Eclectic Muddlehood

It may be awfully cliched, but this peculiar window that opens between the crescendo of the Yuletide holidays and the boisterous finale of New Year’s Eve, always triggers a period of deep reflection, introspection and all sorts of other -ection in me.  I find that in this space in between I am able to stand still for a moment and just breathe.  As I breathe, I’m gifted with a temporary clarity that often escapes me during the rest of the year.  I can look over the year about to pass and into the year about to begin.  I can see all the gifts this year brought that would never fit into a stocking or under a tree.  And I can see the seeds of growing gifts to come.  It triggers an absolute laundry list of emotions; hope, wistfulness, joy, frustration, amusement, determination, pride, motivation, restlessness, mourning, optimism, rejuvenation and on and on.

I wrote a freakin’ novel this year.  A novel.  Insane.  I’m now deep into the editing process and enjoying the ruthless nature of my Inner Editor.  She’s terribly different than the Reckless Writer I was spending every waking hour with  just five to eight weeks ago.  But I have to confess that I adore them both in drastically different ways.  I’m also working on fulfilling an accepted magazine query now that is challenging me in a fantastically personal way and polishing the kerfuffle between yours truly and the legally blonde professor for submission a few choice places.  Between the Reckless Writer and the Inner Editor, I’m getting down to business this year.  If you want to track my journey as a writer, I’ve got a new spot to keep all those fun adventures at The Year of the Writer  I’m working up my official 2010 writing goals this week and will post them there on New Year’s Day.

Today, the first of what I am sure will be many, seed catalogs showed up in the mailbox.  It completely mystifies Patris Maximus how I can take a seed catalog and spend a good three hours flipping and sighing my way through it.  The last year I had an honest to goodness garden was the summer before Athena turned two.  I have sweet, fresh, glorious memories of that garden.  Athena eating sugar snap peas straight off the vine and startling a tiny bunny with her own rabid appetite.  Poking fingers around the tops of carrots and radishes, before deciding it was time to give them a yank.  Fresh, sun-warmed tomatoes and basil, purple green beans that turned green when you steamed them, the Aztec spinach plant that got totally out of control, the pickle and lemon cucumbers that cross pollinated and made lemon pickles, our wacky neighbor’s melon plant that stretched all the way across the backyard, fruited and then mysteriously disappeared in the dead of night.  And countless other simple, vivid memories that to this day have the power to make me smile.  The next growing season, all my cultivating efforts were internal and at just past the peak of the Summer Solstice I gave birth to my fiery, feisty twins.  Needless to say, I did not get back to the garden.  After that, we took a leap of faith and left the DC Metro area.  A listed house in a faltering real estate market meant the total destruction of the remains of my once fertile garden.  Our first year in Houston, we were apartment dwellers and last year we decided to forgo the garden for budgetary reasons.  But I had begun to plan for our Houston garden at any rate, with visions of the outrageously long growing season dancing in my head. 

Alas, my lush dreams of a semi-tropical gardening bonanza are once again, most likely being deferred.  With each day that passes, it is looking more and more like Patris Maximus will be working out of state very soon.  This is good and bad.  Good for us financially.  Good for Patris Maximus career-wise.  Bad for the pesky not-living-under-the-same-roof-all-together thing.  But we’re resourceful types and we’re working out details a bit more every day.  One of those details involves the potential for a considerable amount of travel for Crunchy Mama and the Triad of Chaos.  These would be the kind of travel plans that really preclude the establishment and maintenance in the type of garden I’m longing for. 

This travel thing could be interesting though and in the last day or so, I’m allowing the window of possibility to swing open just a bit wider on this idea.  It would mean a pretty severe reduction of our locally based extracurricular activities, for one thing.  We would basically cut down to our one weekly co-op and our Girl Scout troop.  Even with those, we’re likely to miss chunks of fun here and there.  It is possible that we will be splitting our time between Houston and travel.  At first, my gut reaction to this idea was actually not very attractive.  But the more I reflect on it, the more I can see a landscape frock with possibility.  There are plenty of long distance friends we could work visiting with into various itineraries.  Also, as we continue with our four year romp through world history, the discovery, founding and development of the United States will crest our historical horizon sooner rather than later.  And what better way to learn about it than to see it for yourself?  It is as if we will be building in ready-made adventures that have the potential to bring all sorts of new experiences into our lives and that is something to embrace.  Not to mention, it is something that would be literally impossible to embrace if we were tied to an institutional school schedule, so it’s also yet another opportunity to express gratitude for our homeschooling lifestyle. 

So what awaits the Maximus family in 2010?  Adventure, exploration, learning, growing and all sorts of other wacky hijinx, I have no doubt.  Wanna read about it?  Well, stick around and I’ll see what I can do.