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honor the shift

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September 22, 2016 - Daily Notes, From the Editor

“Look up and marvel at how the morning half-moon knows today is Equinox.”

Words waft into my head while I shower. Sometimes they are directives, mysterious in origin but urgent with a request. When they move my heart I listen.

"Honor the shift," floated in today, under the warm water. I murmured the words several times, as though they hold answers that will only be revealed by their utterance. 

Move slower. Notice the two evergreen clematises your landlord planted in May and how one survived the summer and the other may not. Touch their leaves and give them encouragement. Breathe.

Autumn is here now. Look up and marvel at how the morning half-moon knows today is Equinox. Equal parts light and dark. Balance.

Walking slowly to coffee, think about how one need not clean for hours or spend a small fortune to make her home resemble the Restoration Hardware fall catalog. One candle, one prayer, is enough.

"May I move into this new season with ease, may the growth of the past season be assimilated into my body, mind, spirit. May I spend less time looking at screens and more time touching the earth, plants, and sunlight."

I lit a small candle and it flickered as I wrote those words. It is glowing at my desk now in the 10am morning light, marking the transition, this worldly shift.

That is enough, don't you think? Or maybe you have your own soft prayer. Doesn't it feel like a good day to make one?

xo
laura

Laura Lowery is the founder, editor and publisher of Lucia. She does her best to lead a creative life. Whether triumphant or stumbling, Laura shares daily notes (that are often weekly) here on luciajournal, including stories, behind-the-scenes happenings, little doses of inspiration, and large quantities of curiosity and heart. She is pleased to meet you.

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september smells like samba

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September 20, 2016 - Daily Notes, From the Editor

I am wearing the same dress today, the gray one that hugs my body and drapes to my ankles, the one I shimmied into at 9 o'clock last night after a fast shower and a speed-race with the curling iron.

He shows up with two ice cream sandwiches at 9:09 p.m., carrying an ever-so-faint scent of something nice; the kind you don't notice until you hug a person and bury your face in his neck.

"What kind of music would you like me to put on?" I ask, though my mind is racing through the questions I never asked during our earlier phone conversation; questions I am afraid to ask even though the answers are right here, in my living room, bringing ice cream after a very long work day.

"Samba," he smiles as if we listen to it all the time.

 "Is that like salsa," I query? Fumbling with the Pandora app, I find it.

"Sort of, but it has a different rhythm. Think Brazilian." He winks, and we put the ice cream in the freezer for later.

He starts to dance with me there in my kitchen, barefoot to the latin beat. I follow his seemingly sure steps, and let him lead me into turns. I pause for a moment to go find my black dance shoes because they have suede soles and I can spin better in them. We are laughing.

"Am I doing it right," I ask?

"I don't actually know the steps, but you sure look good," he admits and I melt.

There is a break in the songs and for a moment I feel nervous, fear returns demanding answers to exactly how the future with this man will unfold before taking one more step. Fear wants details, certainty, commitment beyond the limits of necessity and even reality. Fear wants to be safer than safe.

I place my forehead on the chest of a love I have known for ten years and whom I still barely know at all. The depths of another human being become more mysterious the further we go in the direction of intimacy. It can feel terrifying to realize you may never entirely know the one you love. Safety, after all, is only an illusion.

"Can I ask you a question," I whisper? He says yes. "For you, how many days go by before you start to think you really miss me and want to see me again?"

I expect him to say about a week, because with our busy lives--both of us working hard to build something solid (for me, Lucia; for him, a real estate business)--we rarely see each other more than once or twice in a seven day stretch.

He doesn't need to pause or reflect. He is looking me in the eyes and he simply replies, "One, really. I'd like it if I could see you every day."

The music starts again and I soften, and we laugh and say oh, that will sure be nice one day.

Today is Tuesday and I am wearing the same dress. It smells faintly of him, of samba, of ice cream sandwiches and of courage.

xo
laura

Laura Lowery is the founder, editor and publisher of Lucia. She does her best to lead a creative life. Whether triumphant or stumbling, Laura shares daily notes (that are often weekly) here on luciajournal, including stories, behind-the-scenes happenings, little doses of inspiration, and large quantities of curiosity and heart. She is pleased to meet you.

a childhood imagined

“We do not remember childhood – we imagine it. ”
— Penelope Lively in her stunning novel Moon Tiger.

A Childhood Imagined by Sarah Anne Childers

“Will you tell me your first memory?” I ask my daughter, Anita Belle. It is morning and we are in the kitchen. I slice strawberries for her lunchbox. She balances on her belly on the edge of the table and kicks her legs in the air, stalling on brushing her teeth.

I ask because it has occurred to me that Anita Belle has long ago formed the impression that she will name her first memory. This is not a momentous revelation; she is seven after all, practically a teenager according to her. It baffles me that I do not know the first memory of this creature that shares my home and owns my heart. I am greedy for her recollection, like a treasure hunter obsessed.

Anita Belle looks over at me, slides off the table. “Well,” she begins, and the word never had so many syllables. “I must have been about one year old and...” I hang on her words but pretend not to. Her eyes don’t leave mine. The space between us in the kitchen has become her stage, and she fully inhabits it to unspool a story conjured on the spot. I frown. I do not assume exclusivity between the ides of memory and story. I know how one can dissolve into the other, that memories are both fodder for stories and stories themselves of course they are, the moment memory is narrated whether to ourselves or to others it grows story wings. I know this, but a story unmoored from her history our history is not what I’m after from my daughter.

I interrupt her tale. I do it kindly because the child hates to be disbelieved, all the more so when the story is fantastical. She will scream and stomp away, sob face down on the rug if she senses doubt. I am very careful when I stop her. “Sweets, what I meant to ask is can you think of something that happened when you were very small? And once you’ve thought of that time, can you think of a time from when you are even younger, your very first memory?”

Anita Belle is quiet for a moment, gazes up and to the side, which is where she looks when asked to recall. Then she tells me her memory in one rolling thought. “I was with Evie and we were at the beach and Evie was a baby and I threw rocks for her.”

I smile because I remember that time at the pocket beach by the ferry dock when Anita Belle was just two and her cousin Evie was a few months old. It was late winter and the sea and sky were the muted gray of new concrete, the sea freshly poured and dark, the cured clouded sky shades lighter. Only the beach rocks offered color. Anita Belle chose a rock the size of her fist. “Do you want to do it?” she asked, offering it to Evie who balanced head lolling and arms flapping on her mother’s knee. “Oh honey, Evie’s too little,” said all of us adults at once, the chorus offering explanation, moving things along. "Ok," Anita Belle said to her little cousin, nonplussed. "I will do it for you." Splash! 

In the kitchen I tell my daughter how she pronounced "it" as "eet" and that her tangled hair was pulled back into the messiest of ponytails because she wouldn't let me brush it, and that after the beach we went to a diner where she ate only fries with loads of ketchup. Anita Belle laps up these details, trills in a high voice "Do you want to do eet? I will do eet for you!" through teeth brushing and our walk to art camp.

Later I wonder if Anita Belle will swap out her first memory like she does her favorite color – today teal but violet only yesterday. I wonder if she will forget about that time on the beach throwing rocks for Evie in the winter all together in the inevitable though troublingly named process of childhood amnesia, a culling of the majority of our earliest memories.

I am sentimental about memories, mine and now too Anita Belle's because I know the stakes. I do not care so much for things; memory-stories are the heirlooms I collect. From the most minuscule knick-knack to the sturdy fainting couch with ornate carved legs, I clean and arrange because it gives me an excuse to touch, even the ugly ones, even the ones I never desired to own but memories don't have return policies. It is truth that I cannot curate my daughter’s childhood memories. I cannot pick and choose which impressions survive amnesia, cannot display them chronologically or perhaps thematically, cannot pen the explanatory text posted beneath each one on walls painted to complement the memories' hues. It is truth, and while I am smart enough to know it, I am not wise enough or good enough to extinguish my longing for a crack at ghostwriting through memory-story the autobiography of my child's imagined childhood.

Sarah Anne Childers is the online editor at luciajournal.com where she happily toggles between curating creatives as an editor and creatively curating ideas and the words they live in as a writer. 

sarah@luciajournal.com