memories

I Held You First

November 15, 2016 — Leave a comment

This past week was my son’s tenth birthday, so for week 45 of #songaweek2016, I wrote him a song and made a video to go with it. Now I have no more single-digit children!

Who could ever explain how a bald-headed bundle of joy
just by eating and sleeping and laughing and learning
grows into a long-haired long-legged ten-year-old boy?

I held you first
and right through the worst of those midnight crying hours
and I’ll be the last
to ever let go of the love you birthed in me

What a difference a decade of everyday days can make
first you’re reaching, then rolling, then crawling, then walking
jumping, kicking, running, swimming, climbing, never hitting the brakes

I held you first . . .

Be brave, be kind, be-you-tiful boy

I shouldn’t be shocked that you’ve been melting me from day one
cause chocolate bars and momma’s hearts
behave the same way in the light of the sun[son]

I held you first . . .

Fertile Soil, Brittle Seed

August 16, 2016 — 2 Comments

For most of my life I’ve lived hundreds of miles and multiple states away from my grandparents, and for most of my life I’ve gotten back to see them about once a year. A relationship kept like that, in one-year snapshots, has a different sense of time and life passing. One year I’m a mousy elementary-school kid watching Hanna-Barbera cartoons and eating Honey Nut Cheerios with my cousins at Grammy‘s coffee table. Three visits (years) later, I’m an awkward junior-higher playing Grammy a song on the baby grand piano in that same living room. Click ahead a few more frames, and I’m a newlywed bringing my new husband to see the one constant physical place I’ve had in my life, Grammy’s house.

Then there are children to show her, my tiny branches from the family tree. They snuggle on her lap, then toddle on the floor, and they begin their own year-by-year memories of their great-grandmother, the only great-grandparent on my side of the family who they will remember. The other three died before my children could know them.

For many of the years past, Grammy has felt like the unchanging one, solid, always there, happy to see me, excited about all of the changes happening in my life. And always, every time since I showed her the first poem I wrote in junior high, asking me, “are you still writing? Are you still singing?”

In more recent years, Grammy has changed more noticeably. She remembers less, confuses the generations (my son is my brother, her grandchildren are her children . . .), talks more about the farm she grew up on, wonders where her parents are, can’t walk so well, doesn’t feel like eating . . . is generally growing out of life, “not long for this world,” as the old books used to put it. And still, each year when I visit, nearly the first thing out of her mouth when she sees me is “are you still writing? Are you still singing?”

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And so I sing for her, and for my mother, for myself, for my children, because we are all not long for this world. We are all and each of us touched by every year, every age, but never held in its grasp. Always moving on . . .

Here’s my song for week 32 of #songaweek2016:

Fertile soil brittle seed
Tender shoot luscious fruit
Fading flower falling leaves
Grieving ground resting roots

This is happening
These seasons turning to years
These years laying down marks
Uneraseable
Furrows plowed in flesh
Memories scattered like stars on the night sky of my mind

Every age may touch me
None will keep its grasp on me
I go on I go on I go on and on
Till I lay me down at last
In the great one’s arms

 

Places I’ve Lived, People I’ve Known

July 26, 2016 — 2 Comments

Oh I wish you all could have been there last Friday night! Music in the garden at my parents’ house in Minnesota. It was a hot and sticky evening but we had so much fun. My dad used his phone to record Nathan and me and my parents’ neighbor Earl playing the song I wrote for week 29 of #songaweek2016.

Wish we had also recorded a song we did later, with us three plus friend Kirk on accordion and brother-in-love Micah on a second guitar – Purple Rain by Prince. Bet you’ve never heard Purple Rain with accordion before!

Driving down the street with my out-of-state plates
feeling newly out of place
looking at the flowers in my old front yard
and remembering my life lived in that space
home is not a dead-end road
the road home leads you back or leads you on

Places I’ve lived, people I’ve known
everything’s changed, everyone’s grown
how was this ever everything,
how can I ever go home?

Running through the park on my middle-aged legs
going faster than before
stopping for a drink at the Mineral Springs
where the legend says the healing waters pour
home is not a stagnant pool
the river home will take you where it will

Places I’ve lived, people I’ve known
everyone’s changed, everything’s grown
how was this ever everything
how can I ever go home?

the sun still comes up, the dogs still bark
the kids still play in the same old parks
the old men still park themselves out front
but they’re not the same old men

Sleeping tonight in my old bedroom
where the shadows know my name
praying for peace with a jaded tongue
dreaming with the heart of a child I’ll never tame
home is not a prison cell
the doors of home can open either way

Places we’ve lived, people we’ve known
we have all changed, we have all grown
how can anything be everything,
how can we ever go home?

Time Machine

March 6, 2014 — 1 Comment

I wander my past some nights

While I wait for sleep.

Someone I read recently said that our frontal lobe or pre-frontal cortex or some such brain part

Is a time machine

But he was referring to our human capacity to anticipate

Make a plan

Dream a dream

And live it in the mind’s eye.

I must use another brain part

To go back and relive

Though I never go back in factuality.

It doesn’t matter that I don’t see what I’m wearing

I know I am twenty-seven

Pregnant

And a brand-new feminist

Waiting for him in a Florida hotel room.

I know he will take me sailing

Then we will dine on seafood.

I can see myself but I don’t see what I’m wearing

I can look out from behind my eyes

But the everyday details

Have all escaped me.

Farewell to Virago

August 22, 2013 — 5 Comments

Minnesota motorcycle season started shockingly early in 2012. So after a couple years of borrowing or renting motorcycles for the occasional day trip with my Boomer biker parents, Nathan and I decided that 2012 was the year to buy one for ourselves. In March – yes, March! – on a sunny, warm spring day, we brought home a 2002 Yamaha Virago 250. Black, shiny, classic.

And we rode. Friday night dates, weekend rambles, and one four-day getaway to the North Shore, just the two of us, the road, the green earth, the wide living sky, the water and the trees, the friendly towns and quaint cafes.

There are many drug-free ways to free the mind, to unwind the soul and dip in a refreshing stream of ideas and impressions. But I have found nothing that compares to riding on the back of a motorcycle behind my best beloved, my denim-clad knees cutting into the clean wind, my booted feet resting solidly on the pegs. Riding with Nathan is a delightful blend of solitude and togetherness.

This year, we followed a dream that led us west, away from free and easy childcare (namely, our parents), towards climbing mountain roads – and therefore, away from child-free rides on a low-powered motorcycle, towards Nathan riding solo or with one of the kids on the bigger dual-purpose bike he recently bought.

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So this week we pulled the Virago out of the garage to take some photos and make a Craigslist ad. Together we shined it up with soft cloths, and I said I felt sad. But as we talked and remembered that we had only bought the bike last year, I was comforted to realize how well we spent that time. We packed a lot of memories into that riding season, and I know we won’t sell them with the motorcycle.

In the future, only a few years from now when the kids are a little older, the two of us will probably ride regularly together again. And then, if we are still living in Colorado, our Friday night rides will be more majestic and adventurous than back roads through farm fields and prairie.

But whatever the future holds, farewell to the Virago means farewell to a chapter in our lives. A profoundly good and well-lived chapter, one I will read again from time to time in my memories, the photos we took, even the songs and poems I wrote in that larger-than-life, incredibly long Minnesota motorcycling season of 2012.

I posted a rough recording of one of those songs here. And below, a poem. (Instructional moment for non-bikers: in rude and sexist biker lingo, riding on the back of a motorcycle is called “riding bitch.”)

Riding Bitch, Refined

7/12/12 Julia Tindall Bloom

Viewed from the back of a bike

The world is poetry

Cows are bovine mother figures

The road is a ribbon

Every sparrow is joy embodied.

The retiree on his riding lawnmower

Is turning over Keats or Kerouac in his fertile mind

And the biker with whom we just traded the low sign

Is rolling through The Moldau in his memory

Because nothing else would do

As a soundtrack for this movie.

Note: I think I always associate Bedrich Smetana’s The Moldau with the road (even though it’s about a river) because my dad played it in our car’s cassette player when I was young and we were traveling. Here’s a link.