savagemama

Yesterday I buckled three children into my car, ran around to the driver’s side and opened the door to their chanting, “ Savage, Savage, Savage!”

Two of these children were mine. And, until recently, they only called me mama. But they hear other people call me Savage and they are starting to experiment with it. The other night Eliza was pretending it was my birthday, “Happy birthday dear Savage…” she sang with a giggle, trying it out for the first time.

“Why do people call you Savage?” she said. [Read more]

I’m working on being open to what life sends my way, taking deep breaths in the wake of a teeny, tiny crisis in our lives.

Our, or to be totally honest, my minor crisis: The iTouch, uNoTouch is missing.

It evaporated, really. It’s gone. The last time I saw it Lucille was holding it like a phone, pretending to talk to Shrek.

“Hi Shrek,” she said, resting my iPod between her ear and shoulder. “Yeah, you not nice to the donkey. You yell at him. And the dragon. You should be nice.” [Read more]

A million years ago, I was as a newspaper reporter in a small town in western North Carolina, a region of the state known for its lush rolling hills that ripple on for miles if you’re standing in the right spot. I covered cops and courts, which meant I often wrote about the bad things that happened to people.

One day I covered a spectacular house fire in which no one was hurt but the house burned to ashes. A few days later, I went to the sheriff’s office looking for incident reports, trying to scare up another interesting story. I walked in to find the receptionist, a young man who liked to show me pictures of gory things to see if I’d flinch, gone to lunch, gone done the street, gone somewhere. As I waited for him to return I scanned his desk for something interesting. I didn’t find anything worth asking about so I stood around, waiting.

After a few minutes, a couple came in looking for the sheriff. They needed to get married, they said. Dressed in a t-shirt and shorts, the bride wore flip-flops and the groom, dressed the same, wore a ball cap. They were jittery, nervous and giddy.  When the sheriff finally extracted himself from his big leather chair and came out to greet them, he said they needed a witness. And there I stood. [Read more]

A few nights before Christmas I stood at the kitchen sink washing dishes. I stacked, dried and put away then moved on to the picking up of Eliza’s snow pants, Lucille’s dancing dress and everyone’s shoes. It’s been a coping mechanism most of my life, the cleaning. I’ve tidied as long as I can remember. I think when I clean. Somewhere between a sink full of dishes and a long line of snow boots ordered along the wall I sort things out.

A friend of mine once said she’s the type of person who can’t write her paper until her room is clean. Oh, I thought, she’s one of my people. I feel the same way. And lately my room has been decidedly not clean. [Read more]