March 27, Frisco.
Travel day, easy after driving from Columbia, and no major incidents.
This will be our last traveling with the circus this time around, as we leave on Monday and Kelly Miller will be here for four days, with shows on Friday and Saturday and the traditional day off for Easter on Sunday.
The kids ran outside to play with the Rosales twins.
It's sunny and windy and warmer and I love it.
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
Video games.
March 25, Shepherd.
Dylan and Nicolas spend hours playing video games with Nathan. We're home.
Dylan and Nicolas spend hours playing video games with Nathan. We're home.
We're green.
March 25, Magnolia, Texas (833 miles, Magnolia Educational Center.)
We made it.
We had a rough start on Friday, turned around to spend the night back at the house, the trailer coming apart on the road before a flat tire threatened to land us into the ditch, all before we had reached Jefferson City, twenty-five miles away. We were intent on getting away before yet-another winter storm hit, but in the end did not see any more of it than drizzle.
We made it, and I still get a jolt each time I look into in my rear-view mirror, the blue of the sky.
And the green, spring happening.
We made it, we left again on Saturday morning and drove all day, ebbing drizzle nearly all the way along and drenching rain just before Hugo, and never before had I been so happy to see the town, Castro there waiting for us at winter quarters, and I could finally unclench my hands from the steering wheel and my eyes from the rear-view mirrors.
Feeling safe with Castro on board I drove on down today, highway 19 stretching for miles of straight undulation ahead of us, pine trees and ever more green gracing us with spring blooming. We made it by the afternoon, right before the first show's finale.
We're home.
We made it.
We had a rough start on Friday, turned around to spend the night back at the house, the trailer coming apart on the road before a flat tire threatened to land us into the ditch, all before we had reached Jefferson City, twenty-five miles away. We were intent on getting away before yet-another winter storm hit, but in the end did not see any more of it than drizzle.
We made it, and I still get a jolt each time I look into in my rear-view mirror, the blue of the sky.
And the green, spring happening.
We made it, we left again on Saturday morning and drove all day, ebbing drizzle nearly all the way along and drenching rain just before Hugo, and never before had I been so happy to see the town, Castro there waiting for us at winter quarters, and I could finally unclench my hands from the steering wheel and my eyes from the rear-view mirrors.
Feeling safe with Castro on board I drove on down today, highway 19 stretching for miles of straight undulation ahead of us, pine trees and ever more green gracing us with spring blooming. We made it by the afternoon, right before the first show's finale.
We're home.
Sunday, March 10, 2013
News, good news.
March 10, Columbia.
I am thrilled to report that my Double Take series picture of Sara and Gigi has been picked by the Vienna International Photo Awards non-profit organization as today's Photo of the Day and can be viewed on their Facebook page.
Other thrillers: Zuzu came back after disappearing for three weeks. She was apparently living in the burned-out house down the street; both the Cat Lady next door to the house and its owner told me they had seen her there. We had put flyers on neighborhood homes' doors, I had gone and sought her out once I learned she was camped in the house, to no avail.
I believe it is Wishbone who brought her home. I let him out on Friday for the first time since Zuzu had gone, and that night when I opened the front door to go look for him there they were, both of them.
I couldn't stop smiling, even though Nicolas was home sick all day and has had a bad dry cough I'm beginning to be worried about.
I am thrilled to report that my Double Take series picture of Sara and Gigi has been picked by the Vienna International Photo Awards non-profit organization as today's Photo of the Day and can be viewed on their Facebook page.
Other thrillers: Zuzu came back after disappearing for three weeks. She was apparently living in the burned-out house down the street; both the Cat Lady next door to the house and its owner told me they had seen her there. We had put flyers on neighborhood homes' doors, I had gone and sought her out once I learned she was camped in the house, to no avail.
I believe it is Wishbone who brought her home. I let him out on Friday for the first time since Zuzu had gone, and that night when I opened the front door to go look for him there they were, both of them.
I couldn't stop smiling, even though Nicolas was home sick all day and has had a bad dry cough I'm beginning to be worried about.
Wednesday, February 06, 2013
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Here now.
January 28, Columbia.
Fridman left tonight to go back to Hugo and start the 2013 Kelly Miller Circus season without us.
It's all I can do not to cry my heart out in front of my kids.
We have been in Columbia since the end of the year, slowly, painfully moving in a new house, and I hate living in a house, all the dead space, it's a small house but there is all that space bearing down on my sudden solitude, and I'm lost. But the kids love their school and need it badly, and so this is our new life, the three of us here, far far away from everything they've known since they were born, a city life like any other, the three of us shedding our circus selves and it's hard to be sad for long with kids for they just go on and they're happy and their Dad is leaving but they run around chasing each other and being screaming silly, but here, drive safe, I don't say I love you, and they drive off, Fridman and Marcos, our friend Marcos came over, they picked up new seat wagons in northern Missouri for the circus and stopped here on the way, our last week end together before the big plunge, the solitude of not being part of the circus ring, the big ring of trailers and people tied together for good and bad day in and day out here and tomorrow gone there, now I'm here, and they're there.
Fridman left tonight to go back to Hugo and start the 2013 Kelly Miller Circus season without us.
It's all I can do not to cry my heart out in front of my kids.
We have been in Columbia since the end of the year, slowly, painfully moving in a new house, and I hate living in a house, all the dead space, it's a small house but there is all that space bearing down on my sudden solitude, and I'm lost. But the kids love their school and need it badly, and so this is our new life, the three of us here, far far away from everything they've known since they were born, a city life like any other, the three of us shedding our circus selves and it's hard to be sad for long with kids for they just go on and they're happy and their Dad is leaving but they run around chasing each other and being screaming silly, but here, drive safe, I don't say I love you, and they drive off, Fridman and Marcos, our friend Marcos came over, they picked up new seat wagons in northern Missouri for the circus and stopped here on the way, our last week end together before the big plunge, the solitude of not being part of the circus ring, the big ring of trailers and people tied together for good and bad day in and day out here and tomorrow gone there, now I'm here, and they're there.
Wednesday, January 09, 2013
Saturday, December 15, 2012
Saturday, December 01, 2012
Housebounds.
December 1, Hugo.
I had forgotten how draining a child's illness is, how it leaves you feeling as if it were you who had just come out of the dark hours of the pain, emptied and exhausted, even when the illness is such a mundane one as gastroenteritis, better known as stomach flu.
This particular strain hit Nicolas very hard and left him and I actual prisoners of the house as, on top of throwing up with sobering regularity, he couldn't control his bowels and the diapers I ended up having him put on (tight but they fit, thanks Tatiana) had to be changed it seemed every instant. So what started as a lazy day with a kid at home with a little stomach ache quickly turned into hours stretching into long, painful hours and I watched my son groan and whimper, and made the ultimately unnecessary trips to the emergency room, luckily just down the street, but where else can you go to at ten at night when suddenly there is blood in his stools and you're not sure it's OK?
Tonight he is finally better, and I'm a wreck.
I had forgotten how draining a child's illness is, how it leaves you feeling as if it were you who had just come out of the dark hours of the pain, emptied and exhausted, even when the illness is such a mundane one as gastroenteritis, better known as stomach flu.
This particular strain hit Nicolas very hard and left him and I actual prisoners of the house as, on top of throwing up with sobering regularity, he couldn't control his bowels and the diapers I ended up having him put on (tight but they fit, thanks Tatiana) had to be changed it seemed every instant. So what started as a lazy day with a kid at home with a little stomach ache quickly turned into hours stretching into long, painful hours and I watched my son groan and whimper, and made the ultimately unnecessary trips to the emergency room, luckily just down the street, but where else can you go to at ten at night when suddenly there is blood in his stools and you're not sure it's OK?
Tonight he is finally better, and I'm a wreck.
Friday, November 30, 2012
Sick day.
November 30, Hugo.
Sick child (but not so sick, yet,) grey sky, a cozy day.
And maybe a watchful, quiet tea.
Sick child (but not so sick, yet,) grey sky, a cozy day.
And maybe a watchful, quiet tea.
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
She was. My friend. She is.
November 26, Hugo.
She was the last one.
The last one, the past I hadn't found, the last one in my jumble of memories and days gone, the last one the past and the one friend, the quirky soul mate of my dissipated youth, the sister I didn't have, maybe, or want, the warped wished-for mirror of my dreams.
She was the zany one, Zorha, she was my friend, my friend for those golden years of innocence long lost, childhood still clinging, the faint strong perfume of childhood still in secret rooms , secret crushes like little girls, giggles and fears, insecurities and bold looks, crazy hair and madder outfits, books for your true self, in love with the music and the musicians, the buskers of Paris circa 1986, and that cafe, Le Mazet, there was an article about it in The New York Times this winter, a girl spending her youth there the way we did who became a rather famous writer (a writer!), we were obsessively going to the movies, but mostly I went to the movies alone because I liked it better that way, years of enchantment savored later, but there was the music and no worries other than being a girl of twenty in Paris wishing she was pretty like Zorha and mesmerizing like Zorha, my wish mirror, my twin, my heart on my sleeve.
She had disappeared from my life the way she had come in, bolting, and in the years going by I looked her out but she remained elusive, someone had heard of her but that was a long time ago, the last time I saw her she was already a stranger and then she vanished, and then years of wondering, sometime, in the dark hours of the morning, where she was, how she was.
Why yesterday, one last time, turning on the computer late at night on an itch, and she appeared on the screen, the social media resurrection so common, yet such joy.
She was the zany light one and now here I am overwhelmed by raw admiration, not only for her professional achievements, she is a lecturer in American foreign policy at Kings College in London, but also for her strength in the face of a crushing illness, but then there is no surprise because she was a force of life always, her bursting youthfulness turned into iron will as she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at thirty-five, slapped blind out of an ordinary day, sitting down for dinner on the patio. It may have cost her her marriage but she battled and raged on, and she is telling me about this on the phone after we found each other again and I can't speak, I am filled with awe, and thankful for such a woman to be back in my life, because there she is, a rare occurrence of a total remission from MS, after ten years of fighting and not resigning herself to the disease, raging on, ups and deep dark valleys, and I can't believe she is back for me, and how she could be all that, and my nineteen-year-old pal.
For she is nineteen, always will be, in my memory, the way time works when it stops, the way life works when you can't see it unfolding, she is nineteen and laughing and swinging her bag full of books and keys and scarves, her wrists full of bangles, her hair full of tangles, on the Paris cobblestones if my youth.
My youth gone, the longing creeping in, the idiot wheel of life, and Zorha, here at last, teaching me a lesson, her life lightning past my certitudes, and opening a well of gratitude for such valor. We were nineteen and silly, we are middle-aged now and she is a testament of the possible and I am humbled, and giddily thankful, oh yes.
She was the last one.
The last one, the past I hadn't found, the last one in my jumble of memories and days gone, the last one the past and the one friend, the quirky soul mate of my dissipated youth, the sister I didn't have, maybe, or want, the warped wished-for mirror of my dreams.
She was the zany one, Zorha, she was my friend, my friend for those golden years of innocence long lost, childhood still clinging, the faint strong perfume of childhood still in secret rooms , secret crushes like little girls, giggles and fears, insecurities and bold looks, crazy hair and madder outfits, books for your true self, in love with the music and the musicians, the buskers of Paris circa 1986, and that cafe, Le Mazet, there was an article about it in The New York Times this winter, a girl spending her youth there the way we did who became a rather famous writer (a writer!), we were obsessively going to the movies, but mostly I went to the movies alone because I liked it better that way, years of enchantment savored later, but there was the music and no worries other than being a girl of twenty in Paris wishing she was pretty like Zorha and mesmerizing like Zorha, my wish mirror, my twin, my heart on my sleeve.
She had disappeared from my life the way she had come in, bolting, and in the years going by I looked her out but she remained elusive, someone had heard of her but that was a long time ago, the last time I saw her she was already a stranger and then she vanished, and then years of wondering, sometime, in the dark hours of the morning, where she was, how she was.
Why yesterday, one last time, turning on the computer late at night on an itch, and she appeared on the screen, the social media resurrection so common, yet such joy.
She was the zany light one and now here I am overwhelmed by raw admiration, not only for her professional achievements, she is a lecturer in American foreign policy at Kings College in London, but also for her strength in the face of a crushing illness, but then there is no surprise because she was a force of life always, her bursting youthfulness turned into iron will as she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at thirty-five, slapped blind out of an ordinary day, sitting down for dinner on the patio. It may have cost her her marriage but she battled and raged on, and she is telling me about this on the phone after we found each other again and I can't speak, I am filled with awe, and thankful for such a woman to be back in my life, because there she is, a rare occurrence of a total remission from MS, after ten years of fighting and not resigning herself to the disease, raging on, ups and deep dark valleys, and I can't believe she is back for me, and how she could be all that, and my nineteen-year-old pal.
For she is nineteen, always will be, in my memory, the way time works when it stops, the way life works when you can't see it unfolding, she is nineteen and laughing and swinging her bag full of books and keys and scarves, her wrists full of bangles, her hair full of tangles, on the Paris cobblestones if my youth.
My youth gone, the longing creeping in, the idiot wheel of life, and Zorha, here at last, teaching me a lesson, her life lightning past my certitudes, and opening a well of gratitude for such valor. We were nineteen and silly, we are middle-aged now and she is a testament of the possible and I am humbled, and giddily thankful, oh yes.
Sunday, November 25, 2012
Dream (again.)
November 25, Hugo.
Dylan as we were reading before bed tonight: "Mom, I want to learn lots of stuff, so I can be president."
Dylan as we were reading before bed tonight: "Mom, I want to learn lots of stuff, so I can be president."
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