The 100th Day

Anna's 100th day dawns.

At the playground watching the big kids with dad

Pony wrangling in Brooklyn

In the big girl seat

Not sleepy yet!

stripes

Maybe she likes them because each line is distinct, one from the next, and that's comforting when one is new to a world so fraught with ambiguity. Maybe she likes the multitude, the crowd of them together, packed like sardines. She was packed like a sardine not too long ago. Maybe they're like harmonic frequencies, and when she looks at them there's a resonance. Who doesn't like parallels - stands of trees, comb teeth, zebras, a marathon's thousands of bouncing upright parallel persons. They seem to delight her and set her at ease: all of the cast-iron gates of Brooklyn, and the venetian blind store on the corner that's never open where the lady with the loud voice hangs out with her plump yellow dog - now that's a window to gaze into.

some of what she likes

She likes to hold onto the strings of my hoodie. She likes stripes and plaids. She likes to gnaw on our knuckles. The wind makes her squint but she looks out into it anyway, studious. She likes faces and ceiling fans and the upright parallels of shelved books. She gurgles conversationally at the refrigerator. She watches the thicket of bare branches against the sky as we walk. She likes crinkly plastic and polka-dots and eating. When she's eating she holds my braid like a bell rope. Awake, her hands move through the air like wrens. The light in her eyes, a precise match with the dusk outside our window.

DJ AJ, the Baby Beat Box

Like most Brooklyn parents, we hope Anna Jane grows up to be as expressive and creative as Biz Markie.

three months, one day

Anna contemplates the beginning of her fourth month. . .



and finds it good.

thumb

I sucked my left thumb until I was eight. I sucked it so often and so hard it stretched a good quarter-inch longer than the right one. I hooked one index finger over the bridge of my nose and twirled my hair into knots with the other one. I couldn’t imagine not sucking it, even when my parents taped it up, or painted it with that terrible-tasting stuff. When I was eight, the dentist told me that if I didn’t stop it, I’d have to get braces for sure. I imagined that scary silver snarl of wires in the mouth and I stopped that night. Tucked the thumb under the pillow and squeezed my eyes tight shut. That was that (though I always thought it was distinctly unfair to have to get braces anyway).

Most people say, and I agree, that the baby looks just like her papa. But genes shine through in all sorts of ways. Just look at her – not quite three months old, and already sucking that thumb like a champ.

my two

true loves

fairy houses

Walking down 7th Avenue this afternoon the air was so fresh it reminded me of the fresh air on one of my favorite stripes of land, a little fingerling off the coast of Maine. The air there smells like salt and the red dirt of decomposing pine needles and granite and rockweed and if it’s June, the slight peppery scent of lupines. And a little road oil thrown in.

Last summer we were there, the two of us, when our third party had not yet arrived, and I walked a favorite walk over knotty roots to the stack of rocks the Atlantic slams against and sprays. Roaring Spout they call it, and if the tide is right you hear the clatter of rocks as the waves suck out of the slim gap in the granite and then you hear the thunk and slam of the rising tide, and then run for cover or you’ll be soaked and sea-scented.

Just before the trees open out into open air and the shock of sky and saltwater as far as you can see, I looked down as I stepped my unwieldy pregnant self over a root, and I saw these little structures. I didn’t build ‘em, swear. I was too huge to bend down that low. But there they were, all the same.

valentine

before

A million years and a few months ago, before Anna was born, amazing photographer friend Karen Cipolla invited us up to her studio. I remember the four flights of stairs seemed very long. She dressed us up and we stood in the light, slightly self-conscious but even more struck through with delighted anticipation. There will be nothing ever again like those last days of waiting for our first baby to come. I remember her elbows and knees and heels pressing out, reverse dents in the belly as we stood there. I remember imagining the little girl we'd show these pictures to, pointing to the belly and saying, "that was you in there!" Her imagined face then, a blurry smudge in my mind. And now there she sleeps, sucking madly on her thumb with her fingers splayed out over her very specific face. And now I can't imagine not knowing every inch of her by heart.

anna in the sun

the visit

I had to pick up my W2, so I stuck Anna in the carrier and walked down 7th Ave to school. She rests her head on my chest and looks up. I imagine what she sees over my shoulder: a rough triangle of sky intermittently laced with branches. The irregular edges of roofs. Windows, the things in windows. The flock of swallows (are they swallows?) that swoop and bank and turn as one, black and then white as they circle around. She probably sees chimneys. She probably sees the way light catches on smooth surfaces. And she probably doesn't know that's light reflected, it probably looks like an object in itself, a spangle on the pizza place door, a bright slice on the blue hump of the mailbox. She looks to me astounded.

We picked up the W2, and then we visited some kids I know. "These are called kids," I whispered in Anna's ear as they touched her feet and squealed. "You are one of them." She looked serious. The kids with their bright lively faces, looking inches taller than when I saw them last in November, wanted to say things to me about their own babyhoods. The stories they tell about themselves sound different to me now that I am a mama. They grow tall with pride as they announce simple things: "My hair was red when I was born. Red!" or "when I was a baby I was so fat." Or, with a mystified look, "we have a new baby at my house too!"

My girl will get big and carry a little backpack and have opinions and go to school and tell her teacher stories about when she was little, when she was a baby, how she loved to look at the radiator most of all.

one from the vault, since sleep is ever on my mind . . .

Rip

By the time he found the tree his head
was full of honey. Pale sweet-grass
curved over hummocks of black earth -
and under that: the busy lives of insects,
sediment, bedrock, watershed, core.
He thought forward no further than sleep.
As he dropped to his knees, spring dirt
caught him, arms out-flung, cheek
pressed to needle-worked grass.
The sleep was long, though it felt quick
as a blown lantern: the cooling wick, spark
alone in the kitchen a moment, then gone.
He dreamed houses rose and fell like seasons
of crop against sun, felt the scythe’s
momentary nick at the ankles.
He dreamed rivers edged ever closer
to where rivers wished to be. He dreamed
of songbirds plated in sheets of tin.
And then he woke, naked but for his boot nails
and belt buckle: a bracken-haired man
in a thicket (shadows pulled slim
on the hill, bees at the fallen pears.)
He shook loose his dirt blanket.
He started home.

these feet were made for walking . . .

(but not just yet.)

circus

We went to the circus yesterday. Calder’s, that is, at the Whitney. 6 new mamas and our 6 busy infants, stuffed into the 6 train uptown. We were like a baby parade, ladies with babies zipped inside coats, resplendent in fuzzy suits with ears on the hoods and knitted bonnets that tie below the chin. Or double chin as the case may be. It was a whirlwind of gear and feeding – our first stop was the museum café where we took up three tables and all sunk back into the folding chairs to feed the hungry ones, who gulped and slurped and smacked their lips as they would have at home, oblivious to their cultured surroundings.

But the Circus, that was something else again. The elevator opens onto a wall of wire portraits, Jimmy Durante and Josephine Baker. Line made three dimensional, you could see inside their heads. They swayed gently and made themselves again in shadow against the wall. Anna was captivated. She grinned and talked to them like she grins and talks to things she loves at home – her favorite radiator and lamp post, her beloved bookshelf and fridge. We walked and she looked – the sweet lumpy-hipped dancer, the three graces with arms akimbo, the rumple-trunked elephant. Her eyebrows gathered together in concentration. Every so often she’d call to what she saw. We walked the length of Romulus and Remus suckling on their lean wire mama wolf. The nipples looked like they were made of wooden drawer-pulls. We saw the splayed dangling toes of the dancer lady and the tiny pig swinging inside the happy sow.

When it was time to go, it was Time to Go. Some of us waited in the lobby while others of us teamed up on an amazingly explosive poop in the second floor bathroom where the changing table was chin-high. The lobby babies all leaned back in their slings, staring at the honeycomb of lights on the ceiling, black, white, black, white. We ladies, tired, looked up happily too.

snow

The tight rectangles of the block’s back yards fill up, little white serving-dishes of snow. Trees catch it. Even the slim surfaces of chain-link hexagons catch it.

The baby’s sleeping again. She had her shots this morning. Yelled less than I thought she would, just looked astounded, and made two fat tears. Fell asleep fast when we got home, after walking down 7th Avenue inside my coat. Her view: a triangle of sky with snow inside. Every so often a flake would land on her face and melt, leaving a tiny water dome. She looked around intently and made no sound.

It’s taken me 10 years to love snow in the city. It used to just make me homesick for Minnesota fields. Corn stubble poking though drifts in parallel rows, crows on the wire with heads tucked under sleek black wings. A length of pasture to walk beside, long ditches extravagantly drifted. The sound of nothing, standing still between white sky and white ground.

I am raising a city baby. Will she be scared of the quiet, when we go visiting? I want to give her the smell of alfalfa and the moist breath of cows and the quiet of falling snow falling on snow already fallen.

hat story