Butterfly Mind

Pastries

April 26th, 2015

My favorite part of France was the pastries. Not just that they were so good — the best pastries I’ve ever eaten — but that they were important. That they were such a part of daily life. Walking around Marseille or Aix en Provence, every other doorway was a patisserie or boulangerie. Pastry, bread, and coffee. What could be better? These people know how to live.

It was the same in Barcelona. We walked the streets and in every other window were cases of flaky pastry. I couldn’t get enough of them: bunuelos, pestiños, ensaimadas, plain croissants, chocolate croissants, croissants filled with raspberry, sandwiches on croissants. All of them light and buttery and airy on the tongue, but with just the right bite, just the right amount of succulent chew that satisfied your teeth and your jaw and your palate.

My favorite part, though, was that since pastry shops were ubiquitous, there was always one within a few steps of where you were standing. We stayed with friends in Marseille, and each morning, instead of making an elaborate breakfast, Joaquim descended the stairs of his 200 year old apartment building, pushed open the door, walked a few steps to the boulangerie, and returned to us with an armful of croissants. He and his wife gathered the jam, the butter, the Nutella, and filled coffee cups; my husband and I spread the table cloth. We breakfasted with the July windows open, our knives clinking the crockery after we spread spreads on our pastry. One morning I spread raspberry jam on my croissant. One morning, Nutella. One morning I ate mine plain, and the next I was back to jam.

When we finished, and we cleared the table, exhausted from trying to speak Spanish with our hosts, we carried dishes to the tiny kitchen and began washing up, glassware clinking, while Joaquim bundled the table cloth, held it out the open window, and shook crumbs onto the sidewalk below.

Photo credit: Croissant by Zdenko Zivkovic

For the month of April, I will be publishing a 10-minute free write each day, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page.
Thunderstorms

April 25th, 2015

Blue grey. Cloud soufflés. Thundering rumble. Neon grass against blackening sky. We wore minimal clothing because of the heat. I leaned against my boyfriend in a bed in Key Largo, and it was dark outside, and the windows were open. Palm fronds crackled in wind. We stroked each other’s skin while thunder shattered the air and lightning lit the room. Hard rain clacked against glass.

A wall of clouds moving onshore from the ocean, blue black jellyfish in the sky, rain trailing like tentacles.

I remember being in the skiff with Dad near Williamson Island. The Olympics were over and the Day Marina was littered with pallets of Coke and Powerade. We looted, Dad and I. The place was abandoned. We saw a storm coming and hurried. There wasn’t another human for miles, and we floated in the mouth of a river on a marina, surrounded by water, no shelter.

We were in the river behind Williamson when the squall caught us. The boat was small and open; I could hold both sides from the middle of the mid bench. Lightning struck the water and the nearby island, and thunder cracked in our ears at the same time we saw the lightning flash. Wind whipped the green-brown river to a froth, my hair whipped me in the eyes, in the mouth, got caught in my teeth. Rain stung my skin. Rain puckered the river. It smacked the water, slapped my skin, rattled the floor of the aluminum boat. It made a racket like ball bearings clattering on a metal floor. The sound was deafening.

Lightning bolted, thunder boomed, and Dad and I hunched forward in the boat so our backs would take the needling rain instead of our faces. I shivered with cold. I thought about being struck by lightning. About the boat capsizing. About how Mom would worry if she knew.

I felt electric.

Dad and I grinned at each other and prayed we wouldn’t die.

For the month of April, I will be publishing a 10-minute free write each day, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page.
Muzak

April 24th, 2015

Our daughter’s music — Katy Perry, Run-D.M.C. — and our music, especially when we play hard hip hop, make our son cringe. He has specific and limited music tastes. He will tolerate classical, and jazz without singing, but rarely has he said he likes a type of music, and never would he seek any music out.

One day we went to the mall, and as I power walked to whatever store we were destined for, in my hurry to get the shopping over with, our son strolled behind me and said, “I like this music.”

I stopped to listen. It was some horrible generic Muzak whose blandness offended me. I scrunched up my face, one nostril raised, and said, “You do?”

“Yeah,” he said, with his contented Buddha smile. “It’s quiet. And sad.”

He was 10 at the time. And he liked quiet and sad music.

He didn’t seek out or buy Muzak after that, thankfully, but the moment was enlightening to me. A little window into our son’s sensibilities: he did not care about music, as evidenced by his appreciation for Muzak. It just wasn’t his thing.

So when he started requesting a song in the car recently – “Can you play the whale song, Mom? – I was happy to play it for him. Over. And over. Again.

“What is it you like about this song, buddy?” I asked him after the fifth or sixth request.

“I like that it tells a story,” he said. And he shrugged. “I don’t know. I just like it.”

“Oh, well maybe you’ll like the rest of this band’s songs then. Most of their songs tell stories.”

“What’s the name of the band?”

“The Decemberists,” I said. “You want to listen to another of their songs?”

Since then, we have put 39 Decemberists songs on his tablet for him. I’ll be folding laundry in the living room and hear, drifting down the stairs,

We are two mariners
Our ship’s sole survivors
In this belly of a whale*

He listens while he does his homework. He listens while he curls up and reads. He listens while he lays in bed and stares at the ceiling, doing nothing at all besides absorbing the stories, and the music.

*From “The Mariner’s Revenge Song” by The Decemberists.

Artwork from University of Toronto Wenceslaus Hollar Digital Collection.

For the month of April, I will be publishing a 10-minute free write each day, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page.
I took the road less travelled by

April 23rd, 2015

Wow, this is a hard one. Because I don’t feel like I’ve taken the path less travelled. I’m a middle-class white woman who went to high school, went to college, married a man, is raising a family, and now has a job. Isn’t that the most travelled road for my demographic in the developed world?

I guess the only way I may have taken a less travelled road is to follow my heart in terms of the work I do. When I realized my college degree wasn’t in a field that I felt passion for, I lost interest and pursued my love du jour, which was helping with fundraising and athletic endurance events for a not-for-profit. I cared about my work and threw myself into even thought the pay was terrible and the hours were long. I think a lot of people put a lot more financial value on their time than I ever did. I couldn’t stand the thought of being bored in my work, so if a job sparked my passion, that passion was a higher priority to me than money.

Likewise, when we started our family, we knew we wanted one of us to stay home with our kids while the other worked. Since my husband was on a career path, I volunteered as tribute. He was a graduate student on a teaching stipend, and me staying home without earning was not the wisest financial decision we’ve ever made. Having a second child under the same circumstance was even dumber (financially). We will be paying for those years for at least another decade.

During those years that I stayed home, though, I bonded with our kids, I launched a business, and I began writing in earnest, all of which led me to the place I am now: working at a dream job that pulls from my my random skill sets, that I’m passionate about, that keeps me at home with our kids, and that actually pays well. So I guess following my heart, if that is a road less traveled by, did make all the difference.

For the month of April, I will be publishing a 10-minute free write each day, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Thank you to Writeanne for the prompt, I took the road less travelled by, And that has made all the difference, from “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost.
18th April 2015

April 22nd, 2015

After my double post yesterday, I’m taking the chance today to share this haiku from my friend and coworker, Ben Dwyer. Enjoy!

haiku.blog

In an empty sky

Your melting Icarus wings

Land in deep blue eyes

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I loafed

April 21st, 2015

I found a secret for loafing. I spent almost the entire weekend loafing: in a hotel room. Our son had a soccer tournament this weekend in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and thanks to the spread of his games on Saturday, we had hours and hours of down time.

His first game was at 8am on Saturday, so we arrived in the early morning for warmups, walked the dewy fields as the sun rose over the trees, and were finished with the game by 9am. We returned to our room for the few hours until our next game, and since we weren’t home, where there are endless chores that need to be done, our down time was truly down time. For loafing.

I lay in our bed and petted my husband’s head while I read and the kids watched cartoons on TV. For hours. We did the same thing in the afternoon after our son’s second game. We killed most of the day in our room, laying around in the white sheets of hotel beds, doing a whole lot of nothing.

It was bliss.

Now I’m sitting on a window seat in our hotel room, a version of the bay window I have day dreamed about since I was a kid. I’m sitting in a window seat, and I’m writing. The remainder of the soccer tournament has been cancelled due to rain, which is a huge bummer. But I’m sitting in a window with a cup of coffee and a book on the sill next to me, watching wind blow treetops, and grey rain fall, and cars splash puddles in the streets below. I’ve got a pen and notebook in my lap, inking words on a page, with my whole family cuddling and lounging in leisure, and with no work to do. It’s kind of awesome.

Since we won’t get to play or watch soccer today, we’re salving the wound by going out to breakfast. A real breakfast — not the stale bagels and muffins the hotel offers in the lobby. Breakfast is my favorite meal to eat out. I love the clatter of breakfast dishes in a restaurant. I love the liveliness of morning, with the whole day stretched before us, and I love endless coffee and savory breakfast foods. And my favorite part, now that we have kids, is that on the menu, there’s always something for everyone.

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Pastries

Thunderstorms

Muzak

I took the road less travelled by

18th April 2015

I loafed