I begin with the impulse

childhood summers and essays as meanders

Dear Wild Soul,

An update on me: May has had me drowning in life. Inspiration and i have been fickle friends, mostly because the fabric of everyday has been wondrously mundane: graduation parties, school plays (Geneviève’s was a dream!!), summer plans that have me examining how we live our life and where the spaces for play and boredom are.

When i sit down to write what comes through is poetry. For this space, I attempted three different essays which i then tabled because they turned to poems. A dear friend and i meet for morning creative practice, which these days is 5 am to give me two solid hours before A. wakes. I shared with her how i’m less interested in beginning my writing in a structured way, and practicing simply beginning to see where it takes me. Starting with the image, a rise of feeling, a memory how my daughter’s hair shone strawberry in the morning light. From there, who knows?

I begin with the impulse and follow that.

An essay in its true original form, from the French essai, to try, to attempt, to endeavor is a journey, a meander, a wandering. A driving in the dark where you can only see what the headlights illuminate before you and not the whole road. It feels perilous, exciting, risky.

It’s truer to life this way — less stilted, and less safe.

Months like this May filled to the brim with ordinary goodness, but also just full, birth in me the need for trying and not knowing. Letting Life take me by the hand and take me.

The summer has beckoned a similar kind of invitation. The temptation to have GG’s time booked to the gills, between swim practice, piano lessons, ballet, various camps, and logic workbooks i thought might be fun since she is a puzzles of all kinds aficionado, she will probably have zero minutes to herself. It feels like wondrous privilege to be able to offer her these opportunities, and i feel a pause, followed by memories of my summers in Romania. Yes, during the school year, there were mountains of work, memorization of poetry, equations that haunted my dreams (you can read a little bit of my middle school years here) plus piano and guitar lessons, church choir, ballet, tennis, camps, theater, you name it.

April vacationing

But the summers were leisurely. Feel that word in your body right now, the long leee syllable. Let it stretch on your tongue like a cat arching its back slowly. Yummm.

The leisure came from an unconscious commitment to come what may. From sun up to sun down interrupted by meals only and an occasionally imposed (by our mother) nap/rest time to get away from the heat, my sister and i played. We rode bikes and did gymnastics on the broken monkey bars and questionable swings of our neighborhood’s playground. We took the tram to our grandparents’ house to be with our cousins, to chase each other in the garden and the vineyard, to swim in the local outdoor public pool, or go to the markets with our earnings to eat the first cherries of the season or bring home bouquets of lilies-of the-valley.

Summers were for reading indulgent piles of books (adventure and classics and mystery) and yes, practicing piano once in a while, and for inventing games, writing plays to be performed with our band of misfits, and moving our bodies like meteors on collision courses, to later collapse at night sweaty and sticky from the day’s happenings, asleep before our parents could even kiss us goodnight. Do you remember the exhaustion of childhood, of playing and laughing and crying and just being so hard and on purpose that sleep was infinitely sweet, and each subsequent day a miracle?

Back when it was ok to not know what was next. When you could dance with the aches and ecstasies of daily existence. Where everything belonged, and time took on a quality of permanence — each day a slow, perfect blossoming.

I wish to offer my daughters this — the summers of my life.

---

Happy Mother’s Day to all the humans who have taken on the sacred calling of caring for children.

I share a poem here for you, and ask the question:

What have your children brought online for you since their arrival?

What secret corners of your heart have come to life because of them?

The revelation of ourselves through loving a child is not always magical or easy, but i believe, always a gift.

My pregnancy with GG awakened my mother tongue in me in a way that was filled with desire, not simply necessity. I wanted to know, to remember, to reclaim all of who i was. The Romanian girl with wilderness and deep history in her bones, with moss and roots and loam in stitched through. And the American woman, who loves, loves, loves this country and its people, who now loves the gothic South, Spanish moss and humidity and the lilting of r’s on the tongue.

Bless the Forgetting

Asters bloom at my feet when my tante Nuți 
bids me tilt this way and that so my growing 
belly can appear on the minuscule phone screen. 
Binecuvinteaza, Doamne! bless, Lord, bless, she
clasps her hands in prayer above her head. 
Calls in a forgotten tether to the past, my
daughter leaps, arcing like the head of flower
uncurls  green and untrained toward the light. 
This language was a thread we stitched through
each day, wove into ropes to tie us to this world.
But erasure is on my tongue as I search 
for a simple word to tell her when I’m giving 
birth, and only English comes. My tante frowns
her hands separate now, she shakes a finger
toward me, tells me I forget. Later, my husband
lies beside me, his hands on my body, head resting
on my hip. He asks me, how do you say – child, copil,
skin, piele, breasts, sâni, which he pronounces
either sin or zen, and I clap every time, knowing 
how those vowel variations need a delicate discerning
tongue. When he asks me that same word I couldn’t 
summon for my aunt – birth, naştere, it tumbles
out as if he has beckoned it from thin air. How could 
I forget my birth tongue, or the country 
in which I was birthed, this act essential to all
crawling, standing, winged things, of which
I consider myself the latter, the ache I feel
when staying in one place for too long, my love
affair with vanish, depart, a lust for wandering. 
A long time ago I asked my father if we had
gypsy, tzigan, blood and he changed the subject,
his family’s ancestry accounted for all the way 
to the 14th century, the time of Stephen the Great –
they were landowners, Romȃni puri, and I wonder
about that word, pure, as I toss and turn, my dreams
all in English now. Yet in this dream, my daughter
has hair black as the wings of carrion birds, skin browned 
by sun and longing for the ineffable home, in Romanian,
casǎ, which means house, although if you say acasǎ,,
 as in la mama acasǎ, one vowel moves the dial
from a literal building to family, hearth, rest, and the ache
wells up. Her tongue untangled and sharp, sings words 
I no longer know. Our blood runs in many directions, 
I tell her, as she twirls and twirls her colorful skirts, 
an alphabet ribboning from her hands making magic 
shapes in the air.