Tuesday March 9th, 3:01 a.m.

I miss warm-colored walls and flowered curtains, black-and-white mountains, and the spiderwebbed branches of winter trees.  I miss the smell of wood burning in the fireplace, and mom making her Pennsylvania-German version of stroganoff.  I miss walking uphill, and downhill.  I miss hearing the repetitive slapping of the lake on the dock for the first time after the thaw.  I miss the initial sinking shock and then the rising relief of the first cannonball of the season.  I love spring in Boston, but spring is going to happen at home withoutme this year.  I can feel the melting, the growing, the waking up, from here.

I really don't know clouds at all...

I love my mother. So very much. I know we are supposed to dread growing up and becoming our mothers, but if I grow up to be my mom, it will be just fine. She thinks she's not handling this crisis very well but it isn't true at all. Melinda Rachel Wagner Esteban is the strongest woman I know. It takes a lot to keep food on the table for three teenaged boys, a fifth grader, her twenty-year-old daughter, and a morbidly obese dog, let alone herself. She does all that, keeps up with the house, and manages to get to the gym every day, while working full-time with senior citizens. If there is a Superwoman award out there, I officially nominate her.

That's all for today. I know I've been bitching about my life a lot lately, but sometimes having my mom in my life is enough to remind me that it isn't so bad after all. I have a loving family, and the five of us (and Allen) will get through this together.



<3

I've looked at clouds that way...

..::*I've looked at clouds from both sides now*::..

• Dec. 20th, 2008 at 11:54 PM

Sitting in my mother's kitchen, adjusting to the oddity of being home with my family after so long apart and so much discovery, I expected that the growing and changing I had done without her would distance her from me. My summer spent making cappuccinos, changing diapers, working thirteen hour days, and living, relatively, on my own, would naturally affect me in ways that have nothing to do with my mother and father.

I spent my nights awake, listening to Joni Mitchell--who I discovered through Delia, a childhood friend, making me a mixed cd--and writing a play based on her music. During the day, Bruce Springsteen and the Grateful Dead, but Joni is what moved me to dust off my metaphorical pen.

Tonight, while adjusting, I put on some music. A little Joni to steady me--to remind me of that person I made all by myself this summer, far from friends and parents. As my mother walked up the stairs I heard her shout back at me, "Joni is the best."

"What, Mom?"

"Joni Mitchell is my favorite singer, my all-time favorite. My absolute favorite. Do you like her?"

And followed a brief discussion of favorite albums and songs, shouted from the stairs to the kitchen, neither of us moving to facilitate communication. We knew it would wait until the morning, this hidden bonding, this innate love of a poet who touched our hearts miles apart.

And I thought I was growing up on my own. Foolish, to think that my mother doesn't shape my heart every single moment of every single day.

"I've looked at love from both sides now
From give and take, and still somehow
It's love's illusions I recall
I really don't know love at all"