design yummy enough to eat

top image: watermelon blu dot strut tables in powder-coated steel

bottom image: duravit vero washbasin; reminds me of the ice cream in the middle of an ice cream sandwich.

revolving

I said goodbye to the one-hundred and twelfth one tonight. Of course not to his face. Via text. Something about leaving his stuff by the door. There doesn't seem to be any time for goodbyes anymore. Life's busy. Not like in airports where you see plenty of people lapping up farewells, but they are in love, not out. The first goodbye was Ian when I was four. When I was four I thought his name was "N," because that's what I heard people say. It's the South, and folks tend to add a few syllables to their letters. He was sweet, had dark brown hair and glasses and somehow had that magical quality of bringing out the experimenter in me. In Kindergarten it was Brock. He and I had a tumultuous relationship that centered around the playground. Skipping ahead, I have to give a shout out to Josh, who is still a very dear friend of mine today. We never made it official, but we've carried a torch for one another for almost thirty years now.

Truth be told I've had many relationships like the one with Josh. They're friendships, really. They make me feel safe. I like a male companion by my side. If it happens to remain platonic, I almost like it better because it's easier and more constant. I've never been good at making love last, even though I've gotten feedback as stand-out as, "You're cool as shit." When I was a young woman I wanted the world more than love. When I was thirty I wanted to be loved more than anything. Now I think I'm ripe for something that just might work. But what do I know?

The thing I think about today is how many people come and go. It's swift. They're gone before you've had the chance to figure out what your song is, what kind of Scrabble player you are, what your parents are like or where you come from. They take you in parts, until your whole self shouts loud enough to push them away again. I've adjusted to the piecemeal way of life. Romantic notions are more timid. I certainly don't expect much more from number one-hundred and thirteen other than some laughs. But if it happens, I'll be ready.

travel journal (circa 1999)

Today is Monday, and I'm on my way to Dover Priory by train. Last night I stayed in the Hyde Park Hostel in Bayswater. It was a brief visit but a bit more lively than the last hostel. The place was full of French people who played Eminem and Lauryn Hill loud and smoked cigarettes, putting them out on the floor. In my room was Stephanie from Toulouse, Danilo from Sao Paolo, and Ash from South Africa. We talked about capitalism and desire, slavery and normalcy. My Spanish was better than I expected. I can understand everything. I'm just reluctant to form sentences of my own.

Danilo and I went for a walk and coffee last night. We talked some more about leaving home, stepping outside of routine and comfort, searching and challenging ourselves. I was restless all night. Didn't sleep well.

Coming back from Paris now. Had to take the Eurostar so that I could stay longer to have a chance to see the city on Tuesday. I love speaking French. I love the food and the architecture. We had good experiences with all the people --se bon. JT and Marie met us out for dinner last night for Basque food. The water closet had no toilet. Odd. I didn't eat enough food while I was there. We went to the Picasso Museum and the Pompedou. Great views of the city. A moment alone.

derailed

My plan to churn something out at least once each month tanked in April. I actually crafted a little number called "Crazy Bitches" (inspired by my client), but it didn't make the cut. Truth be told, that New Year's resolution to get something published, yeah, I've only made one pitch. You have to keep pitching. It's like acting. You try out, audition, stand in long cattle call lines, usually to hear "no" at the end. My cousin-in-law chatted me up one night about what it takes to be really great at something, a Cracker Jack. Apparently, according to some 20/20 segment he saw, it requires at least four hours of dedication per day to be great. That sounds about right. Think of Olympic athletes or Dancing With The Stars contestants, to excel it takes lots of practice. Most of us dabble. You need time for all the other things. We choose many instead of just one focus.

So, I'm wondering what it takes to make you sign on the dotted line and set all other things aside in favor of one endeavor. This one endeavor could be lots of things--medical school, a start-up business, trying out for American Idol, even marriage. I think it starts simply, with the idea that you want to be something. But what if everything is going great, the status quo is treating you right? That seems to be my problem anyway. I remember the point at which I chucked the career path and went to grad school. The thing that made me do it then was that I'd hit a wall at work. The promotion wasn't coming soon enough to suit me, and I had also always wanted, intended to go on for more schooling. That was the foundation, but it was the obstacle that made me do it. And it was no small endeavor; it was one of the toughest challenges I've experienced, but I never wanted to quit. I was committed. I wonder if that was because it actually was the right thing.

I don't doubt that this little wish of mine is right, isn't something I could do or be, but I do ask myself if it's the right time. I can write whenever. I can be a writer in my 40s or 50s, later in life when I have a New England cottage and a writer's nook overlooking a snow-filled meadow, hmm, when I have something different to say, a different vantage point maybe. Why now?

For those of you who know me, you know that I'm really not talking about writing at all. The things that hold us back or make us say "yes" without wanting to take it back, what are they? In May I'm derailed, a bit.

finalmente y otra vez

I wish I could reach the place I'm longing to go. I have been waiting. But then it seems the thing I have been waiting for no longer matters after years pass without it. Other things bring happiness in surprising ways. Writer Monica Ali describes the fickle nature of our desires in a revelation about different kinds of love. She says there is "the kind that starts deep and slowly wears away, that seems you will never use it up, and then one day it is finished. Then there is the kind that you do not notice at first, but which adds a little bit to itself every day, like an oyster makes a pearl, grain by grain, a jewel from the sand." Do you desire a well with fire that burns until it goes dark, or an ember, slow burning by your breath upon an open slate?

It's likely true that I don't have to choose, that Ali's two kinds of love inform each other and work as one. How would you know when the sand becomes the pearl if you didn't know what a pearl was? That doesn't mean that the two are ultimately the same. They fill different needs. The delight of running bare toes through cool grass is something I can feel now, just by remembering; it awakens you, but everyone eventually puts their shoes back on and steps onto the sidewalk. That pleasure is different from emotional constancy, building each day by another's presence. But the day-by-day can be a chore. Each one falters, and each one holds the other up.

I've gotten off on love, and I started with dreams and the happiness that fills empty space. That happiness feels good; it's a satisfaction with today. I used to battle longing for the things that weren't there. Now when I think of the future, if people ask me or if I ask myself, I'm okay either way. Both kinds of life are good. But even with that, I sometimes want more and wonder if I'm living in the in-between places. When your dreams don't find you, do you forget them, or do they disappear? I wonder if I'm supposed to remember something that slipped away long ago. And here I am again.


(artwork by Joy Young Shannon, RHS alumni; title inspired by Kate Zaluski's journey to the D.R. and back)

a dedication

I'm finally starting to feel my age. This next birthday I'll be thirty-seven. I've lived a selfish life when you think about it. It's been for me, not for a partner or for any children. The only time I understood what it was to give every day for the good of someone else was when I taught school. Everything that was in me was for them, and it was an easy gift, easy to give. They needed me.

When you give like that--all day and into the night--encouraging successes, soothing failures, mending hurts, anticipating questions, preparing answers, preparing people for tomorrow and the next day, it takes a toll. I aged in those years, on the inside, but it was short-lived. I reached for a lighter life again.

Even in the midst of this lighter life, I can't stop the scenery from changing around me. Friends are tending to their sick baby every few hours through the night, picking her up from her bed and rocking her back to sleep again. Friends are separating; friends are divorcing; friends are sticking it out after infidelity. Family, once made, binds you to others.

It's such an enticing idea, making a family, finding a partner. Happiness. For so many, the idea lives as a dream bestowed upon their chosen, but one that eventually they cannot find in the person sitting in front of them anymore. Those revelations often find you in your thirties. My friends call it "the reckoning," a term a little too cute to me for its impact. Aging happens on the inside, through heartbreak and loss, traumas, or simple care for the good of someone else each day. You breathe in life. You breathe out.

tennessee

Once I took a road trip through the South. My favorite spot for viewing was the low mountains near Chattanooga, Tennessee, dark mountains where the clouds wind through them like roads. You may find yourself driving through cloud or just under it, like down covers resting over you with the light breaking through. I was there in the morning, the brilliant holiness of morning, with the Tennessee River looming. I floated down that river, gazed up, and lingered in the in-between places, lines on a map between Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee--secret places with no name, only slips on dark currents that have been there always.

the old neighborhood

When I was a little girl Texas was all around me. Limestone riverbeds plumped up the landscape. Chalk rock crumbled in my hand. Carlos Castaneda books, Mexican dresses, Santana music, toe sandals, nude hippies at watering holes, deep blue spring pools, and my house on top of a hill in the middle of a whole neighborhood full of where I came from, we never left. I grew up in The Four Seasons on Berrywood Drive. We missed being named a month of the year by one street. A slight that didn’t matter, we were a line right down the middle of the world, rolling down into a furious creek. The spring of ’82 brought a flood that killed rabbits in a cage that had been propped up on stilts behind a neighbor’s house. It swept the sound and fury along with it, maybe my fury that I never felt, or don’t remember feeling. The neighborhood was filled with kids and surrounded by fields, undeveloped on the outskirts of town, hidden from the interstate by large pecan and oak trees like shawls around us.

We used to follow the trails that wound through the outlying fields on our bikes, sometimes on foot, trails marked by a civilization before us, the 70s kids maybe. We lived the afternoons in forts along tributaries of Walnut Creek. Our next door neighbors, an elderly couple, got shot by Henry Lee Lucas at their liquor store along I-35 and Braker Lane. We used to break in to find their ghosts or killer, the reincarnation of their deaths, for years afterward, on into high school. By then we had lost reverence and were only looking for a cheap thrill heightened by lame pot or cheap beer. My older brother, Jeff, was my best friend then, since we were tots bundled in snowsuits in Grafton, North Dakota, a place my dad took us after graduate school in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I was born. When I was six Jeff and I moved into that house on Berrywood Drive, at either end of a mottled brown hallway. When we arrived my parents explained to me that my bedroom had a lock on it. I was so young, and they didn’t want me locking us out. Even with that I accidentally locked it shut one day. My parents got mad. I remember holing up in Jeff’s room. He wasn’t mad.

Jeff told me to beat up Chuck, a boy one year older than me who lived caddy corner from us. I don’t know why he wanted me to hit him other than it would be funny. He believed in me, and I would do whatever he said. I don’t remember beating up Chuck, but I probably did. We made horror films with our friends using a Kodak video camera. We climbed fences and snuck out our bedroom windows at night. He stole a car, I stole clothes, he sold fake pot, I made out with boys in cemeteries all before we got to high school. We were arrested and banned from our friends, and decided rebelling wasn’t worth it because we didn’t hate people and we didn’t hate ourselves. We hated what was missing.

misanthrope

I usually write a new year's post. Usually I feel a contagious sense of possibility from getting to start over. January 1 coming around again is like a do over. What will I do this year? What plans can I hatch? This year my mind is elsewhere. It's too early for a backlash, but it's found me.

It's been, what, half a year since gas prices got to $4 a gallon, since we realized we're in an interconnected heap of trouble like a figure eight of standing dominoes that have been tipped? Since then activism is back at the front of the line: collective responsibility. Its manifestations are take out cups made from corn, fair trade chocolate bars, and coupons that you can buy to erase your carbon footprint.

I like people. I am against poverty and pollution. I am heart sick about the polar bears. And simultaneously I feel annoyed by so much goodness. If I were a child, I would be pinching the goody two shoes and getting sent to the corner. As a professional adult female, I am currently suppressing urges to physically push people when they offend by, oh, let's say staying in the women's restroom longer than the standard slow pee and hair correction require.

I read a soothing article published on Slate.com recently about this very subject. I'm always soothed when made to feel perfectly normal for being my imperfect self. The article, entitled: "Well, Excuuuuuse Meee! Why humans are so quick to take offense" explains that "the evolutionary forces that have made us cooperative and empathetic are the same ones that have made us prickly and explosive." Writer Emily Yoffe goes on to reveal a Darwinist benefit of seemingly undesirable traits. She says: "gratitude allows us to expand our social network and recruit new allies; vengeance makes sure our new friends don't take advantage of us." We want to be treated fairly, and it is up to us to make sure this is so.

So, we pay close attention to social nuances, like "who's doing what to whom and what [it] means to [us]," says Yoffe. Why does the goody two shoes offend? Well, you've got to ask yourself more questions: Why is she such a goody two shoes anyway? Something's up. Does she want special favors? Down with goody two shoes! Keep her in line! I'm not sure that someone who buys carbon coupons to make up for a deluge of carbon emissions needs to be kept in line, but then again maybe he or she does.

Sometimes when there's so much jumping on the bandwagon I want to reject it for the simple reason that there's too much. There's something suspicious there, some subtle nuance I'm picking up on. It takes a lot of thinking to figure out what danger may be present, to sift it through. While I continue winnowing away I'll be a gruff little misanthrope, doing my duty.

christmas wish list

nest high

http://brookssalzwedel.com/pages/67heldon.html

fuji finepix s9100

Backroads biking trip through Provence, France

photo by Flickr mc559

Nana DeBary eau de toilette bronze

Winter in Central Park.
photo by Daniele Sartori

repeat the sounding joy

for John

I've been thinking about joy and where to find it. My friend and I have one of those trigger lines--as soon as you say it you both know kind of thing. I'm actually not sure what it is we both know except that we fall on different sides of the fence. The line is from a Lucinda Williams song. She hollers, "You took my joy!" And then she clearly states: "I want it back."

Lucinda's not my bag. She's like a grown up skinny kid sitting on someone's backyard couch in South Austin sipping on whiskey. Her drawl is so put on that it's part of her act. But really, it's her singing that I can't take--a tinny drawl laid on top of rockin' guitar. The guitar's good; the tin grates. Where's the soul? If you're riding on top of the notes you're coasting. If you can come from your gut, then you've got me.

Funny enough, "You took my joy" has become somewhat of a mantra with me--relationship goes south: "You took my joy." Family drama: You took my joy again. You took all the fun out of it. Stop doing that!

I like the blame factor. Takes it off of me.

Blaming is fun and all, but it's lonely, too, and I'm forgetting all about the second part. I'm supposed to want it back. I think wanting it back is kinda like saying: "screw you." I hate to say that. I'd rather say, "you sure?" "You wanna change your mind?" But really, "screw you" can be standing in your own so that others don't take away. You can allow them to give, but they don't necessarily have to take away from you. If you stand in your own and know when to cut your losses, you take back your joy. I keep repeating those lines of hers. She got me after all.

the last month of the year

I feel like it's a race, and I've just won. December 1, the first day of the last month of this break-neck year. I was driving home tonight in the pitch blackness that comes with falling back this time of year and saw the white twinkle lights of a huge Christmas tree in one of the town homes sprouting in my neighborhood. A tall bright tree. Oh yes. Time can stop for a moment to take it in. That must be what they're for, these items that belong in the ground out of doors, or pretending to be in the middle of your living room, foreign objects all gussied up and getting in your way so that you'll stop and notice.

When Thanksgiving came last week I was annoyed to have to stop for awhile and go out to the country because there's nothing to do there but soak up the scenery and think. Boo on that. If I wanted to leave my life behind I'd do it myself. I don't need the calendar's help, thank you. There's no getting out of Thanksgiving, however, so I made the drive in a stupor, hungover, not too badly, just enough to give you a push to want to hurry up and get to the end. I got there, and to my surprise no parents, just a quiet hotel room. So I took a nap.

The pace this year, especially this fall, has been quick. I have a few folks in my life, new-agey types, who advocate meditation or yoga. I like motion.

I'm surprised by how much I've fit in, dizzy at times. It's somehow similar to a new mom's worry that she won't love her second child as much as her first. How could she love another as much? How do I have the capacity within myself for more? Will I forget my place from where I was before? When new friends come in do they replace old ones? When new endeavors are met, does it make you different than you were before? With all the motion have I left things behind, especially when things move quickly?

When you see a Christmas tree with its bright twinkle lights you stop long enough to remember the way it was before, even if you don't want to. I feel like I won because I didn't lose anything, left nothing behind, I remember now.

belated . . .

So friends, I owe you some stories. I've been in the new house for more than a month. Can you believe it? Me neither. It's so very beautiful. I find that my favorite parts end up being a patch of wall brought to life by some mish mash of mixing old and new. I am so sad that I don't even have a digital camera so that I can show you. I wish I had a fairy to bring me things.

I live in a neighborhood three blocks off of Interstate 10. I kind of like this only for the fact that people as far away as Los Angeles also live off of my thoroughfare. The other night while walking the woofie to the little park two blocks away, through the dip, past the kiddie seats on springs, I met a new neighbor. Why is it that you always remember the dog's name and not the master? Grant I think it was, and Charlie was the pupper. He told me that on my street a vato gang used to run amok in some run down houses and block off the road to have their parties. He also said that a year or so ago the city finally knocked down a big house a stone's throw from mine that had real hookers and crack addicts. Do you think he was just telling me stories? I must have missed all the color because there's none of that now.

This neighborhood is your standard inner city, new town home gentrifying spot--me in the town home, my next door neighbors in the little old house with two rentals behind it, a homemade can recycling business in the inner courtyard and a fantastically kept garden taking over much of their land. Last Saturday night I returned home around midnight, sleepy as ever, changed in the dark, but somehow caught a glimpse out my window of this Tejano dance party happening just below. I slid down the wall next to the window so that I could sit and watch them for awhile.

Hmm, those are my best stories for now. I am having house guests this weekend and a Sunday barbecue to warm the place up. Looking forward to it.

I'll post more pics soon.

Sistra.

new home

It's been a busy March. My girlfriends and I kicked it off by hosting a baby shower for Michelle at her lovely home in Dallas. Last week we celebrated Match Day for med students all across the land. Envelopes passed out, "one, two, three," presto, they learned where they'll spend the next four years. (Stephanie got Dallas, and Heidi got Chicago.) On Saturday night before Easter, I got a little good news of my own. All week I'd been on the fast track of applying for pre-approval on a mortgage and bidding on my first home. At around 11 o'clock I got the call. Crazy.

Welcome to my house.

It looks like this on the inside.

Except, my fireplace is actually charcoal grey. I'd like to hang my Rebecca Miser on it. No flat screen TVs for me.

The floor wants this on it in black and white.

Madeline Weinrib

The bathroom wants these on it.

Walnut Wallpapers. Little Whales.

The dining room needs a change of light fixture from this glowing Frisbee thing . . .

to this.

Ochre Furniture

Wouldn't this be a lovely banquette nestled next to the dining table? My table actually looks almost like the one in the above picture.

Ochre Furniture

The rooftop has a terrace.

I'd like to turn it into something like this.

Until next time.

Gang leaders on "The Wire"

My dear friend, Joel (pronounced ho - el, an important descriptor I think), introduced me to the wide wide world of HBO's The Wire last season, a show that is like sitting on the edge of the plains, looking up at the West Texas night sky, everything wondrous and yet barely perceptible upon first look. While striving to decipher the language of the street and at least two dozen characters' story lines, I crinkled my nose and said under my breath, "ay'on'no" during my first viewing. The show was most of the time set in the ghetto. Last season focused on the kids and schools in the ghetto. I wasn't sure that I needed that dramatized for me. But, wow. After three or four episodes last season, wow.

This season I've been searching around the web for articles and reviews on The Wire to become better acquainted with its writer/creator, his background, critics' opinions and so forth. It turns out that a crew of Salon.com staffers have created their own Sunday night chat room after each episode, and an editor on Slate.com thinks it's the best show on television, ever. I've learned that the show has been either snubbed or missed by those who honor achievement in television acting, writing, and directing for its entire run. I think that just means that it's a sleeper hit, maybe too fuzzy for those who start bandwagons.

Anyway, last night I stumbled upon this fantastic weekly blog entry. Ew-good fantastic. Check it out.

"Ding-dong, the witch is dead! Which old witch? The Clinton witch!"

Unexpectedly Orange may turn political for the next eleven months. (The entry title above comes from a line in a piece by one Rebecca Traister, writer of my favorite explanation of the Hillary win in New Hampshire, published on Salon.com.)

Excerpt: "So no, I have not been a Hillary Clinton supporter. But the torrent of ill-disguised hatred and resentment unleashed toward a briefly weakened Clinton this week shook that breezy naiveté right out of me, and made me feel something that all the hectoring from feminist elders could not: guilt for not having stood up for Hillary. "

The naiveté she's referring to is the careless assurance she felt that many more suitable female presidential candidates will present themselves in step with the males in the years to come, that she has no worry about Hillary being a one-time wonder and, thus, no responsibility to feel allegiance to her as the first Democratic female presidential candidate.

Ditto.

I read a narrative accounting of the happenings on election night at one caucus locale in Iowa. It turns out that if a candidate's station does not fill up with enough caucus supporters to reach the percentage quota, then the votes don't count and are up for grabs, or, horsetrading. One Hillary campaign leader began her call for votes, championing all that is righteous and twinkling about her candidate, with: "She's a woman." The horses looked up from the fray of bids being shouted at them and walked away from the Hillary camp.

Is that all you've got? Apparently so, that night. But she regrouped in New Hampshire by calling Obama out for referencing King and Kennedy, saying in effect that he's no King or Kennedy. She brought fight for five days, and humility, which we saw, in contrast to the hammer coming down on her by those who decide our elections--the press. It was over. And, surprisingly, I felt sorry that it was. I can't say that I felt guilt like Rebecca Traister, but I definitely felt sympathy and a wish that it wasn't yet over, so quickly with one night's outcome deciding a presidency.

For Rebecca, her urge to stand up for Hil would have led her to vote for her, if only for one night. I can't say the same. But I'm glad that the women in New Hampshire rallied in a stand against the tsunamis created by pollsters and pundits. I get swept up in them sometimes. I depend on them to deliver my winner, at least I did on Tuesday. He came in 2 points behind instead. But Hillary's display of true joy at her win seemed to also be a display of joyous surprise that voters still have the power to defy. How fun.

I'm not a very good blogger

Hello! More than two months since an entry. Hmph. Blogging requires you to be home in your spot where you enjoy blogging rather than filling all your time with social engagements and travel. My mother sent me a new year's email that included this quote: "Most of us have been given many more blessings than we have received. We do not take time to be blessed or make the space for it. We may have filled our lives so full of other things that we have no room to receive our blessings . . .." I have been filling my life so full of some things that often times there's no room to call someone back, or send out my Christmas cards, or do the things that may change someone's life or my own.

In December, I spent 11 days with my brother in his NYC apartment. He took me along to his GED tutoring session one evening, and I worked with two women to review equivalent fractions. Haha. Okay, let me see here. Fourth grade math steps catch you by surprise at first because you can't remember them. But they return, and you try to teach. This experience led me to one of my five resolutions--to volunteer to teach literacy to adult students. I have found a group here in Houston. I attend a one-day training and then tutor two nights a week for a 12-week session. Perfect. Another resolution is to buy my first house this year. Another resolution is to write, to work on one single writing project and try to make something of it. Another resolution, or goal, is to get myself to France this summer and do a biking tour through Provence with my brother. And, finally, the fifth resolution is fitness and good health.

Wishing you a fantastic, creative, and fortified 2008 (three things, Jeffrey!)

Sistra V

the disappearing frogs

Mark Catesby


Eight years ago when I was preparing for my comprehensive exam that would determine whether or not I would pass graduate school, one of the books on the reading list was from my favorite collection, The Best American Essays. In one of the essays the writer started off with an exposition about the disappearing frogs. I was heart sick at the thought of this. Frogs were dying out? How would little children grow up without frogs? What would a summer evening be without the sounds of croaking in the air and walking through the grass with an eye on the blades, wondering if you were about to step on a mottled bullfrog? I sighed a big sigh and took this woman at her word--she'd done her research, she must have. They wouldn't have published her essay twice without a quality check, and then I tried to put it out of my mind.



John Holbrook, American Herpetology


It is true. The rapid decline of frogs began in the 1980s, and since then scientists have been trying to pinpoint the cause. Climate change looks like the biggest factor--warmer temperatures breed a fungus deadly to frogs, called chytrid. Pesticides are another factor. Atrazine, a common ingredient in weed killer, disrupts the sexual reproduction in male frogs. In truth, many factors have led to the decline. If you look at amphibians as a whole, one third of this population has been lost, gone extinct throughout the world, since the 1980s, according to the Global Amphibian Assessment. When you localize it to countries with warmer climates, the numbers are much more startling. In La Selva, a protected area in the Costa Rican rain forest, amphibians have declined 75%, according to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.



Beatrix Potter, Jeremy Fisher Fishing. Frederick Warne & Co. 2006

I suppose everything in the previous paragraph to be just depressing. But this summer I noticed something unusual. Maybe you noticed it too. I live in a warm and sticky climate, and this year, all of the sudden, the frogs were back. Really and truly it had been years since I'd experienced a summer with frogs. But here they were. Fat little toads were hopping around my courtyard. Gus pup noticed them first. He chased them with his nose. They were in my friend, Stephanie's yard. When my friends and I went to Rockport for our coastal extravaganza, a strange-looking sucker frog was suctioned to the glass on our back door, and the grass was filled with bullfrogs. I brought it up in conversation at a bridal luncheon, and lo and behold, in Weimer, TX, this young woman's three boys were leaping for joy upon the act of dipping their forearms through a hole in a tree trunk and grabbing frogs for play. Frogs were everywhere this summer.

The decline of a species is layered and complex. No one fully understands this frog drop, and perhaps the uncertainly offers the opportunity for unforeseen spikes, not only those but a steady rise again. 2007 was the year of the toad. Hippity hop. Yes please.

rockport

Another annual friends weekend in quaint Rockport, Texas came and went. Choice moment: spontaneous dance party in the living room while watching Saturday Night Live. Musical Guest: Spoon. Picture lots of odd side kicks and hands in the air like we were channeling the Charleston, something like that. Gone by too quickly.

It happened here.

gratitude journal

Do you know No Impact Man? I came to know him through a Nightline special that aired this summer. It was a thorough piece about his family's daily life living in such a way as to put no carbon-producing, energy-draining impact upon this green earth. They have embraced an experiment in what it would take--what kinds of adjustments would be required and what would it really be like living that way. Incredibly enough, they are successfully living this experiment amidst the urbanity of bustling New Yorkers.

No Impact Man has a fascinating blog which seems to be a major part of his commitment, journaling to get the word out there day-by-day. Tonight's entry caught my eye, this line in particular: "I sometimes despair that our state religion is consumption and our main prayer is for more," not so much the consumption part, but the prayer for more, because who doesn't want more? Not necessarily more money or things, but more experiences, knowledge, inspirations.

He says, ". . . I do feel as though we (and I include me) have come to worship desire."

And so, he has me thinking on the matter. What would be wrong with desire? With pleasure in things? It's natural.

And he says, ". . . being grateful for what I have makes me want less." He says gratitude equals kindness, "And also, it turns out, gratitude equals happiness."

I like the sound of that.

My gratitude journal for today--

I am grateful for Genevieve Moss, a lady I had just met, who walked with me across the street and into a building filled to the seams with folks I'd never met before. She had me follow her through the crowd, stopping to squeeze a few hands, and sit with her people. So nice, and it made the experience of that morning connected rather than box-like.

I am grateful for my friend Stephanie this evening. I feel like singling her out. I am accepted in her presence in the comforting way that all of us need in just that moment sometimes. I am grateful for her patience, her abounding appreciation for the people in her life, her spirit of fun. She is a beautiful lady, and I'm glad she's mine.

I am grateful for Michelle and Joel's thrilling new developments.

I am grateful for second annual friends' weekends in a beach house, with big breakfasts, white sangria, dancing on the pier, and a slumber party.

I am grateful to live in Houston, go figure, but I am. I don't know why, but I feel grateful for that.

I am grateful for a courtyard with neighbors, grateful that Sharon had me over for coffee cake the other morning. I hadn't had homemade coffee cake since high school.

I am grateful for my mom, dad, and brother, for Hector and Jackie, Peggy and the Powells, and cutest little Gus. These people are my family.