The wind and rain are howling outside, and I swear there must be a full moon to boot; something’s gotten into me.  I’m blogging, for one, and when did that last happen?  This has been a fiercely private season of growth for me, one where unlike the last, I hardly have words for what I’m learning, let alone time to form them into sentences.  I’m like that zucchini vine you planted last spring and then forgot about.  For weeks it grew and grew and grew, working its heart out under and over the ground, but noiselessly, and without the fanfare of something like snapdragons, until one day you happen to glance at the back fence and good Lord where did those leaves come from?  You get closer up and see, startlingly, that that vine is, well, alive, and taking up a good half acre, each leaf as big as your head.  And there are zucchinis, zucchinis everywhere, many so big you feel embarrassed even looking at them.  You wonder what in good sense you’ll do with them all, but more than that you want to laugh at how this, all of this, has happened under the radar screen.  Without you even noticing.

I’m working my heart out daily in my bumbling process of growth and have a hunch I’ll wake up one day and trip over all my zucchinis.  But in my day-to-day I live far more in touch with the challenges of raising two active, curious, willful kids as an introverted writer/artist in a very small apartment.  I live and grow and learn and grow and practice self control when my kids are driving me crazy and grow and pretend alongside of them to be a plumber/firefighter/farmer/clerk/mechanic/skunk/dog/cat/bull a hundred times each day and grow and daydream and grow and read a few sentences of a book and grow and journal and grow and try to talk on the phone with screaming and banging and raucous laughter in the background and grow and snuggle and kiss and rock and sing and wipe bottoms and read story after story after story and grow.  And all of it out of the public eye, off the blogosphere, unwritten.  Who can say how big my leaves have grown?  How many golden flowers speak of fruit as good as here, ready for the picking?

Soon (in June) N will walk the stage at graduation, marking the end of an era for us in this city by the Bay.  We’ll pack our things and head to LA to begin our next phase.  I’m not yet sure how I’ve grown, what lessons I’ve learned these last 5 years.  The last 2 in particular are mostly blur.  But I’m trusting that even in the forest trees fall, and even at the backs of unkept gardens vines grow heartily.  I’m trusting that with time, words will start to paint the outlines of meanings in what I’ve experienced, and will find their way to pages, paintings, songs.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 2nd, 2009 at 10:47 pm and is filed under Mindfulness, Motherhood, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.