And we laughed and laughed

The other night at school pick-up, a knot of mothers were idly chatting when I threw the conversational grenade of Eat Pray Love in the mix. Strangely enough, (at least to me), I was the only woman in the group who had read this culture-dominating memoir. But as I explained the concept – a kind of self-seeking journey, not to mention sabbatical from one’s established life – all of the women started chatting excitedly. One woman, in particular, recounted a solo trip from the previous year when she was “no one’s mother, wife, daughter or employee.” She then reeled off a list of qualities that seemed to surface when she was liberated from her usual roles and responsibilities. “I was WITTY,” she emphasized – all dramatic big eyes and self-deprecating laugh.

It stuck in my mind, maybe because the one overriding memory from my Blog-camping weekend in Berlin is the laughter, the constant laughter. It was the kind of bodily laughter that inhibits speech and makes your sides ache. I don’t know if a lot of wit was involved, at least on my part, but certainly I was silly, irreverent and raunchy – qualities that don’t get a lot of play in my “normal” life.

Is laughter what happens when you take six intelligent women and liberate them from the responsibility of feeding people three times a day? Was it glorious alchemy, or just the heady oxygen of having more space to breathe freely? I’d like to think it was more than the shot of ouzo that Julochka coerced me into imbibing after I had already, ahem, had enough. “What are you going to remember?” is her motto.

As autumn descends like one great gray wet blanket, I’ve been musing on why there is too little laughter in my daily routine. What is there about normal life that smothers it?

Mother/Daughter Blog Camp

I took my daughter to Blog Camp . . . and she (I) created a monster!

Now I "get" blogging, she said.

I want to go to EVERY Blog Camp, she said.

If you want to take a peek at our artistic/social exploits, look here.

Contextualizing

three different views

of the same fields,
the same horses,

in one week

Context is everything; context is all.

Is it the weather, the landscape, or both?  It's both, of course.

Today was my first "normal" day since December 13th.  But how do I define normal?

Normal is taking the kids to school, no snow on the roads, the morning at Jane Austen House, the afternoon at home tutoring, several loads of wash to do, gnocchi with tomato sauce for dinner, lots of emails to catch up with, a new book to begin, a blog to write.

The Christmas holidays, followed by the snow holidays, were threatening to permanently pre-empt my notions of normal life.  Can you still call it "normal" if it stops being your default context?  A week of Christmas snow is magical; a week of playing-hooky-from-real-life snow is fun; after that, it stops being a novelty and starts being tiresome.

My youngest daughter had precisely one day in school before I whisked her off to Copenhagen for a birthday (her 12th) Blog Camp.  For three days, 10 of us talked (and talked), and drank tea, and sewed, and art-journaled.  It was too intense to be normal.  Even though the sky was gray and the wind was bitter, there was a warm golden glow that can't be entirely explained by those Scandinavian wood-burning fires.

For the first time in years, I have a circle of friends who are younger than I am.  Isn't age one of the strangest, most bizarrely contextual states of mind and being?  During the Christmas holidays, I watched an Elvis retrospective and re-discovered that he was only 42 when he died.   How did  42 get to be such a shockingly young age to die?  When I was a child he seemed plenty old -- and so washed-up.  Although I'm fairly relaxed about being 43 (and one week old), I still can't help but think:  I am now older than Elvis.

We are expecting heavy snow tonight.  My oldest daughter has her Physics GCSE tomorrow.  If necessary, we will put on our ski clothes and walk miles through the snow to school.  It's getting to be our new normal.