We went to the Great Vigil at St. Andrew’s tonight, and my breath caught when I saw the altar covered in spring flowers – lilies of course, but also glads and carnations and roses, and I think an iris or two. I hadn’t realized just HOW stark the altar was, during lent, until I saw it restored tonight.

Happiness tonight was both personal – hearing Fuzzy singing beside me during the service – and universal – a very young baby (who was baptized during the service) added a personal affirmation in the form of a screech at the end of every song. I love that this congregation includes the very old, and the very young, and all in between. It truly is a community.

Happiness is warm wax oozing onto your skin, and being removed by a gentle technician, and the snotty eyebrows that result.

It is also having OPI red toenails and pale passion pink fingernails.

It is walking in the rain to the bookstore, and finding a cd by an artist you never thought you’d like, and then having your husband sneak up behind you, and tell you your toes are cute.

It’s warm lasagna on a cold rainy day, and an afternoon browsing dvd stores, and not finding what you wanted, but not caring, because the act of browsing was enough fun.

I love rainy Saturdays.

We spent our anniversay indulging our not-so-inner geekness – lunch at Benihana in downtown Dallas, then a few hours at the art museum, gazing upon the art from the Quian dynasty (“Imperial Treasures of the Forbidden City”) – I especially loved all the jadework, and of course Fuzzy loved the swords, daggers, and bows.

We visited the European art wing of the main museum as well, so I could visit my favorites, the Impressionists, but their collection isn’t very vast, and I was feeling overheated and parched.

We came home, I changed, and we went back out again, to Barnes and Noble, where I bought several greeting cards, a few books (which involved a long distance plea for help to Jeremy, when I spaced on an author’s name), and the dvd’s of V, and V: The Series. (We still need V: The Final Battle).

It doesn’t get much geekier than spending the evening eating smothered enchiladas and watching 1980’s sci-fi, then blogging about it the next day.

Tonight, we’re going to make a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Perpetual Caffeination (aka Starbucks), and then head to St. Andrews for Good Friday services. Tomorrow I have a salon appointment at nine AM (brow design, manicure, pedicure), and in the evening is the Easter Vigil, and then Sunday they’re doing a late-morning service with the flowering of the cross.

I think I’ve had more church this week than in almost my whole life up to now, but when you’re going because you WANT to and not because some old lady is exhorting you, it’s very different.

And singing the Alleluia is always fun.

On March 24th, 1995, Fuzzy and I were married in a civil ceremony in the courthouse at Brookings, SD. We wanted to avoid familial arguements over religion and money, so we eloped on a Friday in the middle of Lent, though, at the time, neither of us practiced any religion that observed Lent.

Our friends did, though, and the attempt at finding enough meatless dishes at a midwestern Chinese restaurant proved so fruitless that one of them said, “You know, let’s just all pick a different day, and go meatless then.” I have no idea if they honored that or not, but thought it was good that one of them had a solution.

Ten years later, we’ve bought three houses, sold two, been through a miscarriage, an epileptic dog (he’s stable these days), months where we had to choose between groceries and bills, and months where we were doing just fine, thanks (many more of the latter than the former), and it’s all been this incredible experience of learning to love and trust each other, of making each other mad, sometimes, and happy others (again, more of the latter than the former), and mostly just occupying the same space, a lot of the time, without having to talk.

We still have our contentious moments – we always have a pre-trip fight for example – although over the last ten years instead of letting it stress us out, we’ve learned to identify it. “This is our pre-trip fight,” we say, and we finish it, and move on. And then there is the never-ending issue of my addiction to change – I like to move furniture around every few months, and Fuzzy finds this distressing. I’ve gone through more hair colors and lengths in the last ten years than most others have gone through underwear. And unlike my beloved husband, I have grown beyond a fourth-grade palate.

It’s fitting, somehow, that even though it’s eleven in the morning, I am blogging this from bed. Fuzzy is snoring gently beside me, in his typical non-work-day laziness, and the dogs are curled at our feet. Our family, intimate as it is, begins its next decade together, unified.

I’m not sure what the next ten years will bring. We’d really like a child before I’m too much older (I turn 35 this summer), but if that doesn’t happen, that’s okay. We are enough.

And really, that’s my version of bliss. Not necessarily to be rich, or famous, or have a perfect over-achieving child, but to have enough – a house we love, dogs we love, each other to love, enough money to do mostly what we want, though some things require more planning than others, enough time to explore our own interests as well as joint ones…just…enough.

Fuzzy: Happy Tenth Anniversary. I love you.

* * * * *
Effective today, there’s a new feature in the sidebar. It’s called Time Machine, and it offers and excerpt from and a link to, posts from a year ago on this day.

I have no catchy title tonight, and so I’m resorting to using the day of the week. It works, I suppose.

I’ve gone to the gym every morning this week, and plan to go tomorrow. This is difficult for me, but the more I go, the more I want to go, and going every day they’re open from now to April 1st is sort of a personal ritual. I wonder if I can make it a permanent thing.
(It should be noted that they’re closed Friday-Monday, this week.)

We went to the Tenebrae services at church tonight. It was stark and beautiful, intense and moving – entering in silence, chanting the psalms, engaging in silent meditation and prayer, leaving in silence and darkness. I’ll be writing about it in more detail in my other blog, one that I’m not advertising, and NOT setting up with an RSS feed to LiveJournal. If you really want to follow some of the personal changes I’m going through, the ones that don’t really fit my chatty day-to-day blogging, please comment here (or via the LJ interface) or send an email to Ms DOT Snarky AT gmail DOT com (yes, there are two dots in there), or to my regular email, if you know it, and I’ll provide the address.

Thursday is our (mine and Fuzzy’s) 10th anniversary. Ten years seems like nothing some days, and forever on others. More on that tomorrow.

I say… And you think… ?”

1. Stink:: dog breath
2. Renewal:: urban
3. I remember…:: Mama
4. Loneliness:: is not the same as solitude
5. Ooooh:: Aaaaaaah
6. For real:: blue eyeshadow should be illegal
7. Titanium:: strong
8. Get down:: with your bad self
9. Rupture:: ozone layer
10. Dramatic:: interpretation

Like this meme? Play along here.

I spent about half an hour reclining on a comfy chair in my back yard, watching the grackles and the jays, earlier this afternoon.

It’s a sunny day, mostly, but then the clouds cover the sun and I’m reminded that it’s really only 60 or so out there. Sweater weather. It’s very windy, though, so the sunny bits feel perfect, but the cloudy times feel colder than they really are.

But back to the birds.

Grackles are surprisingly pretty. While, at first glance, they are jet black, like their cousins, the blackbirds and crows, when the sun hits them at just the right angle you can see iridescent blue, or striations of grey. This is natural coloration. And it’s quite stunning, but then, I can find beauty even in common pigeons.

While we had birds in California, they were rarely identifiable, except for the ubiquitous pigeons, and the odd stray gull. Here, though, I feel like a microcosm of the Audobon books, because, as well as the grackles, we seem to have a robin or two feeding on the front lawn, and a few blue jays who try to usurp the grackle’s territory.

I love that the back of my house is all glass. It gives me the bird equivalent of the sea otter tank at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Here in my office, I’m at tree-top level, and when I look out I can see them pausing on the uppermost branches, or climbing higher and higher to clear the trees and check out someone else’s yard. But from the living room, or from the breakfast nook, I watch them at ground level, playing follow-the-leader through the various tree trunks and low branches, taking off to flee from Cleo’s pathetic attempts to catch them (I wonder what she’d do if ever she succedded in this), sifting through the lava rocks and fallen leaves for bits of sunflower seed bread I left them (I’m shameless, I know, but I feel it’s an apology to them for having to deal with the dog), and, witnessed today, perching on the cement edge of the pool deck, and dipping up water.

I’ve told Fuzzy we need a bird bath, because I don’t want bird mites in my pool, and I really don’t want the birds drinking chlorinated water.

His response was a typically midwestern “We’ll see.”

And we will, because outside my window, it’s all bird, all the time.
Nature’s so very entertaining.

I have recently decided that the reason family records are kept in half-forgotten folders, or are written in dusty Bibles, rarely read, is because printed documents are much heavier than the actual paper the words rest upon. They are representative of all sorts of old baggage and family ghosts.

I’m in the process of being confirmed as a member of the Episcopalian church. In this process, I’ve realized that my grandmother’s Catholocism is more a part of me than I ever knew, and I’ve re-examined a lot of negative feelings about religion and faith.

But none of that – none of it – has been as jarring as the experience of reading my Baptism Certificate for the first time.

We are accustomed to dealing with legal records in the form of birth certificates, the legal document you must have to get any kind of ID – driver’s license, passport, social security card – and I am intimately familiar with mine. I know that my birth was formally registered about a month after I was actually born and that my mother chose not to name my biological father.

When I called St. Mary’s Church in New Monmouth, NJ, to ask for a copy of my Baptism certificate, I didn’t expect the information there to be at all new or weird, and yet, a week after making a simple request for paperwork, I’m having a minor identity crisis.

It began when I saw the envelope addressed using my birth (that’s maiden for the old fashioned among you) name, something I haven’t seen in print in ten years. As I told my mother, I had a weird moment when I felt like I didn’t know who that person was, that I was opening some other person’s mail.

And then there was the shock of seeing the box for “father’s name” filled in. It’s not that I didn’t KNOW his name, because I did. It’s that I was expecting to see “name withheld” or some such. But, as I told my aunt, while my mother often prefers to believe (or pretend to believe) that I sprung fully formed from her belly, like Athena from Zeus, intellectually, I have always been aware that there is a real person who contributed half my chromosomes.

Once, when I was at my grandmother’s house, I found a box of letters from this man to my mother, dated in the months before my conception, and ending with his reply to being told (though this last was unreadable, as it was torn to bits). My grandmother made it disappear however, and I’m sorry about that – it would have made a great novel.
So all I remember, now, is that he seemed to have a large vocabulary, and he wrote witty, slightly snarky, extremely affectionate letters.

Saturday night was a restless one for me, as I was mulling over whether to let his name stand on my confirmation records, and I finally decided that since I had to provide a copy of the baptism certificate to St. Andrew’s, it was fine to let it stand. After all, confirmation records are completely internal.

I had a long chat with my aunt about it though, commenting on the weirdness of seeing my certifiably insane godfather’s name, and mocking the form of her name that was used.

But I’m still a bit boggled.
Off-kilter.
And introspective.
And thinking a lot about family ghosts.

Does know what is flapping around your window at night make the flapping any less mysterious in full dark, or the dog attempting to capture the creatures any less pathetic – for dogs are no match for birds?

I think not.

Thanks to my good friend Karen, I now know that my night-flappers include a flock of Grackles. Read more about them here.

It is sometime between midnight and one in the morning, and I am in bed, the lights out, the radio on but barely loud enough to hear. The night air, beyond my windows, is cool, but spring-cool – there’s no bite to it.

Zorro is curled in a small ball, on top of the blankets, but pressed against my abdomen. Cleo is on her belly, stretched along the foot of the bed.

Outside, there is wind. I can hear the gentle tinkling of my windchimes, hung in one of the trees, and the soft clicking sound of the slats in the vertical blinds as they move, caught in gusts that blow through the partly-open window.

If there is a moon, I cannot detect it, with the blinds mostly closed.

The wind gusts stronger, stirring the trees, and the creatures within them, and suddenly my world is full with the sound of many many pairs of flapping wings, and startled cries. Cleo raises her head, and lets a low growl simmer in her throat. The neighbor’s dog barks, not at all aggressively, but more a mournful sound – if a bark can be mournful.

In my head, the real sound of the birds and (is it possible?) bats (it sounds more leathery than bird wings alone), mixes with the half-remembered short story I once heard, about a dark winged creature trapped inside an oberservatory on a dark night, with a lone human being. It’s a creepy story – the flying thing and the man battle in darkness, and at one point the man feels teeth on his flesh – but even in my sleepy semi-consciousness, I am not afraid.

The flapping subsides. There are a few stray warbles and chirrups, and then all is silent, save for the wind, and the chimes, the even breathing of my dogs, the soft murmur of the radio.

When I wake again, it will be to sunshine and birdsong, but for now, I sleep, guarded by the dogs, and the winged things in the trees, and in the morning, when I ask Fuzzy if he heard all the flapping, he will look at me and ask, “What flapping?” as if it was my imagination the whole time.