I've come up with sort of a neat idea. I've always got a song in my head, usually just a line or two playing over and over. This week I've been listening to a tape of "Colors of the Day" Mom recorded from her record. And I wanted to write bits of them down and tack them to my bedroom walls, but that would soon mean an awful lot of pin holes in the wall. So I tacked some long ribbons to the walls and as I think of them I'm writing them on slips of paper and paper clipping the papers to the ribbon. It's the same way we hang Christmas cards every year. So I've got four up from today and yesterday and soon the ribbons will be covered. It's great.

When I was little I always wanted to be surrounded by cool stuff, stuff I liked, so I covered my walls in anything I could find. Old calendar pictures were popular, but also silk flowers and a bulletin board and posters and framed pictures, one of Westminster Abbey and one of a shepherdess and her flock. (One of the sheep had a triangular wooden collar on and I'm not sure why.) And when I was about 11 I decided I was sick of my room being cluttered and I took it all down. Then last year I moved to a the little guestroom so I could be next to the attic, which reduced my wallspace considerably. Then I put up this cool thing on the wall over my bed, photos of trees in all four seasons in a wheel. There are ribbons pinned up connecting them - pink and pale green for spring, green and yellow for summer, orange and red for fall, and black and brown for winter. It looks really awesome. That takes up a lot of space, and then I got a bigger bookshelf that takes up a whole wall by itself. It's and L-shaped room and the dresser and the season wheel take up one wall, the door and the closet another, the attic door another, and the bookshelf another. So now the ribbon thing is pretty much going to take up the last two. I realized last night that I've accomplished what I always wanted to before - to be surrounded by things that make me me. My books, my songs, the seasons. It's a good feeling.

Saturday was Allison's birthday and that morning she got out the video of our birthdays when we were really little. (I'll be sixteen in less than a month. Wow.) For about three years running Dad would borrow a video camera from someone so he could tape our birthdays. So we have her first through third and my third through fifth birthdays. I'm really glad we did because it put me in a nice birthday sort of mood - I'd forgotten how nice birthdays are for little kids. There was pink lemonade and carrot curls and pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey (I cheated) and applesauce cake with cream cheese icing and pink sundresses. I love birthdays like that. Allison's first birthday was especially funny to watch because the cake was her first experience with sugar. We sang and Mom blew out the candle and set the cake on the tray of the high chair. Allison grabbed a handful of icing and waved it around a bit and eventually ate some while Mom cut slices for the rest of us. They gave her a few spoonfuls of ice cream, which she didn't touch.

But what was really strange was looking at the four of us twelve years ago. My mother looked so much younger, though Dad looked pretty much the same. We lived in a house that was just the right size for four people - three bedrooms, two and a half baths, a kitchen, a living room, a dining room. The house was on a cul-de-sac and backed up to a feild with a forest behind. The tape shows Dad shoveling manure into the newly tilled garden and Mom proudly displaying her newly planted rose garden. Mom wore a long denim skirt and Allison and I had little dresses she made us.

Now we live in a big house near my dad's office and it seems so different. Dad spends as much time at the office as he does at home some days. Allison's thirteen and wears hairspray. Mom buys plants all the time but she never plants them so we have legions of potted plants waiting sadly in the backyard. The yard itself is fenced off from the other yards and backs up to another house, not apple trees. I don't understand what happened with my parents over the last ten years or so. When they met she taught nursury school and he was a carpenter. At their wedding she wore flowers in her hair and there was a contra dance afterwards. The first place they lived after they got married was the top story of a big old house on a dairy farm. When I was born we lived in a little green house in the country with no AC and a wood stove. When Allison was born we lived in a white farmhouse with black shutters and Dad had to chase the landlord's sheep out of the yard because they were eating our pole beans. Then we moved to Richmond because the schools were better in the suburbs and Dad became a property manager. I know he wasn't cut out to be a carpenter and that the country isn't any place to educate children. (Mom says she thought about home-schooling us but realized the three of us would drive each other crazy.) And I know that life so wasn't perfect as it seemed. Guests had to sleep on the fold-out sofa in the living room, or else Allison and I had to sleep on the floor in our parents' room. I remember my my father coming home exhausted and my mother sitting on the floor helpless with tears on her birthday. I didn't realize until later that it was depression and not just being sad - after all, at age five you often cry without being able to stop and it makes sense that your parents can't either. But I don't understand how they could have left that life of their free wills - to move here, where we have electric heat and a guestroom and a bigger kitchen and two living rooms but no roses or duckponds or maple trees. There has to be a compromise. I'm going to find it when I grow up.

I'm realizing that I've spent a lot of my life trying to go back to that ideal place. I loved the fairy tales and the Laura Ingalls Wilder books Dad used to read us and especially Little Women. I used to dream about building my own house, a log cabin like the one Britton and Ian live in, with a loom in the attic and a wood stove. At Celtic festivals when my parents want to find me they look for the nearest spinning wheel because I'm always sitting on the grass before it, staring in near-rapture. I listen to John McCutcheon and Tom Chapin and Custer LaRue and Judy Collins and the Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel. I moved into the attic last year and though I don't really sleep there any more, I like having the little room at the bottom of the stairs. When I grow up I want to have lots of children and live in a farmhouse with a green tin of Bag Balm in the linen closet and beautiful sheets and quilts and strings of garlic in the kitchen and a wood stove and bread in the oven and stars in the sky and magic in the air.

May 17
May 23