Pooh, acts of nature and cocoa crunchers.

Contemplativeness continues. Can't shut of the contemplations long enough to watch a tv show. So I am sitting here in silence.

I have a knot in my back, longest lasting knot I've EVER had, going on a week now. No amount of hot showers, heating packs, stretching, rolling around on a tennis ball or back rubs from my sympathetic husband will kill this thing. It is a monster.

I swear it is poking me in the lungs sometimes.

Or maybe I'm just having trouble breathing.

A tree is about to fall on our car and start an electrical fire on the way down, after all. It is blustery tonight. Makes me want to watch out the window for a pooh bear to go whooshing by. I hope that someday I will have children who are just as enchanted by A.A. Milne's delightful little critters as I was and continue to be.

This is what free writing turns out to be. And my past-midnight during a windstorm head is a free-writing goldmine-a deep, rich bowl of noodles and tangents and fluffy-tailed wandering.

My husband is usually the nervous one, but he is sleeping soundly. And silently. This household does not currently snore. (tag for reference 10 years from now).

eyes are burning, I am not used to being awake this late on a weeknight. But there is little sense in giving into the sleep when every scuffle of leaves, every cracking branch and every lung-poking shift of that annoying muscle knot will wake me again. With all of these disturbances, how would I ever achieve deep REM and the fanstastical sleep world where I often wear mint green polo shirts and I know how to prevent terrorist attacks.

There is always the option of another bowl of Target-brand cocoa crunchers cereal and a half-hour spent perusing through new Facebook pictures of all of my friends cute babies. I am a cute baby Facebook stalker. Cocoa cereal does have caffeine and sugar, and that might keep me awake until the electrical company gets here to rescue our car.

Anyway.

Happy Windsday, Piglet.

The puzzling mosaic...

Life has been different this year, with a very distinct shape and movement to it.

My junior year of college I arrived at my on-campus suite to discover that one of my suite-mates had developed an addiction to jigsaw puzzles over the summer. Lining the walls of the corridor were about twenty puzzles, glued and matted to boards and hung for all to see. I remember a picture of a giant panda chewing on bamboo. You would walk by it (oh, that's cute), and then stop and realize (ah, much more interesting) that each puzzle piece was a different picture of a chinese fan, strategically arranged by their colors. Alongside that very cool panda print were several less-exciting kitten in basket, puppy running through the field variety puzzles. Some art prints. One or two that were almost all ocean or sky, with very little color variance, that would lead anyone who has ever spent time doing puzzles to appreciate the intense patience and concentration (or, I suppose, thorough boredom) needed to complete such a project. And still, beyond all of the the completed masterpieces, was the large wicker basket in the living room, stashed and overflowing with boxes of future jigsaw challenges. That was the year my roommate Kiki tried to bring back the lost and under-appreciated art of the puzzle.

That very summer after living in the land of jigsaw puzzles, I went to spend teaching dance in Massachusetts. For three weeks of my time there I lived with a lovely, petite, blonde South African woman. She was an inquisitive and overwhelmingly hospitable hummingbird of a person. She was an artist. Her art-studio garage was one of the most exciting spaces I have ever seen in a house. With the paint splattered cement floor and shelves teetering under the weight of buckets, easels, paints, pottery and just about every material needed for unbounded creativity, it actually gave me butterflies in my stomach when I walked in. (I very clearly recall that glorious room filled with the deep murmur of new, unique, and beautiful. That swirling warm-cool-warm of time and labor and imagination. Ahh, I love it.)

While I was there, my artist-hostess was working on a project outside of the studio. For almost a year she had been collecting. The front entryway of the house was crammed with plastic milk crates full of pottery tiles. She got almost all of them for free, lucky discoveries in dumpsters and roadsides. The expanse of brick that made up the base of the large covered front porch of her home was to be a mosaic of a hillside horizon. She vividly described to me the way you see the different colors and clarity of the rolling hills as they fade into the distance from close up, all the way to the wavy skyline stretching out beyond. A porch-wide panoramic view of one of her favorite sights.

So, she organized the colors and textures of the tiles. She stacked them. She went to work with a chisel and hammer, carefully breaking up larger pieces to smaller, or simply shaping them to use in more dominant, wide-expanse areas. Many mosaics are made up of pieces that are all the same shape, simply varying in color. I loved hers, though, because the pieces were both big and small. It was unpredictable. She glued them up and then slowly and deliberately filled in the cracks with grout, smoothing and shaping her picture as she went.

Well, this past year has been large pieces. I got engaged, moved back to the states, planned a wedding, worked a new job, adjusted back to my home culture, got married, drove 1500 miles across the US with my new husband to the tiny, slanty, New England apartment where we have begun our lives together.

And now I am here.

And sometimes, I'm not really sure what happened.

And maybe tomorrow will be a small piece with a picture of a bright green chinese fan.