early to tread

In Italy we walked everywhere. It wasn't that we walked from our apartment on Via del Porrione to class two blocks over, or that we walked to the coffee shop down the street. I mean, we literally walked the entire city of Siena daily. We walked outside of Siena too, to the train stop a few kilometers away. And we walked in foreign cities where we visited, like Venice and Rome, the beaches of Viareggio and the coast of the five lands. Without bikes, euros for bus fare or even a skate board, we walked.  It became not only a mode of transport, but our avenue to see the city, experience the shops and meet the people, even if we didn't exchange words. It was charming to walk in Siena where the streets are made of great gray stones and there aren't sidewalks.  The street runs right up to the store fronts and apartment doors and when the trucks drive through delivering meat from the surrounding farms, you press your body against the cold stone walls in order to evade their tires.  

When I look back at my time in Europe, the most impressive memory I have is of traipsing across France, Switzerland, Austria and Italy, and of discovering the exclusive city of Siena on foot.  In Siena the walls, which tower over and close you in, are also the observer's perch, the writer's thinking position.  And beside the picture of the stone streets, I picture the views from the walls looking out over the rolling hills of the Tuscan landscape. 

From my apartment in Ardmore, the grocery store is one mile away, the post office three-quarters of a mile, my office, two miles, and the book store, a little over two. I began walking again, all over town, about two months ago, when the weather turned cold and my seasonally depressed brain began needing as much natural light as possible.  Occasionally my timid self insecurely hopes nobody I know sees me, but I'm getting over it.  It's the strangest thing, though it shouldn't be, but it's wonderful, this walking.  I'm getting to know this city for the first time since I've moved here, really getting to know it.  Its small roads and its strange streets. The houses with red doors and the women who keep great beautiful gardens. I know where the territorial dogs live and which houses have gone on the market, and the ones which have sold.  

It does take longer, I'll admit. Walking. And it's more tiresome. But it's also much more lively and alluring and cleansing.  In this cold winter my cheeks are flushed by the time I make it to the Post Office... but my mama always said rosy cheeks are becoming.

joy.

I was driving through Baptist Hospital on Cloverdale Avenue this week. It was foggy and dark at 4:30, as has been custom in Winston these past few weeks, and I pulled up to the red light in the left turning lane.  All of a sudden I remembered that Christmas is coming, that I'll be in the living room of my family's home with my big old 6 foot 4 inch brother telling me stupid inappropriate jokes, holding a glass of red wine, while my brother-in-law and dad taunt my husband about the recent (pitiful) demonstrations made by his Pittsburgh Steelers.  My mom will be sticking up for him because she thinks that Mark hung the moon and my sister will inevitably be entranced by some Christmas spectacular on the TV while the little Jonathan hangs on Jake, our old golden retriever. 

And when I sat at the light thinking of that scene in my home with my family, whom I love more than anything or anyone on the face of the earth, I actually started to cry.  (Hannah is shaking her head at this, smiling).

That is joy.

Here's another one: our Christmas tree.  It is the most beautiful, brilliant, vivid, psychedelic tree you have ever seen. Colored lights, ridiculous ornaments, "Baby's first Christmas" sled from 1984 (put that one together...) It's absurd, really, and perfect. Six o'clock in the morning is wonderful this month because I get an hour of darkness in the living room with my beautiful bright tree and a cup of coffee and I love it.  

That is joy.

Jonathan. I didn't think I'd ever like a kid as much as I love my nephew. Mark says it's like a drug for me and he is right. I go over there at least once a week to hang out with the kid. He is the best person in the world. Please see the photo posted in the previous entry on the blog.

Friday morning when I was there he was acting drunk, just laughing uncontrollably and stumbling all over the place. I usually end up in laughing fits just being around him.  Anyway, I'm sitting on the ottoman of the comfy chair in the living room and Jonathan waddles over and kind of wraps his arms around my legs and buries his face in my knees, whining.  I pull him up onto my lap and lay my head back into the seat of the chair and he climbs up onto my stomach, flops his head down beside my head and begins to laugh.  His shaking self, stomach on my face, makes me laugh, and apparently it tickles him, so he laughs harder.  Hannah had to come see what in the world was making us laugh so hard because the one-year-old and the twenty-three-year-old literally cannot stop.  

Now that is joy.

welcome to advent.

the end of november.

This morning I finished the first draft of my first novel. It's been a long time coming, since February, and this morning I wrote the final scenes, made a title page, came up with a title for that matter, and converted the document from 180 single-spaced pages to 357 double-spaced pages.  I am so thankful for the book. I love it! Is that crazy? Is it crazy that I just began to cry when it was finished. I don't even know why.

a few pictures from lately.

Halloween night. Our friends got really decked out! We were excited!  Thank you Stefanie and Paul for donning the afros.  And if you're wondering who is down in the right corner, it's Mark.  He's Mike Tomlin. I'm Troy Polamalu.  Hannah and Josh won the costume contest as a snowboarder and a black diamond.  Dad was... some kind of old man. Hilarious.

Sisters, sisters. Never were there such devoted sisters...

Jonathan had discovered the sugar rush of orange marmalade and instead of eating the toast, licked the jam from it. Dad was helping out, which Jonathan thought was totally bizarre.  "Uhh, Papa? What are you doing?"

perspectives on early Christmas festooning.

A common point of contention this time of year is the early Christmas decorating, as exhibited by establishments such as Nordstrom, Starbucks, and the Gap.  Once Halloween is gone, the Christmas train pulls into the station and anyone that sells something gets on board. 

I hear people say all the time, “Oh.my.gosh. I can’t believe they’re already decorating for Christmas. It’s not even Thanksgiving! It’s ruining the spirit of Christmas, commercializing it, nobody remembers what Christmas is really about…” It goes on.

And while I can understand the sentiment of such complaints, I would like to take my stand on the opposing soapbox.

When I saw the first RED CUP (capitalized in honor of importance) of coffee from America’s largest coffee shop chain last Wednesday, I was thrilled.  Yes, it was the fourth day of November. But something about those red cups evokes a sense of great chilly gladness within me.  Those cups scream, “Drink me! You will be filled with the joy of Yuletide!”

And in department stores the great colored balls hang down from the ceiling, strung up with glittering tinsel. Who doesn’t want to hear Mariah Carey sing about her baby on Christmas a hundred times? Shopping in Nordstrom suddenly becomes this wonderfully sentimental walk down memory lane. The smell of Nordstrom reminds me of my mother when she would go to galas with my father. Those were always in December it seems, and he would wear a tuxedo and she a long black skirt with a deep red top. Those nights my parents became the stars of some great fifties movie.

My sister agrees with me (Can I get an “Amen” Hannah?) too, I’m not the only one on the box in the corner facing the ring.  Both of us love when it begins to be dark at 5:15 in the afternoon. Suddenly snuggly evenings are longer and the cold, dark outside forces you in to hunker down and wear socks around your house.  And, after turkey day, when there is a tree with lights and ornaments sitting in the middle of the living room, where else could you possibly want to be???

I must say that I used to follow the crowd on this, believing that Christmas festivities waited until at least the day after Thanksgiving, if not the first of December. I changed my mind, or I took a stand for the thing I always loved. Bring on Christmas early! I will sing carols as soon as I see my first tree.  I’ll try to keep from decorating until after Thanksgiving, but you can believe I’ll be enjoying the mall and Starbucks a little more often.

 

a room with a view.

The Principle of Trees in October

In fall the house is cold.

Hardwood floors, curled upward at the baseboards

from summer humidity

and time,

chill my feet from below.

The toe I broke a while back, 

all healed, feels sore.

Even socks can’t warm these feet

and I don’t want to wear shoes

inside.

 

I like to have my nose turn cold, like a steel doorknob

and touch it with the soft skin on my hand

between my thumb and forefinger.

Slightly damp hair chills my neck and back,

the collar of my sweater is cold too.

 

Pattering fingers dance on the white keys

and turn opaque with cold.

My rings slip around and the diamonds fall

to the underside, unseen.

I grasp a cup of coffee, also losing its heat,

and stare transfixed out the drafty panes

and the leaves outside the window are

like a blazing fire.

part-time all the time

I suppose that I could have gotten a full-time job somewhere. I could leave my house at 7:30 and get to work by 8. Stay there until 5 and wear black slacks with button-ups and sweaters. I could have a little cubicle, maybe eventually an office, and work at my computer and talk to "clients" and write memos.

However, as I have never been one to stay indoors and as I couldn't think of a job where I would stay sane inside of an office all day, I have chosen (or been dumped into) a life of part-time jobs.

I work half time as the Youth Director at Hope Church in Winston-Salem. This means that I pick up high school kids from school and take them to Starbucks and the grocery store. I meet with them for Bible study on Wednesdays and teach Sunday school and plan things like lunches and days on orchards to pick apples. 

I try to write for ten hours a week, working on my book. I never achieve ten hours because I don't have the discipline and life happens and it's the first thing I let fly, though writing my novel is my greatest hope and passion. Funny how we let things like that happen--let our passions linger on the sidewalk waiting for us while we keep holding up one finger, saying "one second!" with a look of apology on our faces.

Leading Young Life at Forsyth Country Day School is a volunteer thing, but ends up being another job which I love. Mark and I just got to spend three days at Windy Gap with 56 high school kids from our school and it was incredible.  The other leaders in our area are some of the coolest people I've ever been friends with and I find myself doing work at the YL Office more often than anywhere else.  Today, in fact, as I sat in the corner of Lauren's office, Murf (the area director) came in and, not seeing me, turned off the light. I realized that if I spoke I'd scare him half to death. So I spoke. And watched him teeter as a falling tree when the ax's final blow has severed the trunk. I actually thought he might crumble. We laughed and he apologized desperately for having used the bathroom just beside Lauren's office. "I don't use that bathroom when the girls are here!" he exclaimed. "I am so sorry you had to hear that." Life is a comedy.

My other job, working at the front desk at a local bone and joint doctor's office, is another ten hours a week. Mark calls it my "fun" job, mostly because he knows I spend the whole morning laughing. I work beside Natalie. She's a good girl, born and raised around here in Walnut Cove.  She's married to Russell, has two daughters in high school and college and has worked at the office for over 15 years.  She knows everyone. Somehow every person that migrates through our office has some kind of connection to Natalie or one of her four sisters or her mother. She's always telling me, "Ginny, it's a bad scene." On bad days, when seventy-year-old women wave their umbrellas wildly, refusing to pay their twenty dollar copay, she purses her lips and, in her southern tongue, orders me to follow her to "the closet" (the supply walk-in closet).  Her eyes widen and, breathing fire, she'll call a spade a spade, use choice words to describe the man who demanded a second set of x-rays and the woman who picked twenty-two pieces of candy out of the candy bowl when she herself wasn't even being seen--her son was. Her son is forty.  "It's pitiful," Natalie says. And all I can do is laugh. 

october in winston-salem

It is fall again. For those of you who have followed my blog for at least a year (thanks! What an honor) you know that I am completely besotted with the season that is upon us. The blinds stay open at all times, the windows stay up to welcome the crisp breeze. I have spent countless minutes sitting, staring, out the window above my writing desk. The boys play flag football in the city league every Tuesday night and I pace the sidelines with my arms crossed over my chest in an attempt at warming  up, screaming every so often, and running down the sideline before I can stop myself.  Hannah and I bought the most charming pumpkins at the farmer's market this week and today the leaves are falling, swirling in the breeze. It is my season of joy.

Autumn in West Chester was colder than it is here in North Carolina. I remember vividly running through the park at the end of Hillside Drive, kicking up the piles of leaves collected on the edges of the path. We could play for hours outside, my sister and me, even until dusk.  I have no memory of gloves, only small white fingers turning red, then opaque with cold.  My nose would run and when I reached up to wipe it with the back of my little cold hand, I would laugh at the numbness. The monkey bars, metal and painted yellow, were like ice and after swinging from rung to rung our hands smelled like cold metal. Inside, when it was time for dinner, the house felt so warm and my mother making stew on the stovetop would laugh and make us wash our hands from all of the dirt.  We wore wool sweaters and jeans with saddle shoes, all hand-me-downs; we were ragamuffins with flyaway hair and a bottomless supply of imagination.

The need I feel for the outdoors must have been born all those years ago when we played outside all day.  Our TV was small with a circular knob that could be turned to receive 4 stations.  I wished for cable then, but I am thankful now.

Jonathan, my sister's son, is a year old now. We spend hours outside, picking up acorns and throwing them, examining sticks and bugs, exploring leaves and hoses and mulch.  Hannah says that Jonathan wants to be outside all the time, that he cries and bangs on the door until she lets him free. I feel like that too, and as I sit here on this fall afternoon under this great blue sky, I'm thankful, again, for the season of great joy.

about the book...

I should probably warn anyone who read my review of The Prince of Tides and went immediately to the store to buy a copy:  there is some pretty brutal, graphic violence in the book. Obviously I hated reading these portions of the book, although the violence is a huge impetus in the plot.  There were, however, parts I just about skipped over.

The book is still recommended by me, but with a big fat R rating spread across the front.

"The Prince of Tides"

Because I am always looking for the next good book to read and because I feel like most of the books I begin are actually a bit disappointing, I think I'll begin writing book reviews as blog posts every once in a while. I know that to be a good writer one has to read good writing. It's a sort of teaching once you're out of college. However, considering the current state of my life I have precious little time to read. Therefore it takes an expertly written book to captivate me and hold me prisoner until the bitter end.

I was recently recommended The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy. Published in 1986, the year of my birth, the book was widely acclaimed and in 1991 made into a movie starring Barbara Streisand and Nick Nolte. 

If you are looking for a worthwhile read, a book that will make you smirk and laugh aloud, a book that will make you turn 50 pages before you realize any time has passed at all, a book whose drama will roam like a tiger in the front of your mind even when you aren't reading it, a book that will make you cry soft, quiet tears, you just may want to pick up The Prince of Tides.

There is something about this story, told in its narrative excellence and quality of description, that is utterly captivating. It is the story of the Wingo family, told by the youngest son Tom.  Tom, his twin sister Savannah and his brother Luke endure a childhood full of confusion, mystery, defeat, trauma, excitement and, most of all, camaraderie. It is the story of secrets and competition in a small southern town and relationships both deep and dysfunctional.  It is brilliant, absolutely brilliant, and I devoured each and every page.

hhg  vb bj,. <---that was Mark

A good friend and I decided to read this book together.  We haven't had a chance to discuss the book yet, but via text she told me she found the book "good but disturbing."  It's true. The plot isn't comfortable or "happy." In fact, I have spent a few nights a little restless thinking about the events of the novel with all of the strange plot twists and unnerving male characters, the wild setting of the book and the bizarre relationships and philosophies.

For four days I've been circling around and around, trying to figure out just what it is that is so beguiling about the Wingos and their ramshackle history.  It is a story of humanity that doesn't feign beauty where it is vile. In some vein each of us carries threads of pain and humiliation, betrayal and suffering. But when it's all over, when the season of pain has come to a close, after all of the secrets and words and wounds, a rich ribbon of love between the Wingo siblings is redeeming. And a story tied with that kind of ribbon is the best kind of story because that is what we are each seeking in our stories, isn't it?

late august.

In late Augusts back in my memory it has been so hot that the asphalt breathes up under your shorts and the soles of your flip flops seem to melt.  Indebted to this time of year solely because of the birth of my precious baby brother and friend, I usually spend the month of August sweaty and ready for autumn.

Last weekend in Pittsburgh we were delighted when a cold snap moved, it seemed in deliberation, down from Canada and covered over western Pennsylvania. We spent the nights with the box fan running in front of the window in the upstairs hallway to bring in the coolest, silver air I've felt in months. I didn't realize how constricted breathing has been until that night breeze moved in over my covers and eased my respiration, forcing me to bring quilts up around my neck and dream outside of summer. 

In autumn, it always surprises me, the haze of heat rises up into the atmosphere for good and every natural color is richer, darker. Back in Winston-Salem the J. Nissen building changes from red to brick red and the Third Street sign seems to glow in green and white. I am completely transfixed by the state of the world in fall. 

Sur la Table is a store that specializes in housewares, mostly kitchen. During a massive downpour in the city on Friday, we ducked into the store front and looked around at pink and green mixers, a variety of box mixes for brownies and red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting straight out of Santa's house at the Pole. I purchased a set of nine miniscule cookie cutters shaped like leaves and acorns to make sugar cookies and ice them with orange and yellow and brown icing and sugar.  I have to wait, but not for long.

...It is finally September, the base of the rise toward fall. Today the temperature has peaked at 75 degrees, down from last week's 88, and I'm sitting under an awning in the shade in long sleeves. 

lake lure, nc.

For the first annual Ficker family reunion, the Adams and Evans joined mom, dad and Kyle in the western North Carolina vista Lake Lure. Getting off the highway on Route 64, I was surprised to find that the scenery reminded me of the north, the lakes of Canada even, and the lake, when we hit it thirty minutes later, was breathtaking.

Last week dad designated Hannah to purchase the adult beverages and me to grab stuff for breakfast, namely coffee.  We spent the weekend playing golf, riding horses in rivers, jetting around the lake on a pontoon boat, swimming and playing games for hours in the middle of the lake, watching baby Jonathan run a plastic car into walls, preventing him from falling down the wooden steps, drinking wine, playing the family favorite card game “May I” (everyone’s favorite game, except mine, however), drinking coffee, reading, sharing a great deal of conversation and family lore, taking walks, scaling mountains, and sitting out on the porch to enjoy our treehouse view.

A few highlights:

Saturday morning I took a walk up the mountain while the adults (Mom, Dad and Hannah) went looking at houses and lots.  This walk turned into the Great Heavenward Hike and I thought my heart would very well cease to beat.  I lived, fortunately.  As I came around the corner on this “walk” I saw something in the middle of the road like a boulder.  Coming closer there could be no mistaking this object—a turtle.  Surely a car coming around the curve would hit the little guy and I knew he needed a rescue.  However, there is a story that goes like this:

My mom tried to save a turtle once, similarly crossing a little road, and it JUMPED up in the air.  The turtle which had leapt as high as her hip, gave her such a fright that she jumped back and left the thing alone. He obviously didn’t want help. 

Unfortunately for Claire, her middle daughter is the only person on this great green earth that believes the story. My dad thinks she’s nuts, Kyle agrees. But mama and I  know that the turtle leapt that day.

Approaching this turtle on the side of this very high and lovely mountain where there nary another soul could be found and my voice echoed cripsly in the valley beneath, what do you imagine was in my mind? This damn turtle is going to attack me.  However something must have come over me, the non animal lover, and I couldn’t bring myself to leave the turtle. I approached, coaxing it aloud that it should not jump, bite, spin around and claw, or act in any other demonic way as I was simply trying to save it from destruction.  It took me about three minutes to gather the courage to pick up the little shelled being and about ten seconds to walk it to the other side to which it was heading.  On my way back down the mountain, the turtle was gone, probably running far away into the woods from my crazy self.

On Sunday I mentioned we spent several hours out on the lake. Dad had arranged a boat rental and we left the dock around three, just as the hazy rain lifted off of the mountain and the sun began to shine. There are tremendous houses on the lakeside, and there are simple houses that have withstood the increasing property value, the harsh mountains storms and the renovations of time. They are all quite beautiful for no other reason but that they are reflected on this crystal clear lake. We bobbed and sped around for a while until the boys had the itch to jump in. Anchored in the center of the lake, they all debated about the best way to jump in. I stood up on the edge of the boat and dove… they all followed. And, for an hour and a half, we played games in the very middle of the lake. Dad stood up on the boat, throwing the football to Kyle, Josh and Mark for points—this went through several championships (from States to Universe) and Hannah and I swam around, just enjoying the sunshine and fetching rogue footballs. Mom and Jonathan watched from the boat, laughing as Jonathan pointed to us in the water bewildered.

We also thought it'd be a good idea to get an old family picture...on the front of the pontoon boat. Note: they are tippable. Note: we tipped it, almost sunk the thing, and spent the rest of the afternoon with a water-logged floor. The picture below was taken when mom was trying to capture a nice, charming sibling picture. Josh shouted, "We're sinking!" and the rest is history...

(I can't explain the reason for the underlining-finicky computers...)

After playing hard during the day, we went to dinner at Larkin’s Restaurant and ate like queens and kings, listening to stories of dad in college, the year he drove to Mardi Gras and mom abroad, the time she was offered to join the harem of the richest man in Egypt and the time she lived with an assassin.  Doesn’t quite seem real…

The stories, or the weekend. Too charming to be real.

 

family trip to butler, pa.

Stefanie and Paul

Mark and Chris on the back deck

Mark and Me before a nice evening out

Doc and sweet Hannah

Mama Joyce, Lisa and Stef

an avenue of history

The Evans are currently in "recovery"--we took a quick three-day trip to Sandbridge to be with my family, came back to Winston-Salem for one day of insane laundry and packing, and then off to Young Life's Crooked Creek Ranch as leaders from June 18-29 (four of those nights spent sleeping on a bus, one in a hotel and seven one the floor of a cabin at camp), then back home for a couple days, then a two-day trip to just northeast of Philly for the wedding celebration of Lauren Wells and Nate Eakin!  Luckily Sunday night we were able to enjoy some Mexican food and margaritas with the Stogners in order to keep a grasp on some sort of sanity.  

Although the onslaught of travels was a bit crazy, I have felt a sweet peacefulness these last few weeks.  Sandbridge, the only place where us Fickers have maintained roots over the years, always welcomes me back with the untroubled predictability of the tide and the smell of salt in the air. Sand underfoot is never troubling, only comforting. We grew up there and we have enough memories to outnumber the broken shells on the beach.  So many emotions and conversations and fits of laughter and sweet quiet mornings live inside of that old, rickety house on stilts.

To go spend a week at Young Life camp also takes me back to a rich time in my life. There have been times I thought that maybe I don't have "real" or "complete" memories from my childhood spent at Young Life camps with dad on staff assignments because I was so young and saw life through such rose-colored specs, but I've let those doubts go. I met Jesus at Young Life camp, not as a camper, but as a little kid ragamuffing around camp with her sister. It was as real to me then as it is now.  Still now, when I return to camp, I wish my family were there with me and that the history wasn't history, but now.

Finally, our trip to Philadelphia deposited me once again into a sea of childish memories. Mark and I drove from Ashbridge Avenue down to Hillside Drive, the street where we lived when I was young.  Our house was a perfect square, two stories, with a slanted roof and I remember thinking that the bedroom I shared with my sister was neat because the ceiling wasn't flat. I also remember looking out the window on the backyard with the large oak tree that I thought when I got old enough, I'd climb. Mom and I planted merrigolds every spring around the trees and in the flower beds out front. I chose merrigolds because they are bright orange and yellow, my favorite colors.  We had a white picket fence around the small front yard that my dad built and painted one summer for my mom. 

The house is pretty beat up now. I remember a blind man with a massive dog moved in after us and immediately tore down my dad's fence and put up a chain-link fence to keep the dog in. The brick porch out front, which had been crumbling but was, in my opinion, beautiful, is gone now and there is a concrete porch. There aren't merrigolds out front and it just seems strange and different.  I don't know if I can even believe it is the same house.  Our house was such a happy little house and memories of it make me want a small cape cod.  The whole experience was bizarre, sitting in a Jetta with my husband in front of the house that was at one time my beloved castle and watching another family carry on inside.

Time is frightening to me, the way it passes and doesn't forgive or offer a second go. I miss and long for time that has passed and been stored away in the banks of my memory.  But memory, that is the thing I am thankful for. It is a great calm and peace because of the joy of my own history.

a poem I wrote a fifteen months ago.

This poem was written when Mark and I lived across states, before we were even engaged.  These daydreams have actualized, except there are wild trees, rather than hills now, outside the window.

Most poems I've written lack a title.

I wake up to you 

(you wake up 

four hours south)

and my unopened eyes relish the glow

of the rising sun on your butterscotch face

(and closed blinds stack lightlines

on the wall)

Leaning upon my vanilla forearm I

kiss your temple

warm and wispy my butterfly lips

stir and you open your eyes,

azure, as the mountain sky

above organic hills outside of

my window.

519 lockland ave. apt. c

Mark gave me a desk as a wedding gift. A gorgeous, antique, white, worn, delicate desk with round knobs and small drawers made to hold nothing larger than a few pencils or maybe cigarettes.  Perfection.  The desk sits catty-corner in the living room of our apartment beside an old chipped window that looks out on the great oak tree, now green with wet spring, that is so big it fills the windows along our entire apartment. 

We live on the second floor of an old house in one of the most veteran areas of Winston-Salem, Ardmore.  The houses in our neighborhood vary in size, from cottage to mansion, but they are all very complicated. That is the only word that fits: complicated.  In a bewildering sort of way.  The height of the trees and the diameter of the large tree trunks all around the windy streets divulge the great seniority of the streets. The North Carolina Baptist hospital is right around the corner and doctors walk home in lab coats for lunch and nurses linger on corners during their breaks.

The front porch of the house is crumbling. It is supposed to have a half-moon upper deck for us upstairs apartments, but the wood has gone utterly rotten and exposed soggy beams are held up by school bus yellow scaffolding. The house has been this way since before we rented it and looking back, it surprises me that we called the phone number on the "For Rent" sign posted there in the front lawn.  The scaffolding seems beatnik, which I kind of like.

Walking into the foyer, where the door is never fully closed, there are four doors side by side.  We are the third door from the left: Apartment C thank you kindly.  It usually smells like burning incense there in the foyer because our downstairs neighbor is "into" that stuff I suppose. You can also just barely smell the incense, along with cigarette smoke, when you open the food pantry in the kitchen. Just a friendly reminder to mind our neighbors. There ya go, Jenny.  

There isn't much room: a small bathroom with a window and a built in medicine cabinet whose mirror is permanently scuffed so that the reflection looks like an unfocused digital camera shot; a great kitchen with yellow walls and a window that looks out on the far left side of the great oak.  Then there is a bedroom, dainty, and a wide odd-shaped living room we've painted green with the most fabulous four windows.  The oak tree, which wraps itself around our entire half of the upstairs in a great hug, dangles leaves around the windows and casts an even more greenish tint on the room.  Entirely winsome, the small space is pleasant and alluring and ours.

There are hardwood floors throughout the apartment, except in the kitchen and bathroom where there is tile. All of the misfit doors with their crystal doorknobs get stuck when they've been closed all the way, especially when the windows are open and it's rained or is raining. We've got some great furniture, hand-me-downs and a few generous wedding gifts, and a lot of photographs. There are few outlets--2 in the entire kitchen. One on the footboard just inside the doorway and one up toward the ceiling above the refrigerator. One on the footboard in our bedroom.  We've got about a dozen extension cords to access electricity, running all up above door frames and down wall corners.  And the windows... o, the windows. Did I mention how fetching the windows are?

Above my desk there is a black and white portrait in its original mahogany frame of my Grandaddy Jack.  He is wearing a gray suit and a dark tie and he is holding a smoldering cigarette in his right hand, his elbow propped up on the desk before him. He looks like Steinbeck in the picture, sophisticated and entirely brilliant. The photograph is the perfect crest to the perfect writer's haven.

symphony

My name is different now, although I'm having trouble figuring out the way you change  your name with Google... all of its e-mail, blog and record-keeping functions. In fact I think that this name change process is going to be quite a feat.  

Old name: Virginia Leigh Ficker.  It's a good name though I've had my fair share of complications with Ficker, as one could imagine.

New name: Virginia Leigh Evans. Ginny Evans. That's a cute name. Glad I'll be able to publish with that one.

Mark and I got married in Greensboro last Saturday, May 2nd. The weekend, from the rehearsal to my sister's toast at the reception could be summed up in a word: charming.  Charming like a dream... Mark and I discussed the dreamlikeness of it all over pina coladas, in fact, next to the Caribbean Sea on Saint Lucia.  We really were next to something huge.  That may also have been a dream, though I don't think it rains in dreams so perhaps not.  

A good friend from an earlier time in my life sent me a note to make sure that I wasn't giving up on writing, specifically blogging, after my recent rejection from the Creative Writing Program at UNC-G.  I am not, however the wedding and honeymoon did detain me for a little too long and I am also working on a book which takes most of my spare time given to writing.  So to anyone who does tune in and has wondered, I'll try to get back onto my regular blogging schedule.

On the honeymoon I read a book called "The Gathering." It's an Irish novel which, like Irish literature always does, left me feeling kind of dumpy for a few hours after I finished.  Something about that country and its writers digs really deep and sticks inside me and it's all very mournful. I had a great mentor in high school who had this deep deep love of Ireland born of the literature and I can understand that more with each work I read.  And although I couldn't directly relate to the plot of this novel, the writing was incredible. I mean, just dripping with gorgeous symbolism and rich, buttery language. Like listening to some great symphony.  Good writing is like pulling off at a gas station when your gas light is on and re-fueling to drive another couple hundred miles.  I came off the beach at 6:15 that evening anxious to get back to my little white desk and my little white computer to keep trying, the joy of trying, to write measures that will, in time, be symphonies.

close the door, open the window.

Despite my hopes, the Graduate School of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro will carry on in the fall of 2009 without me.  I applied to the Masters of Fine Arts program in creative fiction back in December and found out Saturday that they aren't really all that interested in me.  I got the steel-toed boot.

I want to write and to teach writing. To teach, I'd need a degree, so I'm out one... for now.  Luckily I'm not out both.  The latter only requires some protected time and my sweet friend Dora, the MacBook.

During the winter I had this stagnated posture with writing. It's scary to write a book, at least for me.  It feels like there is a story, which I vaguely know, that is too complex to tell.  Once I realized back in February that my only reason for waiting around was this brewing fear, I started over. I ditched the old book I'd started in the summer and began again at square one.  This was simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating considering that I had poured hours into this amorphous plot.  I filed it away on Dora's hard drive for good.

I'm a good way into the second attempt now and, aside from a few afternoons of writer's block, it's going quite beautifully.  I decided, par the advice of Lamott, to let the book write itself, to let the plot make its way like a secret garden.  It's finally going well.

Rejection is the infamous horror for, well, everyone.  When I found out I didn't get into school, I felt like a dandelion twice run over by a car.  For some reason known only to the heavens every person within 100 miles that loves me was either out of town or busy, so I cooked myself some dinner, drank a glass of Yellowtail, and watched "Marley and Me," which made me cry a little more.  I guess I needed some solo digestion time.  Which I did: I digested, I cried, I sat on the floor with my back against the sink cabinet and began to think maybe I never even had any ability to tell a story, much less write a sentence, and then I let the less dysfunctional half of my brain smack the pathetic side and I stood up.

And I got back to work on my book.

blogger dies in Iranian prison.

Friday morning I read an article about a man about my age in Iran who recently died in prison.  He was in prison because he insulted a "supreme leader" on his blog.  His name was Omid Mir Sayafi.  He was sentenced to two and a half years in prison, but he died long before those years came close to passing from improper medical attention.

All politics aside, this news bite stopped me in my tracks. I realize that I don't typically go off on political leaders or say overly racy things on my blog posts, but if I felt passionate about something like that, if I wanted to deride the President or make a commentary on religion, I could.  The only commentary would likely be banter, at most sparking a debate, but then it would all just move on through like a summer rain storm.  

I think about writing and how precious it is to me, the way the written word is in many ways eternal, an anthem that began before him and lasts long after the writer dies.  How God himself is the Word.  Everyone is a writer, really. We have the gift of speech and labyrinthine communication--how tremendous!  This is God's gift to the human race, and yet not everyone is able to practice his right to write, no pun intended.

After the story shocked me, I got pretty sad about it, just thinking about all the writers in the world who can't open the door and unleash their passion.  It made me kind of sick.  It still makes me sad, but I'm also thankful now too. Makes me want to write further, to extend my vocabulary and tell more stories, to contribute to this anthem that's been written for thousands of years since the light first separated from the dark.

Spring on the Northern Coast

Up north on the coast 

Spring is no new season at all.

I remember dense damp fog,

the sky was gray and plump

geese with long black necks

flew as arrowheads slicing slate clouds.

I remember the air so cold and wet-

my skin stayed moist and my nose

became red.

The beach on the sound, rocky

with smooth stones and 

we took off our socks and shoes 

and splashed in the lapping folds of the sea.

Our feet turned opaque on the soles

and in the toes.

We rolled up our blue jeans and

our raincoats collected droplets from the 

tide and from the dripping sky.

We laughed at the sound seagulls make. 

Dad  panned the old shore for 

segments of memories. He held 

the leash and patted the golden retriever

saying, "Good girl, Sadie."

Elizabeth Gilbert in winston-salem.

Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of the wildly popular Eat, Pray, Love, came to Winston-Salem to speak as a featured participant in the city's Bookmarks series.  Friday afternoon I saw the newspaper article announcing her coming and quickly picked up my cell phone to order a ticket.  There are some things whose urgency transcends even the narrowest of budgets.

All day I had that nervous excited feeling in the bottom of my stomach.  When I thought about what I would actually say if I got the chance to ask a question or, gasp, talk to her face-to-face it felt like my insides were carbonated and someone picked me up, turned me over and shook me hard a few times. Sort of the sick, unnerved feeling I would get in sixth grade just before informing my father of a D on my math test.  I actually laughed aloud in the restroom of the conference center when I realized how ridiculously overwhelmed I was.  It's just a woman, Ginny. Just like you, only dazzlingly brilliant and utterly published.  

You know, I walk around the avenues of my life thinking my passion for writing and chapters and adjectives qualifies me as crazy until I go to a conference where heaps of writers are present in bulk.  It is then that I feel most normal... not that a room full of highly introspective, overly observant artistic individuals would necessarily be considered "normal."  

The older women are strikingly beautiful.  Many wear their lustrous grey hair long and their lips are always red, magazine shiny.  Most of them wear these gorgeous chunky sweaters and corduroys like they should all live in Maine somewhere.  They appear thoughtful with deep kind eyes and such colorful faces.  Writing must be some kind of youth fountain.  There were only a few men, mostly in their forties and fifties I'd guess, with tweed and gray blazers and penetrating focused gazes, devilishly handsome in their seasoned age.  

There are the young writers too.  One woman brought her little baby in yellow fleece pajamas with feet.  That made me wish they made those for adults.  She was tall with her long dark hair pulled back haphazardly in a bun.  The baby crawled around quietly at her feet.  It occurred to me how rare for a child to stay so quiet for two hours.  

My neighbor, reading a workbook on how to facilitate your creative growth in the workplace, had written at the top of her page, I want to be my mother--my mother wanted to be me.  I smiled, understanding her anxiety to secure the fleeting notions, sensing our unspoken camaraderie.

Elizabeth sat on the stage in the front in a large red leather chair.  I scooted to the edge of my seat to listen. I wouldn't move until it was over.  She spoke like on a Sunday afternoon, like she was sitting on the porch discussing memories with an old friend.  She said that writing depends on three factors: talent, luck and hard work.  You can only control one of them, she said.

She cited an old Brazilian adage that her husband, Jose, says: Listen to the whispers or soon you will be listening to the screams.  She said that some people are unsung as heroes though heroes they be.  She said that it is easier to tell the truth than to make up fiction, so write about the truth.

"I get so excited by people," she said.  "There is so much weird variation."  I wanted to jump up and down and say, Me too! Me too! Fortunately I still had a foot on the ground so I held my tongue.  It dawned on me during the interview that I resonated with this woman who I esteem so highly--I could really relate to the things she said.  This infused me with a great deal of confidence about my own journey as a writer and made me want to go immediately home to log some pages on my own book.

Absorbing her aura, her humor, her wisdom, her kindness and her folksy storytelling, I teetered between merry tears and laughter for the short hour and a half.   At the end we all lined up like school children at lunch and waited for our books to be signed, a strange ritual we cling to.  I spoke briefly to her as she signed her name on the title page of her novel Stern Men and I wished for something worthwhile to say but came up with nothing.  Typical. But later I recalled something she said that will propel me and stay with me, I think, forever.  She had said this: 

There is no assurance with writing.  You just have to do it and then see where it goes.

If you're reading this, Elizabeth Gilbert, thank you.

chapel songs.

I wish I could say that every Sunday I spend in church is a rich, overflowing time for my spirit.  That the songs we sing permeate my frustrations and that the sermon pierces right through all of my preconceptions and my judgments and that I walk out of the middle school where we meet totally upheaved and re-written.

This is not the case.  Due to my utter humanness I often find that I sort of grovel through the service hoping to pick up nuggets, grabbing them and shoving them into my pocket like a beggar on the streets of Boston.  I leave the service in a wrestling match between what I am and what I want to be.  My feet are in my sneakers and eternity is in my heart.  So for now, I try and I wait.

After our pastor gives the sermon on Sunday morning, the music team piles back up on stage to play another set of songs.  They kind of scurry up there like mice while he prays, asking the LORD to please sow the seeds of the Word in our hearts and I, in my own little lap, beg for it.   Sometimes my first reaction is to be irritated by that song that I don't feel like singing, but I am learning, have patience with me, that it isn't really about what I like or don't like. It's about singing songs that will take to the skies all the way up to heaven.  So this week when I was singing the songs I closed my eyes and imagined what it must be like for God to hear a whole church sing a song to him, about him.

We sang Be Thou My Vision, a hymn that I have sung so many, so many times.  I love this hymn.  The words are like a blazing fire that emits such a force of heat that you can feel it all around and inside you.  And do you know how a fire, all of its smells and glorious popping light, is somehow comforting in its grandeur?  This is the way that this hymn, with its music and its words, is to me.  And, like a fire, it has the capacity to make me feel so incredibly tiny and powerless.  

Our church is what people today would call "Contemporary," meaning that the music is more up-beat than many churches.  They add some spunk to this particular hymn but on Sunday, around the fourth verse, all of the instruments deadened except for the drum, played by this total rocker college kid.  The auditorium filled with the voices of the congregation and this tremendous Celtic drum beat.  The sound was audacious and, at last, I could imagine God really listening to our singing that colossal anthem.

Riches I heed not, nor man's empty praise.

Thou mine Inheritance, now and always:

Heart of my own heart, whatever befall,

Still be my Vision, O Ruler of all.

meals in minutes.

Stuart bought a cookbook recently, "Meals in Minutes," in a new concerted effort to learn to cook.  The selling point of this book is that you can throw together a delicious well-balanced meal quickly.  The intro reads: "Sharing homemade meals is a fading ritual, too often replaced by television or a slice of pizza ... However, you hold in your hands the book that shows you how to create wonderful dishes without a lot of fuss and bother."

On Wednesday night he was going to make some curried chicken with rotini dish.  At two-thirty he was pulling the meat out of the freezer and asked if Mark and I wanted to join the family for dinner. Of course! Well would you mind picking up three more cans of this... he looks at the can... reduced fat Cream of Chicken soup?  I'm on it, I said.

When I brought the soup home the chicken was no longer on the counter-top.  I guess the dinner process was already underway. I put the soup on the counter and left, yelling up the stairs that I would be home by 6:45.  Dinner would be served, I was informed, at 7:15.  Wake Forest would be playing Duke in basketball so we would eat in front of the TV. Please refer back to the Cookbook's tag line.

The smell of something hit me when I walked in the basement door from outside. My apartment has its own entrance and I was surprised to smell dinner all the way downstairs.  Mark arrived and we discussed the wedding over a glass of wine while waiting for dinner.  

Around 7:20 Kim marched down the stairs in her flannel pajama pants and red fleece, classic post-work-I-don't-care-I'm-not-leaving-the-house garb.  

"Time for dinner?" I asked, getting up.

"No." She rolled her eyes with a laughing in them.  "We're having frozen Costco pizza."  Please refer back to Cookbook tag line again.

"What??  What happened to Chicken Curry Cream Pasta thing?  He's been working on it all day!"

"Well, yeah, you know you'd think that you couldn't botch a meal in minutes, wouldn't ya.  Well apparently Stuart added two entire--" making a little hand motion to indicate the two-inch-tall plastic container, searching for the right word "--things of curry powder!  And then, you know, it tastes awful so he keeps adding more milk! I mean he's got about three huge cookers full of this curried milk sauce.  You have to get the milk up to temperature but he got impatient so he turned the heat up under the pot and scalded the milk! So two gallons of milk, all this chicken, curry powder, vegetables... we're throwing it out.  It stinks up there, like something rotting. It's foul."  

Mark and I were laughing at this point. 

"But thanks to Costco we have pizza.  Y'all want some pizza?"

We nodded, my eyebrows raised.

"So what is Stuart doing right now?" I asked.

"Well the Wake Forest game is on now, so he's lost any concern about dinner.  He's up there with a glass of wine and his buddy's here..."

She laughed and tossed her hair back as she turned toward the garage door to get the pizza.  "I swear..."  

Lesson: the only simple thing is spaghetti and meals in minutes don't exist, at least not around these parts.

it's cold here.

It is cold here. Last week the temperatures were down in the "teens" and my car hesitated to start when I tried it for work.  We had two days in the fifties but the cold still felt thick--like maybe it's so far inside of me by this point that the actual temperature doesn't factor in. My bones are in frozen hibernation and the only respite is Florida.

My apartment is a basement and the door to the outside doesn't quite close all the way.  I have a long skinny pillow with a design of row houses painted on it that is meant to be stuffed down at the bottom of the door to prevent the air from wafting in down low to the ground.  This is fairly effective, however there is also a gap between the door and the rest of the door frame. I can look through and see a little line of light.  The little pillow doesn't frame the whole door, dang it.  The thermostat is upstairs so there isn't much I can do about this except to turn on the gas fire place when I'm home for long enough.  Then I wrap myself up in a fleece blanket and sit on the brick fire place to warm up.  I've also resorted to running my hands and feet under scalding water in the sink, wearing five layers, doing the dishes more often by hand and making sure to fold the laundry when it is just out of the dryer.

The low body degree issue is compounded by a few things.  For instance I am addicted to ice water. My cells are probably on the verge of explosion because I drink so much water.  There are these insulated no-sweat plastic cups called Tervis Tumblers and they have straws.  These things go everywhere with me full of ice and water.  I probably drink over 150 ounces of water a day, no joke, and my sister commented on how even when she was 8 months pregnant I peed more than she did. It might be a problem.  So it's freezing cold and then I guzzle cold liquids.  No wonder my guts are frozen.  

I am also an outdoors person.  We're not talking camping, I don't have any great desire to be rugged. However I have a real need to be outside and in natural light.  In fact I can hardly stand to be inside during the daylight hours.  Windows help, but since I live in the basement the best option for me is to, obviously, go outside.  So I do.  Sometimes I go for a walk around the neighborhood and call my mom to catch up.  Holding the cell phone turns my hands into ice.  Sometimes, though, I just sit outside on the deck and read.  It's thirty-five degrees and my body is shivering with cold, but I have to be outside.  So I sit there as long as I can possibly stand it and read.  Just finished Kite Runner. Had to read the last few chapters inside.  It helped that it was gray out.

Winter is good for Christmas and snow, but I'll be glad to dismiss it come... March?? Please say yes.

january snow.

I recently read an excerpt from a book that said this: "to pray means to wait for the God who comes."  It is in God's identity--One who comes.

Ever since I read that it has remained in my mind, dusting my thoughts like powdery white snow that swirls around on the pavement and only accepts the faintest footprints.  So I guess it was something I had needed to hear.

It seems like this road has been so daggum windy.  I can only see two feet ahead and then the pavement makes another jarred curve and I drive in blind with only minute confidence that there will not be a car, or a herd of grazing water buffalo, in my lane on the other side.  I feel tired because I wait and yet have no idea what is coming.  UNCG would do me a huge service to tell me if they'll take me for their Writing Master's program because the not-knowing is turning me into something of a plastic wind-up duck.  

We've got these married friends who went out on a limb to move down here to North Carolina. They live in an apartment complex.  It's nice, but they decided it was time to move on.  They found a house and jumped through about seventy-five loops, all hung up high in the air, some of them on fire, to buy this house.  And they love it--it's got a big lawn with a slight hill in the back.  There are a few other houses around but everyone is neighborly.  They have two big dogs, a lab and a golden retriever, and my friends just want so badly to live in a place where the dogs can run around and play.  

So they had it all lined up and then they hit a snag.  His company won't write a letter declaring he's got a consistent full-time job, even though he does and has worked there for three months, because they're "working on their budget."  Now they can't close on the house.  They are living out of boxes, borrowing spare bed rooms and using other folks' washers and dryers.  My friend, the girl, who is the most delightful soul, her eyes are turning red with stress and the other night, when I saw her laugh at someone's joke, I realized it was the first time I'd seen a real smile out of her in a good while.   This week all I can say to her is that she has to wait for the God who comes.

That's the catch about God coming-- you have to wait.

On Monday night my almost-husband left late after a movie.  He wasn't gone ten seconds before he busted back through the door, picked me up in my plaid cotton pants and sweatshirt, ran outside and spun me around under the radiant moon.  I laughed and shrieked and gasped... it was snowing.

On Tuesday morning I awoke and when the sun finally rose I, in some bizarre ritual, stepped outside in a tank top.  The street was silent and it the earth was white.  I expected the quiet to linger, as it does on snow mornings, but then I heard the most peculiar sound.  I walked out further and heard my neighbors--a five-year-old and two-year-old toe head--shrieking and calling out, "Dad! See this?!"  It was so early, but the kids ran and laughed and dragged their dad by his gloved hands down into the snow.  

I don't know what it is, between the waiting for this One who does come, the small measure of faith that we cling to, and that sweet soft snow and they way it seemed to cover over a multitude of troubles.  But I think I believe it deep down, that God will come.  

"God is thrust onward by his love, not attracted by our beauty.  He comes even in moments when we have done everything wrong..."

papa introduces Jonathan to Seinfeld.

one night last fall.

It was in the fall, probably November.  He called me to come over--it was 10:00 on Sunday night.  I was tired and already in sweat pants and a rugby shirt I'd inherited from my brother.  But of course I'd go.

When I pulled up he came out, saying, "let's go for a drive."  I almost whined, "but I have to get up early..."  but in some attempt to embrace impulse, didn't.  I held my tongue and decided ah hell, one late night won't kill me.

We got in his car and he looked at me and said, "where should we go?"  I shrugged, a bit confused. "Business 40?" I suggested, "Through downtown?"  There is something about city lights at night--any city.  But the center of Winston-Salem at night is majestic in its isolated height and uncanny quiet.  It is heavenly, and the city charm can make anybody feel dazzling.  It's inviting and warm and sparkling with contrast.  Janitors and night watchmen have keys and they turn on the night lights in the city.

We drove down the expressway and got off on Cherry Street.  Weaving around down in toward Fourth and Trade, we got mixed up and turned around on one-way streets and turn-abouts.  Fall had come that day, a swift overhaul of any residual summer warmth.  It was eerie the way all the lights were on. Everyone, like aggravated turtles, was tucked up at home to avoid the cold wind.

With wide open parking, Mark pulled up by an apartment complex.  He looked at me and turned off the engine, smirking.  

"But I'm in sweatpants!"  

He just smiled and got out of the car.  

I opened the door and shuddered when the wind diced right through my cotton coverings.  He grabbed a long sleeve shirt from his golf bag in the trunk and threw it to me.  We ventured into a parking deck and came out to the landing which afforded a view of the skyline.  I'm sure I gaped and he, less concerned with city lights, wrapped his arms around me and lifted me up, stretching his neck to place a kiss my jaw bone as I looked at the light pouring out of the tall domed building that you can see from a thousand points around town.

I smiled, a gesture for the stars, as he spun me around.  And then, setting my feet back on the asphalt, he put his hands on my frozen face and I kissed him.

We walked up the street and turned right on Fifth, toward First Baptist, whose stained glass window glowed with colors.  

"We look like we're homeless," I said, flopping the unfilled sleeves of his large men's shirt that draped off the ends of my hands in his face.  

We stopped in front of a mural wall, holding hands, and craned our necks to see the picture.  It was too close so we crossed the ghost street to get a better scope.  

"Weird," he said of the ambiguous figures.  We both laughed.  "I mean really, what is that supposed to be?" 

The traffic lights switched dutifully from green to yellow to red to green again, though in the whole universe there wasn't a car on the road.

almost three years old.

My niece to be, Hannah, took me to the park for an outing this afternoon.  We didn't get out the door until about 4:45 so the sun was already set and it was getting cold.  

Hannah will be three in February but she talks as if she is a twelve-year-old college student.  She is more articulate than most of my peers.  She walked me down the street, instructing me to "hold hands" and "jump on the grass" when cars drove by.  I am baffled by nice family neighborhoods without sidewalks, as is the condition of our neighborhood.  She stopped and sniffed at every little thing that was out of the ordinary for the side of the street.

"This is somebody's pay," she said, pointing to a renegade grocery receipt that was stuck in the mud.

"Do you see this?" she asked me, pointing her toe into a pile of mud.

"Yes," I replied.

"It's dirt. Don't step there, your shoes will track it in the house."

Ten four.

She told me to watch when she ran and to look at her when she jumped up high.  There are days when this sort of dilly-dallying makes me irritated, but today I enjoyed it.  It's really entirely stupid to let myself become annoyed since the purpose of our time together is for her enjoyment and if all it takes is marveling at a lost receipt, then I should really be counting my blessings.  

When we got to the park, we played house for a while and then hit the swings. She had me put her in the swing that has four leg holes and then gave me instructions.

"Aunt Ginny, I want to go super high."

So I pushed her high.  Usually I'd pretend to give a big push but take it easy so that the kid didn't fly out of the swing and hit the wood chips.  But I didn't do that, I really pushed her as hard as I could, and she just soared. For a hot second I thought, "Too hard?"  But she came down laughing and  sputtering like a little monkey.  Precious, so sweet it made me laugh out loud.  And then she just laughed harder, and I pushed her again.  

"The moon is out already," I said.

"Where?" she asked, craning her head on the down swing to find the elusive moon behind her right shoulder.

"Up there," I pointed and she turned and spotted it.  "Where do you suppose the sun went?"

After a brief pause, she said, "He's up there behind the sun."

 

She asked me to stop her so she could look and really see.  I grabbed her little feet and she came to a halt.  With both hands she wiped her blonde hair, all sticky with static, from her face and stared at the moon.

"There's a man on the moon," I said. "Sometimes you can see his face, when it's totally round." 

She looked at me skeptically.

"He makes sure you're okay when you sleep."

She smiled at the thought and then told me that the sun probably sits up with the moon too.  I laughed, and that made her laugh.