Still finding my way...

What did you think of last night before falling asleep? What was the first thing to cross your mind this morning when you woke up? Now that I’ve asked, do you wish you could re-think it? (I did. I wished those thoughts hadn’t been so mundane and functional, that they had been about what really matters.)

Because for me, what I care most about in this crazy life is love. People, of course, and places, experiences, animals and adventures. Flower gardens and hand-sewn quilts, canoes, sunsets and weeping willow trees. I am ultimately infatuated and curious about the human condition, especially when it comes to love. Whatever it is that you wrap your heart around, that is what I’m most interested in. Who still makes your heart beat so fast after so many years? Who kissed you first? Who makes you blush? What did you feel the first time you saw your child? This is what matters to me. And though it’s not at all the sort of things that you can just go up and ask people, it seems to be what I think about.



I can’t explain it, but I care way more who and what elicits your broadest smiles than I do about what you do for a living. I wonder where you lay your heart when you’re sad. Who gets the most terrified or elated parts of you? Where is your safest place? Who knows you by heart? To me, these things supersede everything else a thousand times over, and say so much more about your character.

I’m thinking about all of this because I’ve been waffling a bit when it comes to writing here. I didn’t really know this, not until I noticed a trend of mostly writing about my pets. Which is fine, they make for excellent characters, but that really isn’t the point. I think the point is that I’m unsure what I’m willing to lay out, what I’m willing to answer to. I don’t know what to let out into the light and what to leave as merely mine. It’s also been brought to my attention by a few people that the things I don’t write are present anyway, as if they are conveyed somehow by the tone of my voice. This makes me wonder if I should just start introducing the elephants in the room. If maybe I’m supposed to.

So what do you, wonderful person who actually comes to this site to hear me ramble on about my life, what do you want to hear about? You take time out of your busy day to read my words, and I wonder what it is that you think about…

I’m not making any promises, but I do wonder. And I’d love to hear your thoughts, your stories, and your answers to any of the questions that I’ve posed…

Edgewater Park

I don’t know what it is about that park, the long, thin plot of land that hugs the shore of Beaver Dam Lake just north of town. It’s beautiful there, for sure. The sunsets are phenomenal, the views quiet and peaceful most of the year.

But there’s something else, some quality, something that feels like power. I’ve had places like that before. Quiet beautiful spots to sit and think and walk and just be. But there is some magical quality that I find at Edgewater Park that draws me back, like I belong there. Like there is something for me to learn, if I can listen closely enough, if I can be wise enough to hear it.


Beaver Dam Lake is long, shallow, and always windswept. But the section of the lake at Edgewater Park seems to have its own climate. There are days that town, just two miles to the south, is cold, windy and bitter, and the lake at Edgewater is tranquil as a mill pond. There are days that town is perfect, sunny and warm, and this marshy park is icy and raw. As if it didn’t hear the forecast.


My friend Rhino introduced me to the park when I got my dog last December. Sometimes he'd bring his yellow lab, Molly, to play with Somewhere, the yin and yang labs sliding through the snow, darting in and out of brush and prairie grass as we walked. I had forgotten how much I liked walking around outside investigating, even in the winter. I started coming to the park almost everyday, and the whole world would slip away for a little while. I felt warm and safe, despite the cold and snow.

I went to the park the evening of Obama’s inauguration. I was happy, mostly because I was so proud of how far we’ve come as a country, as human beings, to stop looking at skin color and be able to look at the person within. I forgot my camera, so I had to use the one on my phone, which totally didn’t do it justice. The sky looked like it was glowing. The whole sky. I’m sure that I’ve never seen anything like it.

There was an ice storm in March, a rainy black night that froze everything in its path. The morning sun melted most of it, making driving safe again. I didn’t think of what the park would look like, I just took the dog for a walk. The entire park, every weeping willow and cattail, was covered in thick, melting ice. It sounded like a waterfall. Every branch and twig was coated in a layer of ice, and the whole place looked as though it had been set in glass.

There was a storm in April, just as the first twenty yards of ice melted around the shore. It was just a spring thunderstorm, some wind, a little thunder, a lot of rain. The next day I took Somewhere to the park for a run and found mounds of ice stacked along the shoreline. From a distance they looked like large piles of snow left by a plow, but once I got closer I realized they were ice formations, pushed up onto shore from the storm. Gigantic piles of glittering delicate ice that looked and sounded exactly like breaking glass. I couldn’t imagine the violence created by forcing this ice onto shore. I was mesmerized, and took about 300 pictures, in different lights, for two days.

I went to the park to fish with my cousins a few times this summer, but mostly I avoided it. It was full of people grilling, and there was an ebb and flow of motorized watercrafts coming from the boat launch that inevitably made my stomach hurt. Once they invaded, I retreated. I’d sometimes grab a quick look at a sunset, shoot a couple pictures, but the park itself felt distant. And at least for the time being, no longer mine.

When I went there with my cousin Joey just after Labor Day, we sat on the far pier, goofed around talking in funny accents while he fished. I was feeling confused and sad and beat up by life. Joey and I didn’t really talk about the stuff I had going on, mostly he was just there, making me laugh. When he shone his light into the water, we took a double take. The lake itself along the shore was thick and green; Joey’s bobber resisted the heavy liquid. I wasn’t surprised. It made perfect sense to me that the lake would be pea soup at that particular moment. Also not surprising was that it stuck around for weeks.

I went out there last week, on a whim. I had spent the cold, rainy morning watching movies (which I rarely do and should really do more often) and just decided to check out Edgewater Park. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was completely vacant. I drove up by the boat launch and realized that the lake was dead calm, despite the lingering wind and rain in town, across the whole state.

I’ve been going there for nearly a year now. I know it by heart, but it always surprises me. I never tire of its views, its sunsets and storms. And maybe this is what I’m supposed to learn, or be shown. That there can be violent storms, beautiful sunsets and safety all in one place. That this is life, at its best and its worst. That not everything that’s scary or painful has to do with me, it’s just a part of the whole. And if you don’t like it, wait it out a little. There are bound to be more surprises, and you’ll never guess what comes next.

Sparky

I realize that I need to stop blogging about my pets. I will, really. After this.

Sparky, the Big Gray Asshole, is not the world’s nicest cat. He’s not the world’s meanest cat, but he isn’t exactly cuddly. And we like cuddly. We’re spoiled by Football and his 3am wake up calls for a quick snuggle. Sparky gives warning paws with claws extended to anyone who pets him for too long. Affection is not Sparky’s best quality. Sparky’s best quality is actually alerting the world of famine because the bottom of his food dish is visible.

At this point, Sparky kind of does his own thing. He hides out under beds and chairs. At out last house, he just hung out in the bathroom, since that’s where the food and the litter box lived. Not like he couldn’t get around, he just didn’t want to, so we set up a little bed in there. We’d say hello when we were in the bathroom, but given the inconsistency to his acceptance of it, (and his glowing eyes) our affection towards him is limited. Plus, he doesn’t come out that much. I found him lying on my bed the other day and I was so surprised that I snapped a startled “What the hell do you want?” at him.


Sparky steals sleeping spots and sitting spots, and then gets pissed when someone wants them back. He’s been dragging poor Football off my bed by the scruff of the neck for years, for the sole purpose of filching the warm spot. This infuriates me, mostly because Football is the last guy in the world to deserve it. And can you imagine being jolted out of sleep by someone dragging you off a bed by your neck?

He has yet to mess with Somewhere’s sleeping spot, because that’s her kennel. And her nasty pond scum-grass clipping-fall leaves-blanket is in there. So Sparky just steered clear of it, until yesterday.

I don’t know when he got in there, I just notice that he’s in there, sleeping. All stretched out, belly up, happy as can freaking be…

“What are you doing?” I ask him. He just stretches, doesn’t even look at me. Somewhere comes over, hockey checks my leg and starts to pace. She looks like Lassie trying to tell Timmy there’s another kid in the well. I tell her its fine. I figure they’ll work it out, he can’t live in there.

He stays in that kennel for five hours. Yep, five. I drag him out of there, triggering a low growl from the Gray Assole, but I have to put the dog in the kennel, because she was on my bed and I want to go to sleep. This new arrangement isn’t working for me. And of course Sparky started it.

I was talking about this to my daughter Holly as we fed Sparky one day, saying that we sort of tolerate him because he’s our cat and part of the family. He isn’t the nicest cat, but it just is what it is.

“Huh,” she says, pondering this. “I wonder if that’s how he feels about us.”

We both turn to look at wide eyed Sparky, waiting at our feet to be fed, howling because his food dish is almost half empty.

“Sparky would sell us up the river for scrap metal, for sure. Still, he’s family.”

The Girl Cave

I’m in the process of cleaning out my garage. It’s just a little one-car garage, but I spent the summer staring warily at the closed door, thinking that if I really worked, I could make my car fit in there before the snow flies.

So I go out there, open up the door, and the garage is, of course, just a sea of boxes and bags. Everything is balanced precariously within the chaos, as if one sneeze could bring it all down. The trampoline is scattered in pieces and our grill provides a base for a bag of old toys. Clothing of every size and style since birth for all of us is stuffed into cracks between boxes in plastic recycling bags. And I’m pretty sure the stuff is multiplying when no one is looking. This was fine, when we had the huge house with a full attic and basement. But now we don’t have the space, so the stuff can’t just lie around anymore.

I’m going to be honest here and say that I think there’s more than one reason that cleaning the garage is normally a boy job. I wrestled (literally) with a leaking garden hose for over a half an hour before I could roll it up. I won, but the hose gets credit for keeping me totally pinned for the majority of the fight. I finally got it onto the hose thingy, but it’s ugly workmanship and I don’t ever want to do that again. Like the wasps and the faucet filter, this is not a Shelly job, not if she can help it.

Once I made some actual headway (meaning that boxes got stacked high and an actual path was formed) the room took on a cozy quality. I started looking at the loveseat that we had standing up on end in the chaos, thinking about putting it beneath the garage window in back, with the end table beside it. Holly, my helper who is always up for an adventure, gave me all the encouragement I needed. We moved a table, a bunch of boxes, and the trampoline before we could move the couch into the corner. Then we took down the extra kitchen chairs and set them up, went into the house and made Lean Pockets for dinner, and sat out there eating them on the couch with a blanket over our laps. We named it our girl cave.






Maybe this is why the garage is normally not girl territory?



But in our house, all we have is girls. And since I have to do the hose rolling, and the car will probably never fit, we just made it homey.