women have changed; men are changing

I'm so glad we women are not just blaming men for all our problems any more. When that became a mantra, we allowed ourselves to slip into magical thinking instead of facing problems in a larger context. We are growing up as women into adulthood, and now our men are facing bravely a new world that we must allow them to help define if we are to work together toward the best that we can build for ourselves and our children.

My family celebrated my birthday at a buffet that allowed the kids to choose their own platefuls -- and they did a good job for the most part. Lots of vegetables. I sat waching them interact and laugh, and then my daughters giggling together, and then my son-in-law Bill (Adam was at work). Both of these men, as well as my son living in the Midwest) are so different from what my father would have defined as "manly" but are stronger and more tender and more compassionate for that difference. Their children do not fear and tremble in their presence. They are strong enough within themselves not to need to demand sovereignty. They work with. My children and their spouses work as teams, and I am grateful.

Blue Undercolor

Blue Undercolor

A blueness; a kind of undercolor he could not place, whatever word there was to describe that particular blueness. Rather, it was a presence underneath that gave the hill a haze near purple as though you could see the water of the earth pushing to rain upward from the rocks into the sky.

Again he felt the need for words as though in not being able to describe what he saw, this was trapped with him. And more. For what he could not name, even to himself, the shades, the textures: the deepness there of the hill,as though even the color itself had depth apart from the hill -- the roughness, but not harsh, not unpleasant, a bumpiness but smooth, no, soft to the touch so that if only his fingers could move up and down over the surface, he could feel them working, feel with his mind what they would tell him were he able to tender the surface as of a bolt of cloth. Only it was not the knowing that he could never caress the mountain as a whole, for he knew well the aspect of its parts, it was this aching to name somehow within him the feeling he knew of the color and the hill as though not to be able to say what he felt now barred him from further feeling, and seeing. As there was a redness, too, coursing through, not spread out, not diffuse but in veins somehow. (He smiled.) Like blood through the hill, and the hill alive.

Alive? Beating? Was there motion he could not see? Was there breathing, a gentle rise and fall he could not see because he could not be still? (He held himself quiet.) Or was it alive with time he could never possess? Time long beyond his span, beyond his imaginings, where a beat would be years and the gentle rise and fall of breath the movement of a thousand ages. An evening gone.

And blueness in veins, too, large, distended with blood in the fullness of a breast painful with milk. As hers had been. And he had traced the blue with his fingers and felt the softness and the hardness, the milk quivering to stream forth, and the bumpiness, the smooth roughness of the veins different from the surface only part of it, and the fine gold and brown hair that fell over him as he lay. For she had given him suck long after he could run to touch her.

Before he could name.

"Jess," she had called him and he heard the wind, but he could call her nothing.