and third-shift obligations, on our early ay emm returns from work.

The sunroof is open, my window down, and my elbow is propped up on the door. My hand, fingers slightly splayed, is upright and barely cupped into the streaming wind. The air is moist and near-cold. I imagine it splintering through my palms and wrists, crucifying me. Crucifying me to this mountain.

Sometimes I think the red clay taste of this place, the sting of fire ants on naked toes, will never leave me.

Photo Credit

Double lines, broad expanse of fields to my left, chicken houses and horse trailers and apologetic farms to my right.

A caution light, a sign with a large, stark black + and I swing into a right turn, slowing significantly. A pebbly road paved with what I’ve always referred to as ‘gravelcrete’ is seated between trees that could masquerade as rows of the blackest of monoliths if only their bumpy tops did not give them away. The sky above is still impossibly blue, even though the sun took its’ leave of the horizon two hours ago. It is strewn with bruised indigo clouds that don’t even pretend to be fluffy. They are as flat and as stretched as the road before me.

{by Gailt Breen of These Little Waves}

photo credit: Sean Hubbard/@seanhubbard

I look at him through red rimmed eyes. He wipes my cheek dry with one thumb and asks, Are you happy?

Yes. No. Sometimes.

Yes, when I’m focused.

No, when I falter.

Sometimes.

We sit in the center of our bed like our three children often do. Our room is large but this space in it is small. Our toes touch. Our voices conspire.

He is loving mixed with worry. I am anxious laced with anger.

Anger because he dared scratch beneath the surface of what I want seen. I am faltering.

When I’m focused, I see a straight path to my treasure. The obstacles along the way are simply tasks to complete.

But inevitably, I falter. I falter. It is my own undoing every single time. I steal my own confidence. My own vision. My own focus.

I hide these treasures somewhere deep inside until they are no longer visible. And I replace them with ugliness. Fear. Insecurity. Jealousy.

{by Kaleigh Somers}

We’re graduating and the future is 34 pushpins pressed into a map of the United States.

“Probability says California,” My roommate, Brooke, told me as she cupped her forearms around a cluster of pins.

I nodded, trying to imagine her in California, me in New York City, our other roommate in Washington, D.C. It was too much to think about, all of us spread thin across a country where the only comfort we had was loneliness. We’d take comfort in knowing that, ironically, we couldn’t possibly be sure anything monumental would happen in the next five years.

It’s funny how one home transitions into another. Looking back, it’s seamless. But when you’re at the edge of each cliff and you’re ready to jump, it’s like the first time you realize the world is in constant motion. For three years and eight months, it’s pushed to the back of your mind.

Then you feel it rising up from the pit of your stomach like a sudden sickness that washes over you, forcing you to stop and sit down. To regain a sense of balance and stability. To find yourself on that map of pushpins.

Where will I be in the future?

I wonder.

“You’ll live on the lake,” I told Brooke. “I can picture it.”

…

Forestation rises up on three sides; a vast expanse of murky water closes off the loop. Children laugh in the background as she stretches out on the shoreline, digging the tips of her toes into the grass and dirt. She stops reading her book to crane her neck, motioning for her daughter to come to where she’s sitting.

“Do you want to go for a swim?” she asks the child.

The girl, whose hair is as white-blonde as Brooke’s, nods vehemently and starts tugging her t-shirt over her head.

She reaches the edge of the water, lifts up one foot, and frowns.

“What’s wrong?” Brooke asks.

{by Melinda Wentzel from Planet Mom}

(photo credit: wolfgangphoto)

When I was nine or ten, I remember well my enthrallment with my mother’s hands. They were delicate and slender, sweetly scented and rose petal-soft—so completely unlike my own nicked and scraped, callused and chafed boy-like hands that were better suited for wielding a hammer and throwing a fastball than anything else.

Mine were distinctively earthy, too, largely because remnants of dirt and grass simply refused to be removed. Or at least that was the sentiment I held for much of the summer. It was a byproduct of being a kid, I suppose, literally immersed in a world of sod and soil from sunup to sundown. Never mind my fondness of forests and rocky places, which typified a deep and abiding bond with nature—one that I’m not quite sure my mother ever completely understood.

At any rate, my hands told of who I was at the time—a tomboy given to tree climbing, stealing second base and collecting large and unwieldy rocks. Everyone’s hands, I’d daresay, depict them to a certain degree, having a story to tell and a role to play at every time and every place on the continuum of life. Traces of our journey remain there in the folds of our skin—from the flat of our palms and knobs of our knuckles to the very tips of our fingers. As it should be, I suppose.

For better or for worse, our hands are the tools with which we shape the world and to some extent they define us—as sons and daughters, providers and professionals, laborers and learners, movers and shakers. That said, I’m intrigued by people’s hands and the volumes they speak—whether they’re mottled with the tapestry of age, vibrant and fleshy or childlike and impossibly tender. Moreover, I find that which they whisper difficult to ignore.

{by Emily of Chatting at the Sky}

Piano was my major until my sophomore year of college. That was when I quit. Required practice and theory classes and hours upon hours in fluorescent lit rooms with Chopin and Czerny did not bring out the art in me, it nearly made it die. I quit simply because I wanted to love it again. It’s the same reason why I will probably never be a real professional photographer. The art of it doesn’t outweigh the responsibility enough, and so I continue to learn at my own pace and in my own way. I take pictures because it helps me see. And that is all.

For a long time, writing was private for me. Over time and through this blog, writing has become something different. Of all the art there is in the world, writing is the art that brings the most satisfaction as well as the most fear. I can avoid the piano for months at a time. But if I don’t write, there is a distinct possibility I might not exist. I know that isn’t actually true, but that is how it feels.

I write for pleasure, for remembering, for learning, for listening, and for money. I can write in the early morning hours as well as late at night. I squeeze it in ten minutes before it’s time to get the kids and quick while the water boils. Unlike piano or photography, the art of writing outweighs the pressure and expectations. For some people, the art of making music is worth the fluorescent lights with Chopin. For me, the art of writing is worth the fear, the risk, and the isolation.

Because I believe I’ve found the art that is also my worship, it is important to me to use it. To practice it. And to share it. When I played piano, it was always really difficult for me to play for people. I was nervous, embarrassed, and tried to avoid it at all costs. If I would have decided that was the art I wanted to pursue, I think I would have gotten better at sharing it. I would argue that unshared art is still art, but it feels more like a hobby.

{by Kristin Zecchinelli}

I see nothing in space as promising as the view from a ferris wheel.
~E.B. White

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

{by Tara R.}

She had a penetrating sort of laugh. Rather like a train going into a tunnel.
~P.G. Wodehouse

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

{by Joe Flood}

That morning, Ted got dressed, picked up his clubs and headed for the links. At the club-house, he had a drink, a Bloody Mary reeking of vodka and Tabasco. The TV played CNBC, news of the financial storm overturning all boats. Ted ordered another drink, handing over his credit card to the bartender.

“Charge it while it still works,” he said.

The first golfers were heading out into the humid dawn air. A group of vacationing orthodontists were looking for a fourth. Ted fell in with their group, a little tipsy from the vodka.

Ted sent his first shot racing into a drainage ditch, a line drive that sent up a big splash in the early morning mist.

“I’m taking a mulligan,” Ted said.

“Yea, it’s practice!” the shortest of the lot said. He was the oldest, the richest, and was the leader of the group. His name was Danny.

Ted’s second swing wasn’t much better. He seemed to slip on the dew-wet grass, his left leg jerking out, as if it had been yanked like a marionette. The ball overflew the drainage ditch and bounced over the neighboring fairway.

“I should’ve hit the driving range,” he explained.

“Hey, it’s early,” Danny said.

Ted took another mulligan and, on his third try, sent a decent drive down the middle of the fairway. Danny then launched a ball high over his, by a good fifty yards. His colleagues congratulated him.

“It’s the Bertha’s!” Danny exclaimed, holding the oversized driver in his hand. The club was nearly as tall as he was.

Ted scooped his ball out with a nine iron and sent it arcing onto the green. Danny did likewise.

The men lined up for their putts. The orange sun was just over the palm trees, starting to heat up the day.

“Did I tell you?” Danny said. “Winner buys drinks.”

“Got it,” Ted said, aligning himself with the hole. He was short by a good ten feet. Danny sunk his ball, a smile alighting on his face.

{by Amber of The Run-a-muck}

My firstborn, with a shoulder sunburn and radiating roses on his face, is not well acquainted with pain, so his big cousin coaches him with his thoughts.

Sophia is nine. She has known multiple hospital beds, scary chest sounds, needles and nurses, so she says, “Isaac, when you hurt, all you have to do is think of your mother’s smile. When I’m with my daddy and I hurt, I think of my mother’s smile. When I’m at my mom’s, I think of my dad’s smile. It works.”

Then she flits off like a dove.

I watch her all weekend, her unaffected art, the lack of desire for new clothes or a hair-brushing, the freckled beauty of a long, lanky child, and I turn my head more than once for what of her is lost in me. I behold her joy.

Most people carry their souls in a deep pocket at the pit of their stomachs, but Sophia lets hers slip out to her fingertips. Hers rides on easy lips and feathers out from her shoulders to fan air at the disappointed. It is innocence and how it shirks this world, how pain is transformed to beauty.

Maybe it’s the knowledge that her straight body will shortly turn to curve and that her imagination won’t so easily delve to the floor in character play that makes me awe at her on the cusp. Sophia’s arms reach at first guess, and she offers an honest smile to the sun. She sits with paper and draws, snuggled generously with my boys.

{By Zombie Daddy}

Some days I’m better at getting out of the house than others. I bring my daughter with me to the grocery store or to the mall while I browse. I don’t buy anything; any cash I pick up here or there goes straight to rent; I don’t work and we need the apartment so that it at least looks like we’re normal. (Aside: Those idiots who hang out in graveyards all day and all night, slowly rotting from the damp and never giving a thought to staying clean and inconspicuous just give me a headache. Make an effort. Fuckers. Take some pride in your being; you have been given a second shot at existence.)

As I was saying, I don’t buy anything. That isn’t the point of the trips to the store. The point is to care. Complacency will be the life of us. If I don’t care enough every day to get up, get out, and keep track of what is going on in the world then I will wither. The doldrums will win, the hunger will dominate, and my daughter and I will get caught as we rampage down a suburban street picking off soccer moms. So, activity, involvement. Playing among the cattle. Keeping track of who is divorcing whom, and whether or not Bat Boy has finally had a kid of his own; noting the changing fashions; watching books climb and fall from the bestseller lists; I pay attention to all of these things and pretend they matter until I almost convince myself. I train my being to react as though they are important, to behave effortlessly normal.

She thinks it’s a big waste of time, of course. “Daddy, can we eat now?” she asks every time we go to the store. “No sweetie. Not now. Now we learn.” I’m teaching her that there is value in normalcy, even if it’s only self-preservation.

Only self-preservation. It’s so hard to get through to her sometimes, to teach her that this existence we have is precarious and precious. She’s young, and impulsive, and driven by the now.