The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": Grateful

Monday, November 16, 2009

Grateful

Since I am the kind of parent who is up until 2 or 3 a.m. on Christmas Eve, and I wrap birthday presents in the car while my kids are waiting to go inside to the party, I've decided to celebrate Thanksgiving early. I'm never early, but here it is Thanksgiving already on my blog. See? People can change.

So what am I grateful for? I think most of all, I am grateful that my kids are turning out okay. Yes, they slam doors and act like Dracula on a regular basis (dark, brooding, filled with angst), but that's pretty normal I think. Philip told me yesterday that, "You're the kind of mom I'll like again when I'm like 30." But I think the larger stuff matters more.

Over the weekend, we had a birthday party for a teenager whose parents decided she is too old to have a party (she turned 18). We ran around the warehouse store looking for presents since everything else was closed. We came up with flowers, balloons and an enormous pumpkin pie. The girl likes to draw, so we found some art supplies, charcoal pencils and drawing papers. She didn't mind that we wrapped her presents in colored tissue paper and put candles in a giant pumpkin pie. I really liked that the kids worked together to put up crepe paper and get out the birthday tablecloth and some balloons. They were doing all this for someone else -- they couldn't believe parents wouldn't celebrate a birthday.

We had no guests other than ourselves, so we invited the cats, our Malaysian houseguest (who took the house down with Happy Birday - and that's not a typo - things really, really do get lost in translation).

Anyway, there we were, with five cats, Mazy, the German shepherd, the three kids, two parents, a Malaysian houseguest, and a pumpkin pie the size of a pizza with old Barbie candles blazing - and we had a good time. And that brings me to number two: I am grateful that my kids accept weirdness so readily. I mean, they have to, living here, but things don't have to be perfect for them to have a good time.

And I am grateful that they get along so well. This Halloween, Philip wanted to go out as an Eskimo and have Emma attached to him as an igloo - I think that's pretty telling (except once Emma found out what an igloo was, exactly, she protested) But moments like this make me grateful:

and in the rare Christopher sightings:

I am grateful that I have one quieter kid to balance out the other two chatty ones.

And I am grateful that even though I have very little time to write, what I do write seems to get published.

What I like about Thanksgiving is its positive thinking - it's like asking what's GOOD about your life? That's a great question. It makes us forget how dreary November can be.

So tell me -- what are some of the great things about your life?

10 comments:

Katie Anderson said...: This is the most wonderful post Anne! I'm grateful that I have found my passion at all. So many people go through life never really knowing "what they want to do with their lives." But I do. I write. And I love it!

And I am also thankful for my precious husband and my two girls (even though we argue pretty often...) But your post made me realize that arguing is okay. Heck, it's normal.

And finally, I'm thankful for cheese.

And coffee.

Oh! And my favorite line, "They accept my weirdity so readily." or something like that :-); Monday, 16 November, 2009
Mary Witzl said...: I'm grateful for having lived all this time (sad, but true) in relative health and wealth. I am VERY grateful that my kids seem happy and well adjusted too, and generally like my company. I'm grateful for having a job (even if it is a crappy one), grateful to be able to write at all, grateful for having sight and the ability to walk and say what I want -- and eat spicy food without being miserable with indigestion. And what Katie said about cheese and coffee. And chocolate.

And here's to weirdness!; Tuesday, 17 November, 2009
Adrienne said...: I loved the story of your impromptu birthday party. And candles in pie - done that, too.

I'm grateful for my family and for a zillion things I still get completely stupid over, like hummingbirds and perfect seashells. And yeah, chocolate.; Tuesday, 17 November, 2009
Anne Spollen said...: You're right, Katie --about finding your passion. That really is a major element in life to be grateful for. And chocolate, on the same level, at least in this house.

Health, I forgot that one, Mary, and relative wealth. We take those for granted, I think, until one starts to falter.

And yes, weirdness -- the acceptance of weirdness is what I'm grateful for; my kids would all be in constant therapy if they didn't accept oddness as the norm.

I didn't think of the bd party as a story, Adrienne, but I guess it is sort of a story. And I love your pairing of hummingbirds and perfect seashells! It's like a picture book.; Tuesday, 17 November, 2009
Hardygirl said...: Ditto what Katie said!

There is so MUCH to be thankful for--family, love, home . . . and hulu.

Beautiful post!

sf; Wednesday, 18 November, 2009
K.C. Shaw said...: I love the way your family so comfortably makes room for others, like the 18-year-old friend lacking a birthday party (and I have pumpkin pie on my birthday every year! With candles!).

I'm thankful for my own family, and, gosh, the more I think about it, the more paralyzed my fingers are on the keyboard. I have so much to be thankful for, I don't know where to start!

I guess I'll just have to settle for being thankful for cheese like everyone else. That about covers it. :); Thursday, 19 November, 2009
Elizabeth Bradley said...: What a sweet post. I'm grateful for my husband and kids and grandkids, everything else is just whipped cream on my pumpkin pie.; Thursday, 19 November, 2009
Anne Spollen said...: That's right, sf, there is a lot to be thankful for - as long as we include chocolate in all that.

K.C., underlying my kids' generosity, I think now, was a tacit fear that there is an end to bd parties. like there is to trick-or-treating. They are all under 18 so they had to scurry. But still, yeah, they did run around for another person.

Well put, Elizabeth!; Friday, 20 November, 2009
Stewart Sternberg (half of L.P. Styles) said...: I am such a negative man, it's something I have been battling for years. Some people fight depression. I fight being negativity.

Your blog, or at least this blog posting is good for me. When I read something like this it makes me pause. It's like wearing a wristband.

So thankful? For sometimes remembering that people are more important than things and events.; Saturday, 21 November, 2009
Anne Spollen said...: Hi there, Stewart. (I've been stalking his blog)

I have friends who battle negativity. On the positive side (had to do that), they are probably the funniest people on the planet. Their slant is so dark and sometimes dead on.

And yeah, people are way more important than either of those things.; Monday, 23 November, 2009

Books

Light Beneath Ferns

"I have this strange sense that my silence is preparing me for something I can't name . ."

Elizah Rayne is nothing like other fourteen-year-old girls. More interested in bird bones than people, she wraps herself in silence. Trying to escape the shadow of her gambler father, Elizah and her mother move into an old house that borders a cemetery. All her mother wants is for them to have "normal" lives. But that becomes impossible for Elizah when she finds a human jawbone by the river and meets Nathaniel, a strangely hypnotic boy who draws Elizah into his dreamlike and mysterious world.

Only by forgetting everything she knows can Elizah understand the truth about Nathaniel—and discover an unimaginable secret.

Teen made trailer for Light Beneath Ferns.

Order Light Beneath Ferns here.

Foreword Magazine's Review of Light Beneath Ferns

Excerpt from THE SHAPE OF WATER

CHAPTER ONE
I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same. They had always been there, of course, glass panes shimmering in the color of rain, but that spring for the first time, I was able to open the windows in my room. For years, the locks had been painted stuck, and during the winter, heat from the radiator beneath my windows finally steamed off enough paint off the metal wings of the locks could be twirled open. Knowing that I could open the windows attracted me to them, and I began sitting under the windows, staring through the glass at the sky. From that position, on a chair in my room, the sky did not seem real; it seemed a place I was making up, so I watched it.
The white wood of the window panes acted as frames so the sky came to me slowly, and the huge openness of its space did not touch me. All the window glass in our old house had wavers and bubbles inside it, so at times the clouds moved like water, melting and blurring until they passed outside of the warp. After a few afternoons of sitting, the heavens seemed too quiet to keep watching so I began watching a small patch of woods next to our yard that housed little more than trees and a scatter of bony, mean-looking rabbits.
I started gazing at the sky and the woods in March when the branches were still wet and it was then, with nothing outside my window but trees and rain, that I noticed a shine inside darkness, I noticed colors glimmering within the darkness of the wood. I watched birds come and go, I watched rain nipple down from buds to the grass. The water dripping from branch edges and leaves created optical tricks; I could see that as I watched leaves melt.
Then one day I ventured into the space outside. I did not think about doing this much beforehand. I simply opened the window and dropped to the ground below, uncertain as to why this should be such a more satisfying exit than simply using the door; my father worked until seven o’clock and I could do whatever I wanted until then. But I liked the solid sound my legs made when I landed. Leaving via a five foot drop seemed so much more a decision than just using a door. The sense of escape made my heart pound, though all I escaped was the soundless spread of moss-colored light inside my house and the silence.
I had come to know silence well during those months after my mother died. When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, but with weight, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, flute notes rising up like the words of glass speaking. There comes a point when you must shatter the silence, when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light. I did this by going into the yard. Once I stood there, in the grass next to the trees I had been watching, I found silence outside as well. But I was happier outside than I had been in the house, so I stayed for a bit. I stood beneath my bedroom window for a few minutes, looking up at the branches and the crooked pieces of sky colliding between the branches. I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent smelled much more subtle than the ocean’s heavy, fishy aroma, a whiff of salt and mint that warned a more powerful scent would enter my nose just as I approached the water on a dive. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.

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