Today, in 100 Words

Life with a word count maximum.

[jackielutzke]

To Hazard More

Perhaps it is the loss of possibility that makes these current days gray and heavy, even when the sun shines in the clear sky. Perhaps it is that the task selected for Sunday afternoon will unfold unencumbered and that is fine for satisfaction of completion, for the to-do list, but frustrates the part of us that likes to hazard more against the hours of the day, the part that wants to look up, surprised, and see a friend. That sets the rake aside, walks away from the partially tidied yard, and asserts, even silently, I have time for both.

[jackielutzke]

My Son’s Desk

I work at my son’s desk. Things of his are now mine to the extent that they comprise my view when I look up, are things I adjust when I add other things—a mouse, a notebook and pen, a coffee mug filled with cereal—to the desktop.

I bought this desk for myself when I got the job that dissolved into the job I have now, but I gave it to Oliver when Margot got a desk. Neither he nor his sister are here to make claims on things like desks; ownership becomes murky without presence, becomes a solitary game of a mother naming things such to pull absent kids closer.

[jackielutzke]

Keep an Untidy Flower Bed (A COVID-19 Sunday Reflection)

It is in your best interest—though you won’t realize it until later, as is often the case with lessons or the counterintuitive—to keep an untidy flower bed. By this I mean that you should fail in its management the year prior; you should miss an opportunity or ten to weed it; you should consider putting down weed blocking fabric but ultimately opt not to. You were tired that day, that series of days; it was too hot or dark or whatever prohibiting factor of nature or circumstance.

And because of this the bed grew over and you chastised yourself then, probably, but now, spring, each weed you pluck is a thank you to a past self for this opportunity to set a piece of life back in order.

[jackielutzke]

Hummingbird

If I could have taken the picture I just took two seconds faster it would contain a hummingbird, hovering just to the left of my purple butterfly bush. And if the picture could somehow capture me it would be as a heartbeat trying to outpace this bird’s. And this is because birds make me nervous and hummingbirds in particular—there is something in me that reacts to divergences from average: “backyard bird” is robin, is sparrow; “backyard bird” moves in distinguishable hops and lines of generous flight and does not suspend herself for a moment to face me. She frightens me but when she appears I am reminded that even known spaces like my backyard are malleable, are more than my averages. And I can slowly back away or I can let my heart pound and try to take her picture.

[jackielutzke]

Externalization

There is a room off my bedroom, a room I have made and remade, again and again, in my decade in this house. The timeline of my occupancy here is somehow a section of my life and all of it; this room is somehow just a part of the house and also the entirety—the entirety of me. Because it was mine from the start and even when it paused to become my daughter’s nursery it was at my hand and by my body that this occurred, another iteration in the life of a woman. So the room is an externalization of me that I can sit in as I do now, an externalization of my understanding of myself, steadfast, four immovable walls, but perhaps now the paint is gray, perhaps the pictures should be changed.

[jackielutzke]

Before, After, Between

In my bedroom is a painting I purchased from a local artist shortly after getting divorced. This purchase was three years ago; the divorce was slightly more than three, though to be perfectly honest it feels like much longer—maybe life stretches out in a certain sort of way when you’ve settled into it, reaching backward and forward as a more expansive truth than what’s actually owed.

The painting is an inky blue-black sky scattered with hundreds of dot-stars in two clusters, one left, one right, with gap between them. The stars are painted so that they seem on the cusp of dissolving this separation, on the cusp of sweeping into the empty space and absorbing it, eliminating the notion of before, after, between.

[jackielutzke]

Magical Margot

She labeled herself that, in a Girls Inc. program get-to-know-you activity that required pairing first names with first letter matching adjectives. Perhaps her choice was somewhat process of elimination deduced—another M friend took the more obvious “marvelous”—but when she told me she was Magical Margot she smiled in the sort of way that made it clear she was pleased. And I looked at her and agreed with her choice, out loud and also in the part of me that didn’t exist until she and her brother came along. She is eight today, and I am thinking about passing time and how time can amount to distance, but maybe she will always be close to this truth—and even if one day she can’t or won’t claim it, for me she will always be magic.

[jackielutzke]

Belong to Two Places

On the way out the door this morning to take my kids to their last day of school, I happened to look down at Oliver’s saxophone case, sitting next to the front door, and the tag looped through the handle, that he’d filled out with his contact information. The tag that would, should the instrument be lost, help bring it home again. He’d filled in the address with the street numbers and names for both my house and his dad’s, bound together in the not quite adequate space by virtue of a dogged belief that both were equal and true and that’s TRUE—though senseless at face value, though subverting the tag’s purpose. But this is what we have asked of him: find a way to belong to two places. And, see, he is trying.

[jackielutzke]

The Exoskeleton

A praying mantis left a perfect copy of itself clinging to the outside of a candle holder on my porch. So perfect that I jumped when I first saw it there, certain that I had disturbed an actual mantis.

But no—after a beat I could see that the form was lifeless, even though characteristically poised—frozen in its normalcy. Frozen such that the front legs even retained their prayerful posture. The act of molting, of leaving behind, seems that it would demand more sacrifice. Some more obvious destruction, or difference. But here is the art of preserving while moving forward, no alterations needed—just a little more room to grow.

[jackielutzke]

Outlook

There is an outlook adjacent to the trail I most frequently take into the woods at Holliday Park. It is perhaps 30, perhaps 40 feet of wooden planks; its terminus is a rectangle generous enough for 15-20 viewers but I am here alone. Sitting, not even looking at the view because I decided to write this, and I have to stop looking to write, as much as I want to think that my writer eyes are always open, and they were enough to see this outlook and feel the double meaning and try to say something, because I have not wanted to, lately. I have felt too raw for even this. But there is the scent of lilac in the air and the leaves of the maple tree above are waving at me, or they’re just waving, but since I’m here I think I’ll claim it.

[jackielutzke]

Burnt Out Bulb

Part of my end of evening routine, as I move from downstairs to upstairs occupancy, is to switch on the light over the kitchen sink. Or at least that’s the plan.

A light switch is the site of unthinking action until it’s not. Until you flip it and nothing happens. And in the absence of a reaction at one switch another is flipped—this, without satisfying tactility, in the brain, sending it scrambling off to find in its records the moment the lightbulb was installed—to mollify itself that the bulb performed as it ought to have done, that the task of purchasing and replacing the bulb, auto populating on a mental to-do list, is justified. In the meantime, the kitchen stays dark, but now you can accept it.

[jackielutzke]

Orange Cake

Today I made orange cake, made orange cake using a recipe from a cookbook I used to have and then didn’t and then did again, yesterday, when I happened across a copy in an antique mall. I knew immediately when I saw it that I would buy it, and would, by buying it, bring into now a piece from before, from old days, perhaps for sentimental reasons but not really the sort that come to mind first, not for him or then, but rather for the me that loved this recipe and baked a beautiful orange cake.

[jackielutzke]

Book Recommendations

It’s only fair, or, entirely reasonable, inevitable, desirable that, the first half of my two-part parenting agenda successfully fulfilled (that my children would love books), that there come a day in which the manifestation of that love no longer only resembles a desire to listen to the books I select, the books from my childhood that I read aloud to them chapter by chapter each night we are together—both a way to help them know and also know me (how much are we evidenced in our artifacts? I think quite a lot)—but become them turning to me to say, Mom, I’ve read this book and I love it and would you please read it too?

[jackielutzke]

Expiration Date

Creative nonfiction—what I write—is influenced by the notion of an expiration date, and this date, and the allocation of fresh, sink-your-teeth-in time is variable. How long you have to write about something depends on the nature of the topic—what it is and to what degree did it impact the life?—how deep are the tendrils that must now be untangled? Topics must be give time, for clarity, for emotional distance, but not TOO much. I once said of a chapbook I was writing that I needed to hurry and finish the project so that I would not heal to the degree that I no longer cared—or I would be forced to reimagine the project from a more now-relevant angle. So we let our moments beg to be understood, so that we listen, but then we DO listen, and we write.

[jackielutzke]

Mobile

I have a mobile in my bedroom, hung from the ceiling in the corner. It is decidedly Grown Up—it is made from delicate black wire with five black die-cut feathers balancing and turning at each terminating point. And it is my little piece of cognitive dissonance because I hate birds and I hate feathers but the motif, the shape flattened out into paper representation—this, apparently, I can abide. And not just abide but lie here and be entranced by, it moving in the breeze made by my ceiling fan and maybe I love it regardless of the shapes for its safe unpredictability, its ability to be both always the same and always different. Its ability to make being moved by outside forces feel magical.

[jackielutzke]

Recount the Clouds

At what point do we reach the limits of the insights we can extract from our lives? I am a person of patterns; I like certain repetitious habits to fill out the open spaces of my life; even my divergences are based on habits that comfort me—I will walk a new place, but, I am walking. And I will come home, and something about the temperateness of the evening and the puff of clouds rolling overhead will lure me to my hammock where I will look up and consider the sky—and the ideas that I might write are like those clouds: different in texture and form than others, but no new essence. But then again, how often we recount the clouds without wearying anyone.

[jackielutzke]

Single Mother’s Day

When you are a single mom, there is no one obligated to admire your motherhood, so we must learn to do this for ourselves, or perhaps we can for each other. Because, regardless of how we came together in single-mom-solidarity, I am glad for each of you, and I hope that doesn’t seem warped to be glad, because single-mom-hood isn’t really something we think we ought to wish on anyone because it’s difficult but I have to say that since being assigned this label by my circumstance, I have stopped at certain moments and thought, hey, I’m doing this and have in that moment been rather delighted with myself, and I don’t think that’s arrogant, to recognize how we find a way in spite of whatever our particular in spite ofs are.