Welp.
It’s been a full week! I came away to the big city for a few reasons. One was to get Kai setting in his new boarding situation for his last year of high school. He has been a very blessed kid and a very flexible kid as we have worked out his housing situation for high school in the big city. Flexible because this is the fifth house he has stayed in. Blessed because he has been able to stay with such incredible people and this time, he is staying with some of the coolest people I know. My friend Esther is smart and funny, kind and wise, and her husband is wonderful. Kai is a lucky kid to be able to stay with them for the school year.
So he has his belly full of last-minute lectures (“communication! homework! help out! clean up after yourself!) and Kenya and I are heading back to Pai today.
Another reason I came away was to finish my book edit. Working at home has been hard lately. There are so many people to care for and I have been up late with our new family hours (we became late-night people during the quarantine and it never really went away. We’re eating dinner at 9:00 pm sometimes, and I just call these Parisian hours. Going with it.)
I am scattered. Isaac comes down to my studio in the mornings and he is too cute to withstand. I will find my rhythm again, but meanwhile, this book is burning inside me.
So I stayed for the week in a dirt-cheap Airbnb, just a hotel room really, getting the edit done. Kenya joined me for some of the time. She’s pretty into her own work and needed to get away for a bit (all the little brothers, who she loves to death, but really, any teenage girl needs a break sometimes) and so we have found a rhythm that works for us.
The hotel room is forcing me to get the work done. Outside the single window are slats of metal.
I miss the moon rising over the mountains, but the moon distracts me with its beauty, and I’m always wandering out to the garden to see what’s growing. It’s good to be locked in here. I have to stare at the screen and find beauty in the words I write. I couldn’t do it for very long but it is good to be here now.
As soon as I have the cover for this book, I will put it up for preorder!
Other than writing I’ve been doing this and that. My friend Leaf hooked me up with a poetry feature at a local poetry reading event. That was an honor. She and Ro and I looked through clothes and they found sparkly things to wear on their legs and feet.
We went thrifting to replace some of the younger boys terribly old T-shirts. We’ve just been getting more raggedy over the year of COVID, and all of our clothes are originally thrifted anyway, so they have a shorter journey to the land where old clothes go. I found a few things.
Then I promptly had to use one of the t-shirts as a mask when I forgot mine in the hotel room. Thailand has check-ins and outs for shops, which you do on a phone app with a QR code. I often forget to check back out, prompting me to wonder if these shops think I am sleeping over. I’ve been doing a lot of awkward check-ins: where is the basket, oops going backward, oh, that guy wants to take my temperature, backstep, forward step, get in people’s way.
“Never say that your mother is not awkward,” I told Kai when we went to buy him soap, coffee, and toothpaste.
“I would never say that,” he told me.
Touche.
I also found the Shan restaurant that I’ve been looking for all my life. The restaurant owner told me of the benefits of butterfly pea flowers and wanted to take a selfie, which proved hard as there was a foot-and-a-half height difference between us. But we managed.
And we had a flood in Pai. I wrote a poem about it for my daily poetry on Patreon.
Here it is:
our community space,
has had its first flood
of the season.
there might be more,
could be, it’s only early
August, but
I refuse to
I will not
I’m not going to
I’m far from
I won’t
I shan’t
I refuse to
let it
bring me down.
there are only
so many downtrail
slippery falls, muddy
tumbles, rockslide,
low moan, bedlam,
ski slide, motorcade,
white knuckle, tummy skid,
waterplaster, hair trigger,
mountain bend, cliff jumping
wipeouts
you can take in one year,
after all.
*
Perhaps you can tell by the tone of this post that I have had enough? Ro and Chinua and Neil and I will be out there soon, scrubbing and quipping. For now, we’ll wait and see if more water is coming, I think. We learned our lesson last year.
Onward, friends. Pursue God, justice, and humor! I’m heading for the curves in the roads, heading for home. And I love you!
***
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