Life is Beautiful from Stephen Niebauer on Vimeo.
seriously..
www.herewecollide.com
its amazing
10.30.2010
10.28.2010
Hearth
I sort of carried you around with me
What?
Is that creepy?
Like a photo?
Yeah, your graduation one. You’re hair looks silly. But you know, I still like you
Do you?
Yeah
I don’t really understand
What?
I’ve been away for so long
But you’re back now right?
I guess so
For good?
Yeah
Did you figure things out?
You broke my heart
I’m sorry…It’ll never happen again, I promise
I loved you
I loved you too I just didn’t know it
Now you do?
Now I do.
I went to the East Coast, to make you jealous
I don’t want to go there anymore
You don’t?
No
Where then?
Alaska.
10.27.2010
Laundry
The roaring in my ears is the world. From the second I wake up to when my head hits the pillow it deafens me. I’m not sure if it’s just the pile of laundry overflowing into the hall or my three year old jumping on my bed to wake me up on Saturday morning. When I told my mom I was pregnant she gave me this look. It wasn’t like she wasn’t happy. She was thrilled. But she had this expression for about a millisecond that made me wonder if I was ready. It passed so quickly that I forgot about it, and we went to pick out fabric for new curtains in the living room. New curtains. I never thought I’d become that mom. The one that worries about new curtains or frayed rugs or whether the house is tidy when company comes over. When I asked my husband if I was different he said no. I was exactly the same as when we met; except maybe more responsible and less restless. I didn’t want to tell him I still was. Then he asked if he could buy a new TV because everyone has flat screens now. I said no because I wanted to wall paper and decorate the living room first. And then I felt silly, like I was playing house, and apologized. He suggested maybe we take a trip somewhere because I seemed stressed. I said no and picked up my Danielle Steele novel to look occupied.
At eleven on Tuesday morning I took Max to his library program and sat with the other moms at the star bucks across the street. I listened to their whining conversations about their balding husbands who had names like Frank and David. On and on they went about their marriages, the colour of the walls in their multiple bathrooms and what some body’s mother-in-law had said to them at some family gathering. I occasionally interjected with the appropriate clauses. It looked more interesting to talk to the college student with the half pink hair behind the counter. We might even have something in common. She didn’t look like she type to read Danielle Steele novels, though. Neither was I really, I was just trying to fit in. Like high school. It was all the same really. They had designer jeans, I didn’t. Mine had holes in the knees from painting my neighbours deck to buy the new Guns & Roses album. I listened to it on the floor of my tiny attic bedroom on Bern Rd.
I asked Cal if we could move to the country while we were having a glass of wine one evening. He set his down the coaster (yes, I have coasters) and looked at me seriously.
“I just don’t like the women in this town,” I took a sip of my wine.
“That’s the only reason?” he laughed. I liked the way his eyes squinted.
I explained the balding Frank and David husbands, the in-laws and the ripped jeans. I asked him if he remembered the time we sat on the hill looking down over the Mills farm and told him I never ever in my life did I want to live in one of those developments with the houses made of red brick that all looked identical. He said he didn’t really. He only remembered how we made out and smoked.
I looked at him seriously. I want a farmhouse and a clothesline. I want to hang my laundry in the sunshine and watch max play with his toys in the grass while denim wearing overalls. I want him to ask me things like why we love, and how the clouds are staying in the sky, and why daddy holds my hand. I want to go on long walks through the farmer’s fields and have colourful rag rugs in the living room. Cal said he’d been kind of waiting for me to say something like that. He wants to build a tree fort and sleep in it with Max and get a puppy named Achilles, like the Greek warrior. I thought, finally, the roaring, wouldn’t be so deafening if there were an ocean of grass. And I was glad he was still hungry, for the same things I was.
10.25.2010
irrational childhood fears
1. Rabies
2. Rats that carried rabies...actually, just rats too.
3. cat scratch disease
4. my parents dying (not actually ridiculous...kind of still scared of this happening)
5. the pigs in Old Yeller (they had rabies)
6. The cobweb hotel cartoon http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqRYYs84pCs
7. The jack frost cartoon http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMzRQNv-GE4
8. The black plague
9. the witch in sleeping beauty
10. Ursula from The Little Mermaid
11. sars
12. Nancy Drew books
13. needles
14. black widow spiders
15. poisonous frogs
16. large deadly tropical insects
17. scarlet fever
18. getting locked in the bathroom or trapped in an elevator
19. teenagers
10.16.2010
10.13.2010
Bathtub
This is an awesome video made with a tilt shift lens.
It makes everything look miniature.
I want one.
Bathtub V from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.
10.12.2010
homesickness
I am in love with tattoos
and anything vintage
quilts quilts quilts (I'm almost done mine!)
Beards and Sam Bean
This is not a pipe
swings, sweaters, fall
my dream house
10.03.2010
Grief Lessons
We sat on the fence like a Norman Rockwell painting. Our bare feet swinging and slinging mud clods at cars. My overalls were so tattered my mom had given up patching them. I had such a boy haircut. I hardly wore shoes. Flynn has a crazy smile and Noah just isn’t paying attention. Like he did for a majority of his life. I remember my mom laughing in her summer dress when she took that picture. Her hair long, and in her eyes because of the wind.
This photograph reminds me of the 50’s. The black and white kind where the kids have rose-tinted cheeks. You know those calendars with kids holding hands under umbrellas? Anyway, I’d framed it and put it on the mantle in our house. Today is one of those bad days. When I can’t hold my head up. Flynn can’t even help me because I miss Noah so much it’s hard to get out of bed. This type of missing doesn’t seem to abate even though it’s been six years. Usually I can watch a movie like Lost in Translation, eat a big breakfast and go about my day. Today I feel kind of sick. I have an art show in a week and lots of work to do. The centerpiece of the show has still yet to be finished.
Flynn leaves for work on his bike, with his fly-away hair.
“It’s so cold!” he shouts on his way out the door. I watch him pedal down the street.
My studio isn’t big enough. I try not to complain about it because Flynn wants a baby more then a bigger house. I think I do too. But today, I want my brother back more.
Noah with his tattoos and vagabond hair. His favorite corduroy vest, and smell of Colts. His stupid Volkswagen Jetta that never ran.
We were eighteen, sitting in the quarry in the shadows of the machinery. With dump trucks yawning at us, backhoes with their big gleaming eyes. Stars and sparks exploded into the velvet sky. Noah had smoked a joint; Flynn had a bottle of Jack Daniels. It was the first night I’d ever kissed him. I’d wanted to before but I’d been kind of a shit head. I’d loved Flynn since I was fifteen but never admitted it. We had crawled into the cab of a backhoe. He was kind of angry with me because I had made out with a guy named Alex and then showed up on Flynn’s porch hammered at 2am and asked him for twenty bucks for cigarettes and gas because I’d lost my job. Like I said. Shit head.
“You’ve got a problem,” He’d said.
“I think I’ve got more then one”
“Yeah,” long silence. Our breaths were white clouds. My fingers were cold. “Can I kiss you?” He asked, looking at me, with such honest eyes.
“Yes.” I thought I’d blown it a hundred times. I was miserable.
“Is it going to mean anything to you?”
“It’s going to mean the world,” I could feel a warm tear of relief on my cheek.
His adoration was so heavy, it smothered me. I liked his scruff on my cheek. It’s my best memory. That kiss.
When we were in the Jetta (one of the few times it worked) on our way home Noah had said; “You keep her straight, you keep her straight Flynn, when I’m gone. No one disserves her like you do,”
“Noah, you’re not going anywhere,” I’d laughed.
“I love you sister,” was all he said, and then stared out the window.
He was gone a week later. I think he wanted to make sure that I’d be okay.
I take the car and drive out of the city past the skyscrapers and into bleakness of the prairie to the little brick chapel where Flynn and I were married. All the fields are bare and trimmed for the winter. I listen to Crosby, Stills Nash and Young on the way. I cry. I sit on the bench in the graveyard until well past noon. The inscription on Noah’s stone is a Jack Kerouac quote. “Maybe that's what life is ... a wink of the eye and winking stars.”
On the way home I stop at a convenient store with a pay phone to call Flynn so he won’t worry. I like the sound of his voice over the phone. Concerned. I imagine his eyes. The smell of the house when I walk in. The colour of the front window curtains.
I feel so sick I throw-up in bathroom. Suddenly I realize that this sickness could be more then art-show nerves. I’m lucky that convenient stores carrying everything from engine oil to pregnancy tests.
I fly home.
Pregnant.
A baby.
I can’t wait to tell Flynn. It doesn’t seem to matter so much, that Noah is gone. And that, he won’t be coming back.
Green and Golden
Went home from University for the weekend and took some photos in a pretty field
behind my house with Jhoove and my mommmm
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