self-portrait, blurry, with boy

It was threatening rain on and off today after days, on and off, of rain.

My boy left yesterday for his beloved Pacific Northwest. I accompanied him down to Penn Station and we spent a last half hour together before, abruptly, his train was boarding and our time ran out.

I came home in the rain, had a quiet evening filled with love and concern from friends via text message, phone call, Facebook. I felt buoyed by all this love -- his, our singular and overlapping circles, our families -- but even so waves of sadness have been taking me by surprise all day.

I got home a little while ago from a much-needed Lauren-dinner. It was just starting to spatter from  a quickly darkening sky and I almost burst in to tears as I put my key in the lock, knowing how empty it would feel on the other side.

I could hear Llama crying disconsolately through the heavy door.

I wasn't going to meditate today, perhaps out of some juvenile shred of acting out -- let me show you how much I don't care, how little all of this means to me. But Evan's meticulously home-made meditation cushion was on the floor next to my desk, and I looked at it guiltily, and then set the meditation timer for fifteen minutes.

At first I couldn't calm my thoughts, and every little noise went careening and swirling around my head. The rain flung itself at the windows, and the refrigerator's hum turned grating, and the room felt dark and empty and vast behind my eyelids, and Llama sniffed and yowled at me, inconsolable.

But then, suddenly, the rain quieted and a bird started chirping, and then. Then there was this warm golden light behind my eyelids, a loving light that wrapped itself around me, and when those fifteen minutes were up I opened my eyes to the sun breaking through the cloud cover and a room suffused with a gorgeous west-facing evening glow. Even Llama was basking in the light, stretched out on the floor and purring, eyes heavy-lidded with sun-shiney pleasure.

Thank you, my dear, for giving this to me, and for smiling with me yesterday despite our crying a bit through all those goodbyes.

that western air

My dear boy bought a one-way ticket to Seattle the other morning.

It's been a long time coming, this leaving of his, though we've both known it for awhile. It was the doing of it, of course, that's been so hard. Or, to be more exact, the being unable to do the doing of it.

His ticket is for the train, of course, because that is the way of my dear boy. I am envious of this (it was he who showed me, over the course of two summers, the romanticism of train travel and also the great beauty of this country), and amused (why do in one day what can be done in two, or three, or ten?), and so very, very sad.

We know that it is for the best, and that he is going home, for now, to the island he loves, to the forest lands and the ocean water and the air he longs to breathe.

My beloved New York, my small-town life in the midst of millions, is not for my boy, despite his genuine love for it too.

We will be saying goodbye, at least for now, at least for here. But in the meantime, from now until I kiss him goodbye at Penn Station on June 10th, we will fill our days and evenings with the people we love, and we will come home tired and tipsy and teary and filled to the brim with love for each other; with, in our calmer moments, hope for each other, and for us together.

Of course, when one or the other or both of us gets tragically overly sentimental about our impending goodbyes, one of us will, hopefully, manage to laugh and remind us both that we will see each other at the end of July.

And despite everything in between, this coming goodbye makes me think fondly of the beginning. I don't think, back then, that either of us imagined we would be together now, let alone going our separate ways, at least for awhile.

It's funny what can happen, and I'm banking on it getting funnier yet.

going home, 5.19.13

conversations on knitting, part II

Me, excitedly: After this chuppah is done I'll be down to having just five projects!

Evan, super encouragingly: Great!
Me: And then I can start another project!

Evan: Well, why don't you try finishing all of these before starting another one.

Me, super excitedly: Right! And then I can start FIVE NEW PROJECTS!

Evan: Umh. That wasn't quite what I had in mind...
(Part I)

it's funny...

It's funny (I was saying to Evan this morning) how I can have such a wonderful time with my mother, and then be ready for her to leave, and then afterwards feel this mom-shaped hole that aches for her presence. Do people ever stop feeling this way?

bridge, 4.20.13

mer-woman shawl

Knit from pure silk lace in a gorgeously rich teal, with turquoise beads in the border section. Now available here.

another april eighteenth, almost

Tomorrow marks twenty years since my father's death.

My mother is visiting this week for the first time since 2010 and we have been planning a mini celebration, if you will, for his death-day. (We are never morbid, we McNeils! We just happen to sometimes feel like we have to make light about death.)

Later this afternoon Mom is meeting our Bill for coffee, and tomorrow our Jill is going to come up for dinner. It will be a simple meal filled with some of his favorite things: garlic & tomato pasta, a green salad, a bottle of good red wine, an apple pie. Perhaps Evan will bake a crusty loaf of rosemary foccacia with which to sop up the garlic & tomato sauce. Perhaps I will once again buy a pint of malted milk ball ice cream, or maybe just a bag of Whoppers.

Evan and Mom and I were sitting around the table the other night planning out this April 18th dinner and Mom suddenly paused and said, "Is this silly?"

It is silly. But it is also nice.

Sometimes, when I am supposedly meditating, I am composing letters to my father instead: Dear Dad. It has been almost twenty years, and I am no longer the sixteen-year-old girl you once knew. This no longer makes me cry, at least not often, and I am grateful for this dinner tomorrow, for these people that I love so very much and these foods that still taste so very good. Thank you. I love you. Your Emma.

bridge, 4.13.13

uprooted

tunnel / river

the little red lighthouse & the great gray bridge, 4.12.13

allergies / colds

It turns out I have allergies.

I've always thought of myself as a decidedly un-allergy-prone individual, so either they are a newly acquired frustration (entirely possible) or I've had them for years but also for the majority of those years spent so much time with nasty colds or fighting off nasty colds that somehow these pesky allergies got lost in all those weeks and months of walking around in a cold-induced daze.

This winter I didn't catch a single cold! Amazing! But here I am sneezing and itching and feeling generally miserable anyway (and being damned stubborn about taking any allergy medication), and nary a cold in sight.

I'm not entirely sure which is worse.

easter is hard, except when it's not (love letter to M & C)

Easter fell early this year, safely out of the bounds of April (that strange amalgamation month of beauty and warmth and loss). I woke up early Sunday morning feeling hopeful, lingering sleepily in bed after days of seeping, creeping light.

Easter has not been easy for me, though if I look back far enough I can almost feel how much I loved it once. But ever since April of 1993, that last lighthearted holiday our little nuclear family spent together a week before my father's death, it's been a mixed bag of chocolate and rage.

Last year was going to be different, as Evan and I waited for news of my nephew's birth and as Mom and I shared gleeful conversations about an Easter baby: a joyous April, even, to replace or to soften our still-sometimes sad springs. But then Easter morning Nathan called and in stricken words told us that all was not well with his newborn son, and I got so caught up in anxiety and fear that I couldn't quite seem to stop crying -- not sobs, not drama, but constant slow tears -- for much of the rest of that day.

Later that afternoon our friends Matt and Courtney came for Easter dinner.  We went for a walk up to Fort Tryon park, through the gardens and up to the overlook from which you can see all of upper Manhattan and on into the Bronx. We stood there for awhile, and it was windy and clear and bright, and bless them, they talked enough for all of us until I was able to find my words again.

We went home and drank their strange and delicious drinks and ate Evan's strange and delicious Mexican Easter feast (tuna empanadas and shrimp cakes in broth and other delicacies I can no longer quite remember). April wore on and we flew to Portland to meet the wee babe, and spring wore on and I fell a little bit in love with this nephew of mine, and the year wore on and here we are at another spring, another Easter, a first year almost complete, and he is so very adorable and wonderful and strong.

This past Sunday morning found me and Evan in a tangle of emotion, circling each other in a swirling dance of frustration and sadness and love. Matt and Courtney once again got thrown into the middle of this semi-toxic milieu, and once again brought such warmth and affection with them that Easter, in the end, became beautiful.

I feel like it happens less and less the older I get: meeting new people who become so quietly integral. It hadn't occurred to me until going to bed that night that this couple -- this gorgeous, quirky, brilliant couple --  have been in our lives long enough now for us to have created traditions with them.

The days since then have been good to me, and I am hopeful that the rest of this April, of this spring, will be good to me, too.