Halloween

Happy Halloween!

Fall Stuff

October is hands-down my favorite month of the year. Lately, my days have been full.

Filled with three carved pumpkins, three more waiting for faces. iTunes playlists to blast at home and cds to groove to while on the road. My days have been filled with medicine or supplements, rather. Good food like hot-dish, soup, and frozen pizza. Dinosaurs. T-Rex and the like. Slot machines and dirty money. Warm blankets and snow. Cold beer. Hot Honey bush tea. Mountains. Mountain tunnels. Anxiety. Love. Phone calls home. New friends. Lou Reed. Birthday cards I have forgotten to send out. Failed yoga. Flo’s diner dash. My days have been filled with visits to Hobby Lobby. Therapy. Funky, colorful dreams I could take a bite out of. Long hair. Halloween costumes. Novels. A bicycle in the living room. A new couch and an old coffee table. Berlin. The broken Taurus that has gotten me so far. Good sleep. Fall-scented candles. Slice and bake cookies.

I cannot wait to see what November brings!

Old Souls and Free Spirits

It takes me 45 minutes to get to and from work these days. I don’t mind most of the time because I like to sing with the car radio and the views are pretty. It’s nice to have that time to myself to think about everything or nothing, however the canyon road moves me.

When I was growing up my dad cleaned on Sunday mornings. To make the task go by faster he would play his far out records. Records my mom came to refer to as his “boing-boing” music because of the wild melodies and the raucous resonance. The record player console was in the dining room where the sun caught the glass from the patio.

Once in a while, the old man would bestow upon me the great responsibility of choosing the cleaning music. Picking out a record is the first recollection music I have. When it was my turn to choosethe music, without fail, I would carefully slide the enthralling LP out of a box. I always found the record with children like me on the cover and was delighted. It was the first piece of art I thought was truly beautiful, even then. I was haunted by the sea-children climbing on rocks for many years. Much later, I realized the album was Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy.

My job was to dust with Windex, and I carefully sprayed every surface more than liberally and loved the smell always taking great care to get every spot on the coffee table. It was a special treat when my mother would have me dust all of her fragile pieces in the china cabinet. The sun would gleam on the clean glass and it made me happy. My dad loved the album. As he cleaned, he probably thought about everything or nothing, however the record moved him.

About three years later, I tagged along with my dad to the car wash to help him wash the Ford Econoline before we headed East for Christmas vacation. I was probably eight when we took this small voyage. I was always his little tag-along kid on these small errands. “Crimson and Clover” by Tommy James and Shondells started to play on the oldies station. We sang along and after the song was over, my dad told me about how innovative that song was in it’s time. I didn’t really know what he was talking about, but I felt important because he always spoke to me like I was a grown-up.

As we drove home from the car wash, we listened to more oldies and were happy. I was eight and my young mind was thinking about everything of nothing. When Christmas season comes around, I always throw “Crimson and Clover” into the music mix with all of the Christmas carols.

I grew fast, as kids do. I lived with my parents when I was nineteen and unfortunately, did not have many friends with the same music taste. When the Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young tour came to St. Paul, Minnesota, I had no friends volunteering to check out the show with me. My dad bought us tickets and it was the first time the two of us went to a concert together.

The show was stunning. I was so happy. That night we spoke about everything and nothing, however Neil Young moved us. I still have the ticket stub in a box of mementos.

My dad and I have always had music in common. There were teenage years when it was hard to relate to one another and it seemed the space between what we thought and knew was a million miles. More years have passed and now I am in my twenties, and he is in his fifties. The miles are now space and distance between our doorsteps. He came to visit this last week and it is not too hard to catch up these days. All we need to do is throw a CD into the boom box and visit at the house, put a quarter into the jukebox while sitting on a barstool, or listen to the radio on a car trip and the time and distance doesn’t seem to matter anymore. We still talk about everything and nothing and in these conversations we are happy.

Bobaloo, this one goes out to you...

Yesterday marked my one year wedding anniversary with my husband. I am generally not very good with the mushy-gushy and to be honest I felt a lot of relief yesterday, as in yay! we did it. With almost seven years of togetherness under our belts, this last year has certainly been the most strange and the most wonderful.

We have seen each other through job changes and encouraged one another to be better. A gigantic move there, a gigantic move back and the long stretches of road in between. Broken cars, broken hearts, life, death, and what goes on in between. We watched our patio garden go from brown and lifeless to beautiful and fruitful. We have seen one another drunk and happy and sober and sad and dealt with everything life had for us in between. We have stuck together for the amazing and the ugly of this last year and the normal in between.

We were married in a little mountain ceremony in Boulder. It was everything I could ask for in that it was outside, not fancy, and “us.” My little brother did a reading we picked out and I think it still holds true:

"An anonymous text from the Tradition says that, in life, each person can take one of two attitudes: to build or to plant. The builders might take years over their tasks, but one day, they finish what they’re doing. Then they find they’re hemmed in by their own walls. Life loses its meaning when the building stops.

Then there are those who plant. They endure storms and all the many vicissitudes of the seasons, and they rarely rest. But, unlike a building, a garden never stops growing. And while it requires the gardener’s constant attention, it allows life for the gardener to be a great adventure.

Gardeners always recognize one another, because they know in the history of each plant lies the growth of the whole world."

-Paulo Coelho (Brida)