Filed under: Emotions, Family, Good day, Living, happy, memories | Tags: home, memories, moving
I almost just started to cry. It may have been the hormones, may have been the lack of proper sleep or it may have been the tasty danish I just took a bite of; I get emotional when it comes to pastry. It isn’t any of these things, it’s moving. This year will be marking the eighth year we have lived in Tucson, and although that is a blink of an eye in our life times, most of those years have been in this house. We got married, Mike got his degree, I got tattooed and quit my job living in this place. My relationship with Mike has grown into something wonderful here between these walls. Sadie is all grown up, and Leo came into our lives here in this house. I have made the two best friends I’ve ever had living here. I finally found and freed my artist within, here in this safe place. I found out I’ll be an aunt here. We won and lost Superbowls here. Kids never came to this house for candy on Halloween even though every year I would have a bowl filled to its brim waiting. I quit smoking while living here. Subsequently I doubled my size while living here. There was that New Years Eve when we took in a lost dog and we fed it hotdogs, and laughed after her owner came to claim the doggie about how it was going to poo something awful that night. I was sick here, very sick here but found such an empowering strenght within, I never imagined I had.
Of course there are countless other memories, the kinds of things you remember down the road, make you stop and smile and think about only the good times. Have I done everything I’ve wanted to do? Have I finished and tied up all loose ends? No. But I’m a happier, stonger, smarter person for having experienced this part of my life here. So, moving 3000 miles away from home or moving less than a mile away from a place filled with memories, it is important to reflect and to know that you can go home again, no matter where that may be for now.
Filed under: Vacation, memories | Tags: american museum of natural history, central park, memories, new york city, photographs, stage deli, Vacation
Mike and I visited The American Museum of Natural History, and no, Ben Stiller does not work there, but it still rocks!
I recommend getting to museums as they are opening. You get the run of the place.
Probably the most photographed feature of the museum now, “Dumb Dumb give me Gum Gum”. Why aren’t we smiling? Because the very friendly tourist who offered to take our picture couldn’t figure out how to use our camera. There are a few I’ve deleted of our feet, over exposed, under exposed and this is the best of the lot.
But she did her best:
Out of all of the amazing things they had on display here, and even at Mike’s dismay that “these are real animals… stuffed animals… that’s not right!”, my favorite animal on this planet is still the manatee.
After the museum, my sister and brother-in-law took us into the city for the best damn sandwich I think I’ve ever had at a place called Stage Deli. I’m pretty sure this place will be in my version of heaven.
Oh, and we had a piece of cheesecake that was bigger than my head. Check.
They then walked us through Central Park and it is as romantic and as wonderful as you have heard. We even stole a kiss on one of its many historic bridges… yeah, we’re love nerds.
Filed under: Vacation, memories | Tags: Empire State building, memories, NYC, photographs, Times Square, Vacation
Here it is a little reminiscing of my outstanding and wonderful recent vacation in New York City, I wish I was still there…
On our first day, Mike and I did the NY tourist thing and visited Times Square and the Empire State building.
I was overwhelmed and underwhelmed at the same time. I’m sure our Dad brought us here when we were kids but I don’t remember it. For some reason all I remember from that trip was Trump tower and my Dad acting like a kid on the escalators.
So there are a lot of people (tourists) here and its like an outdoor mall. I’m not saying it isn’t cool or wasn’t cool to be there, but it’s a little like going to Hollywood, CA for the first time, at the end of it you kind of scratch your head and wonder, “Was that it?”
You are immediately reminded of how small you are in NYC. The moment we got into the cab and started whizzing around the city you can feel how everything is so packed in. It’s an awesome feeling, how the city is busting it is being pushed upwards.
Going up the Empire State building was surprisingly fun! It is such a production nowadays and I know I sound like “in-my-day”, but in my day you just went in and went up and I think there was a little admission but it’s so different now. I think my favorite thing about this time were the 100s of Japanese kids apparently here on a school field trip.
It was rainy that day and wicked windy at the top, as I am sure it always is. But seriously, some of those kids almost blew away. I love the feeling of looking down and thinking that we’re some Godzilla type creatures and we could just stomp on all of those little buildings. I’m such a kid.
How cute are we? You have no idea how cold we are! Burrrrr… but having a blast!
Later on that night we walked to a couple of bars in my sister’s neighborhood (btw, everything is in my sister’s neighborhood, to me at least!). I got hit on by token creepy guy and we had so much fun watching the patrons, my they haven’t changed. I fell asleep very quickly that night.
August 26th, 2008
A bad teen movie
Bookmarks
Friendships gone awry
Loosened shoe laces
Bright green and black
The swift wind tumbling through the yard
Look up
See the sky filled with fear and coming of the storm
He walks the path outside our door, I see it again and again, the dreamlike memory never leaves me
Always leaving
I am 14 now
(observations from 05.02.07)
August 18th, 2008
Oxygen tank, limping body
Dragging your weight with me
Please speak loudly, time took away the sound
Scream at me with your eyes
1917
Your mouth is moving but there are no words, he speaks to himself and leaves her out of it
“We’re not really into each other anymore”
Reading the pages of a second hand yellowed forgotten romance
Jeweled technology, sickeningly sweetened fingers grabbing wheel chair spokes, brace yourself, you’re dying
Crowd widens
Door swings open and shut, no one remembers Virginia Miles
Filed under: Emotions, Introduction, Living, love, marriage | Tags: love, marriage, memories, Mike
July 24th, 2008
You and I aren’t the same people we were when we fell in love.
And how could we be? We were so young and so fearful of what would become of our feelings for each other. We guarded ourselves behind gossamer veils of pretension that meant so little when it came to embracing passion. Giving in to the newness, wanting to make first contact and wanting to freeze every moment in time, forever. How do you hang on to that? And can you, or should you rather? That isn’t a place for permanent residence because other things clamor for attention, like trust and security. But that sense of protection can come quickly, either by choice or by happenstance. And with the latter, you are thankful that you have met your soul mate, lucky that you can stop looking, or better, you have found each other. You hold each other and you can almost see it all laid out before you, as if the future is playing out and someone else is playing the part, someone so much better versed in the script and dialogue. When you embrace you can’t see into that person’s eyes, instead you are looking past them– ironic, because you have never felt closer and there is no where you would rather be. The dark, starless night is bitter cold, dense with lost time and you never want to leave that place, or that memory behind because it is who you are wanting to be and who you remember wanting to be.
Who is with you now? Do you remember the hesitation as you picked up the phone and remembered a lifetime as he spoke those words to you? Trembling inside because the loneliness was washing away, the pain was fleeting. And when he left you after that first reunion, you didn’t touch the ground for weeks, for months, not even now. The coy smiles, the bright eyes, the electric touch of two people finding that connection between heaven and earth and each other. It is the giving in completely to fate, the stripping down to the bone, the unmasking… that is what will let love in. It can’t be scary, it will be blind, or at the very least like searching around in the dark shadows cast by moonlight. It will lead to the brilliant dawn, the cold still bites at your naked body, but the sun will warm you and keep you close, as two hearts now beat as one.
We aren’t the same people we were when we fell in love, but that love is better now, stronger because we made it through the shadows into the light. The expectations of what this love was going to be built from the ground up, deeply rooted in trust and understanding, is something greater now. It isn’t complete yet, and in time it will grow higher towards the sun, and its roots will expand ever deeper into the ground. And the stars start to show through the night’s cover because love is ever changing, always constant and forever. You cannot go back to the person you were when you first fell in love, and why would you want to? You would lose forever the growing, the learning, the memories of an awkward and fledgling romance turned true love. Don’t look to turn back the memories of love, instead look to what you could become, chances are it will become more than you ever dreamed it could.
Filed under: Emotions, Family, Introduction, Living | Tags: 1975, 1978, 1979, 1988, 1993, 1994, 1997, 2000, memories, photographs, pictures
May 17th, 2008
A while back when I was blogging on The Space I got it in me one night to share a bunch of old photographs of me through the years. I got it in me again, so here you go:
Me, as a baby… I think this is when my affinity for napping started.
Look, I’m vintage:
Me and Amy playing in the snow. Those were the greatest days.
Eighth grade beach day. I’m standing there in my bathingsuit and that’s Walter M. I ran into him around ‘98 in Portsmouth and damn did he look good. What ifs. I just didn’t have the gumption to take it any further than, “How have you been for the past decade?” Must have been the bathing suit, would have done it in ‘88.
Senior year of high school, ‘93. Hair wasn’t natural and neither is that pose. Seriously.
First college dance, Halloween ‘93. I think I surprised some people.
A rare picture of me looking glamorous circa ‘94 or ‘95. Yes, I cropped that one. Don’t ask.
This, hands down, is my favorite photograph of all time and always will be.
Orleans, Vermont. 1994
College graduation, ‘97. I’m pretty sure I should be smiling.
Ah, that’s better. Me and Mike, so young, so thin and so… tanned.
Island Pond, Derry, NH, July 2000.
I hope you enjoyed that. Until I get it in me to do that again… ‘nite.
