We insisted that Chas poop before getting on the plane, and this saved our LIVES. The kids and Damon filled the row behind me on the plane, shouting out random data like “Look, Mom! Shit Pile crater!” and “WHOOOOOOOOOAA!” and “Look at me! Look at ME!” as the plane bounced through mile-high white clouds. Really, there was nothing sober about the flight; I think that these pictures just show our fatigue after dealing with the whole waiting-for-Chas-to-poop-while-fearing-he’d-still-wind-up-pooping-on-the-plane period. The flight was nothing but an amped riot and strangely, everyone near us on the plane thought it was all pretty funny. One man lost it when he heard Ford ask Damon,
“Daddy, what’s this button for?”
“Don’t touch that Ford, that’s the Self-Destruct Button.”
Just lost it.

The process of moving has involved Damon spending much of his time in the office, rearranging bits and bytes among three or four different laptops, including mine. I’ve walked into the room numerous times only to stand in the doorway, slackjawed in fatigue, wondering in my little mind whether it may be wise to interrupt the binary flow and ask for my computer. Most of the time I pause there for a minute, holding my breath, until I decide that I’d rather go pick my nose or knit, or do both, in no particular order. Craziness becomes me when I’m in limbo, manifesting itself in peculiar ways.

I had a lovely photomosaic from the holidays which, after Damon looked sideways at my computer, got lost. Not that it was his fault. I blame it rather on my computer, for being there on the countertop, in his plain view. So intimidating was his glance from across the room that Safari just quit on him. On all of us, really. It took me about an hour to put together, so you can understand my frustration and the hesitation I feel trying to making another. And until I have packed. But first, priorities: blogging. After all, I’ve been such a prolific blogger the past 4 months, right?

For the record, I did get a Shuffle for Christmas and it’s probably the coolest thing on my list of cool things on the planet, next to this really cool other new thing I got for christmas, called a FISHEYE lens! I still can’t believe it. I must’ve been a good girl last year. Or something.

The act of moving feels second nature. We have been moving every two or three years for the past decade, Damon and I, so this time feels not unlike the rest. We know the drill: Before it’s too late, one last taste of everything we love…Today, Magnolia cafe pancakes–without the kids; a muddy plod through the greenbelt basin; yesterday, skateboarding after dark at the top of Damon’s old parking garage. Shotgunning Shiner beer and watching the weather change above us. I wish we could experience one more thunderstorm before we depart on Wednesday for the west coast; I’ll miss the stratospheric drama we’re accustomed to here, but we’ll exchange all that for a new trove of earthly spactacles: quakes, geysers, hot springs and bubbling mud pits. Purple sulphur bacteria. And heaving kelp beds beneath tiny boats. I decided to unearth the kelp quilt I started several months ago and pack it with the hotel yarn stash, fodder for my late nights to come, once we arrive in Mountain View.

Wow, this is awkward. That struggling for the right anecdotes when you’re standing there with a towering armful of them, ready to topple over. An anxious pause in conversation with a long-distance friend, when you know there’s something you’re forgetting to mention.

Well, here it is, the big thing I’ve forgotten to mention: We are moving back to California. At the end of the month, a big tractor trailer will back into our bending driveway. It will rip off the lowest, brittle oak limbs that cover the stretch of pavement where Ford has learned to skateboard and park over the spot, near the garbage cans, where the chickens keep scattering leaves in their search for grubs. And somehow, when this all happens, I will be in a hotel room in Mountain View, probably still scanning Craigslist for a place for us to live.

It’s not that we don’t love Austin. We’ve managed to sink a pretty thick taproot into the limestone bedrock here, and bought a lot to build on and sunk our teeth through some great plans for our future here. And we’re keeping that foothold here. Nothing changes that.

It’s just that someone really needs Damon right now, enough that they found him, interviewed him 23 times over the course of 3 months and made it virtually impossible for us to justify staying here in Austin, when every fiber in our body was begging us to just stay put. One of his colleagues sums it up well: You’d have to kick yourself in the arse every day if you stayed. And I can’t live with a husband who kicks himself in the arse every day; only one of us can do that in this household and I claim that right for myself. For reasons that aren’t important right now and that vary from day to day anyway.

And because it’s the holidays and I’m packing and making presents and freaking out, I’ve given and exceeded the five minute limit I put on blogging tonight. I don’t have any new pictures. I do have so many things I regret not writing about over the past few months; the time has simply slipped through my fingers. I’ve instead been rewarding myself lately, at the tail end of the day, with a beer, a shameful tv program and a lapful of wool between busy but meditative needles.

A double-take, and I see Ford drinking milk straight out of the carton; he is five going on fifteen. The array of cheerios on the table ground him solidly at five, though, harking back at two.

Chas, meanwhile, sneaks a few steps ahead of me when I’m not looking. Here, he is taking a break from sit-down longboarding in the driveway, elated with the feeling of being able to soar only inches above concrete, all by himself.

I have a cache of smiley moments to toss onto the page but not a lot of time to do it right now: the way the sun dappled through cool limestone shadows as we rambled through the canyon, grazing the chalky outcroppings with little fingers; laughing at the dancing chickens in our yard; standing on stools in the kitchen, cutting vegetables for a pot of soup and laughing at the carrots that kept rolling off the countertop and onto the floor. Despite the occasional headaches, this job rocks!

Ford, the White Witch from Narnia, along with Mr. Incrediboy, on the walk to the school carnival. Looking pretty tired already. But they perked up after each squirted a half-can of cookie icing into their mouths while we grownups weren’t paying attention.

Chas, on Halloween night, decided to be the White Witch, too. But in battle dress.
It looks even better with the red lollipop hanging from the pelt, but I lost that photo somewhere.

It took me a half hour to post my last entry because Ford was singing really loud downstairs in the garage with Damon and I kept turning an ear down the hallway and laughing. I wish I were this uninhibited:

If It’s Nothing

On Saturday morning, we rediscovered our old college schedule of getting up early and hauling ass to class, except this time we went to Elgin for a Sausage Run. I loved the morning drive, creeping out of night across the hills, still blanketed in fog. It’s so breathtaking, this yawn of daybreak. I usually sleep through it, as do my children; we are a family that wakes up twenty minutes before school starts, and somehow this works for us. But to see what I’ve been missing makes me want to curb my nocturnal habits. Passing by our neighbors along the road, little glowing windows inside each shadowed house reminds me of forgotten habits: frosty morning jogs along Balckburn avenue in Providence, cats on the prowl in driveways that I pass, concert flyers waving on telephone poles, and showering before breakfast; the opposite sequence to my current routine, a thousand miles south.

Ford, quietly pouting in the center of the universe, was disappointed that the race didn’t include him. So we pulled back, letting him sprint every now and then through the old town streets and across train tracks. I even gave him my number, and trailed behind him through the finish line. I want to be the family that runs together. It’s a lifelong sport. And my hip was killing me so this made good pretense. He ate it up.

A proper fun run, this race divvied up a kegger at the finish line along with steaming pork sausage (note: the best in Texas) and while I dislike eating pork, I couldn’t resist pints of beer and hot sausage to follow the trail of woodsmoke that carried me from start to finish along the uninspired smalltown route. Even better: a bounce house for the squirts to decompress while we shotgunned refreshments.