MindSpinner

From downstairs, dramatically:

“Ew Mom, what is this? What is it doing in our house?” My daughter’s voice, from the kitchen. She’s found something evolving at the back of the fridge, surely.

“What is it?” Son’s voice, from the computer in living room.

“What is it?” I call downstairs.

“Alien skin!” She steps to the living room, a length of flesh-colored “skin” in her hands.

“Ew, gross!” says Son. “Mom, have you been dating an alien? He left his skin!”

A length of flesh-colored skin, with that tell-tale white pantiliner panel, straight from the laundry room. Panty hose. Leggs hatched from an egg. Alien skin. Ew.

The cat snoozes next to the laptop on the bed where I sit writing. There is the erratic, staccato rhythm of keys and, just beyond, his soft breathing, a rhythmic rising and falling of fur. He is gray and white, a cow cat, with eyes the green of Granny Smith apples.

He sleeps through mornings and sunny afternoons. At night he hurtles through the house for no reason at all beyond than the unfettered joy of hurtling and leaping, which he purports to be reason enough.

He insists that the blinds of the bedroom window be raised six inches before bedtime so that he can watch the night. When he sees birds or bees or bugs or flies, he cries like a rusty hinge, as if there’s a door inside opening to instinct and desire.

He wants his food at 9:00 and 6:00, even on Saturdays. He likes only expensive scratching posts, mainly couches. He doesn’t want holding, only nearness, and stroking, especially with a brush. He remembers his mother’s rough tongue.

He is here when everyone else is gone, which will be the case tomorrow. I lay my cheek on his fur to feel softness - the warmth of a thing alive - and to hear the purring in his middle - a lullaby of contentment.

I’d like to learn his gifts for napping at noon, hurtling just because, watching the night, and purring in my middle.

After a good morning belly rub, the deaf dog crawls back into his crate and lies down as if to say it’s too early, and we should all go back to sleep. I have to pull him gently out by his feet, pick him up like a sleepy toddler and carry him to the door to begin his day out in the back, cavorting with his brother. This morning he ran out without thinking, the two of them together off to play, but as I filled the water bowl outside, he scampered back in again to carry out the ritual. So I pulled him out of the crate by his back feet, picked him up and cradled him. I told him (always just as if he’s not deaf at all), “I will love you out of your bed every morning for all of your days.” It doesn’t matter that he can’t hear. He knows it’s so.

This past week I’ve tried to deal with pressing family issues - big ones, not dull bits. I’ve graded batches of papers. I’ve commented thoughtfully on favorite blogs. I’ve written emails that matter to people I care for. I’ve done a sizable favor for a friend. But I haven’t had time to be still and to write here, except for snatches of this or that. That shouldn’t matter so much, I tell myself, given all that’s going on. I shouldn’t feel guilty. But it’s not guilt. It’s a loss - like not being able to take a long walk, not being able to make time for a friend. So I give my self a little hug this morning and promise that I’ll make time soon.

Saturday morning’s comment at Jo(e)’s:

I don’t write for a living. There are no books in the offing - at least not in the foreseeable future. Maybe that’s the reason that blogging, however limited the hours I can devote to it, is not an afterthought.

I was just rereading Milton’s sonnet on his blindness. I was drawn to it at 6:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning for a single line which today I think I suddenly understand at a level I had not understood before. Milton speaks of writing as “… that one Talent which is death to hide.” I write blog posts because if I don’t write (poems, posts - something) a part of me is not allowed to breathe, to live, to find voice…. I gravitate mostly toward the blogs of people who feel the same way; I can tell by the way they write.

This weekend finds me feverishly working on behalf of a friend to use WordPress both as the basis for a website and a blog, in order to speed the creation the site and to make it easy for my friend to manage both.

I am not a sufficiently good geek (I am no geek at all, alas) to figure out how to implement the static home page plug-in available for WordPress, at least within the time limits I have. I followed directions after downloading it, created a page called home.php, and found to my horror that it did not hold hands with the style sheet intended to format it. The results were predictably ugly. No doubt SOS queries could be sent to WordPress users and in a week or so, with the help from here and there, I would have this conundrum conquered, but I don’t have a week. I have this morning.

So this is what I’m doing. I’m installing a blog of identical design in two places, at the root level of the domain and in a subdirectory called “blog.” The pages of the website to reside at www.whatever.com, are “pages,” not “posts,” except that the home page is both a page and a post so that it appears permanently on the sidebar and as the content of the page. No more posts are to be written on this blog, so that the “home page” post stays put. I’ll pull out the bits of code that pull up categories and dates and comments. I have figured out enough to manage that.

The second blog, at www.whatever.com/blog/, will function as the blog, with links to whatever.com website pages in the sidebar and via navigational buttons at the top. Comments and categories will appear in their appointed places. The whole thing will look pretty seamless and will be easy to manage.

No doubt there are better ways to proceed for those who have time and know-how, but for now, this workaround looks good to me.