One Year

If someone had asked me five years ago when I would marry, I undoubtedly would have replied that such an occasion could never possibly occur.  For a reason quite unaccounted for by anything I've been taught, as a young girl I was under the impression that women who married young were made of weaker substance than those who withstood matrimony. Looking back, I realize I have always struggled to maintain my individual identity--one that apparently I thought I would lose after taking a husband. At that point in my life, I think I was determined that if I was going to define myself, a life of singleness could suit me just fine. Give me a house full of good books, a freezer full of ice cream and a couple of cats for company and I would be quite content to live on my own-- fat, yes, and covered in hair-- but happy.

Jason Michael Barton and I started dating last October. I did not enter in or return home from our first date with the shocking knowledge that I had just spent the first of an eternity of evenings with my future husband. Instead, I complained to my roommate about how badly my bladder hurt after drinking a significant amount of water and not having access to a bathroom all night. An impending futuristic doom of loneliness was only narrowly avoided because I fell into a psychosis. It didn't take long for me to love Jason. He was charming, funny, easy to talk to, considerate, gentlemanly and, most important, never failed to laugh at my jokes. When I was with him, I walked on air. For a boy I hardly knew, I was surprised by how I felt-- comfortable, at ease, happy. 

Love is a fascinating phenomenon. It's not just an emotion, but an actual physiological change that occurs in the cortex. Once I had actualized the fact that perhaps I was falling in love with Jason, I had a desperate need to reach out to everyone-- anyone! Neglected friendships were mended. Well intended letters were finally written and put in the mail. I distinctly remember walking home from school and skipping-- yes, skipping-- when I fancied no one was looking. Suddenly, a life of solitude sounded completely unappealing. What was my life without Jason? A million purring Persians couldn't make me as happy as he did. Oh, I knew what was happening; my identity was being erased. Soon my name would change from "Joslynn" to "JoslynnandJason." And worse still, "JosandJase," or worst of all-- "the J's."

But this is where I admit I was wrong. I knew very early on that Jason + Joslynn would be a very good thing, but I severely underestimated how good. After only one short year, I feel he is an inseparable part of my life, and I am so excited for the day when we truly are inseparable. If I have to lose my individuality to marriage, I feel proud and happy to gain this new, better identity with Jason. The truth is that since I've known Jason any trace of mindlessness or weakness in me has been completely eradicated. I love Jason for himself, for his strength, his character, his honesty. But I also love Jason because he brings out the best in me and has moved me to love myself . I want to be the best person possible for this wonderful boy, because there's no one else I would rather be with.

I'm getting married on November 20th to my best friend.

Cats and books will follow.

Winter 2009

New Year 2010

Spring

Summer

Autumn

 

 Love you, Jase.

A Day in the Life

It's a little delayed, but I want to walk you through the only breathtaking summer day I was ever able to capture on the camera.

Each morning as I walk to the library I always pass this house. The courtyard encircles a luxurious fountain. I counted five chimneys and one guest accommodation. I once saw a herd of wild deer grazing in the apple orchard. This truly magical house never fails to spark my imagination. Without the tenants' prior knowledge, the kitchen, living room, front porch and entryway have all been picked apart, decorated and redecorated in my mind.

I thought my plans were going quite well...

And then I saw this....

And this...

 The day proved to be a rainy one. The loveliness was increased even more after the storm passed.

 

 Which yielded this sunset:

Which eventually culminated into this:

Beautiful.

Season of Love

I just ordered this completely gorgeous teacup from Royal Vale. I eagerly anticipate its arrival.

All things bright and sparkly

I have been a negligent blogger. I apologize. In light of September's events, I would like to write a post in honor of my ring only. Certainly, the man who gave it to me is worth a million posts. But I know you want the dirt. So here it is.

I

If you notice the half-moons on my nails, I'll only say that I went a little crazy with the cuticle cutter. I am now prohibited from using it.

These photos honestly don't do it justice. I spend a good deal of time gazing at my hand, and I actually enjoy walking in natural light because of the sparkle.

Wonderful ring, wonderful boy.

Favorite things that I actually have.

Summer of the Birds

While walking under a shady path at Logan's annual Summerfest Festival, a blob of something wet fell from a tree branch overhead and landed in my hair. It was a fine hit.
I saw the culprit flit away gleefully, twittering, nonchalant. It was a robin-- or maybe a swallow. I was too busy rubbing bird poop off my head to get a good look. My first thought on seeing the bird was, "I wonder if it has a nest...?"
I began taking cautious and measured steps toward the car, and glanced down at the small, white, glutinous mass on the tissue. It seemed innocent enough, but the lump triggered a series of memories, most of which had to do with my animal-loving sister, Shirsti.
The spring of 1999 found me in a fever. A perpetual bird flu, if you will-- except it's not at all what you're thinking. The highly contagious sickness was inflicted by Shirsti, who had been trying all her life to catch and tame a wild bird. She was extremely astute at finding baby birds, and under her guidance we ravaged the yard searching for nests, eggs,  chicks, and wounded black-bellied Plovers. We climbed trees and trespassed into neighbors yards. We scouted rooftops and ridgepoles. We wanted a pet bird, and by golly we were going to get one, even if it meant stealing it-- which was precisely what we did.
Working as stealthy partners in crime, on a whim we decided to take two smooth, gray-spotted Sparrow eggs from a neighbor's tree. One for her, one for myself. Hardly able to contain our excitement, we placed them under an aquarium light and waited for the chicks to emerge. Several days later, we returned to the same nest and stole a baby bird, as the mother Sparrow seemed to do a much better job at keeping her eggs warm than we did.
Only an inch long, the thing was bald and pink, with popping eyes and little tufts of gray fuzz sticking out of the sides of its head. I christened it Zinny (because of Sharon Creech's Chasing Redbird) and together Shirsti and I took turns feeding it throughout the day and night. Two days later, Zinny's head went limp and lolled to one side. I was filled with unspeakable horror. We mourned quietly for several minutes before we determined to steal a more mature baby bird from a Robin's nest in our pine tree.
Our yard, our birds.
We took the ladder from the garage and Shirsti climbed to the top, rustled around in the needles for a minute, and emerged with a tiny, fuzzy Robin with clear black eyes and a very disapproving expression on its face. For some unexplainable reason, the honor of naming the bird fell on me again and I called it Squeakers (because of the Wild Hearts Humane Society series I was reading). We told our mother the cat had knocked down the nest. As we very well knew, our mother couldn't say no to a needy soul, and so we were allowed to keep the little bird.
Squeakers was our first, and only, success story. Through the involvement of everyone in our family, we were able to adequately take care of the little Robin and, because of our mother's wishes, release her back into the wild. It was a supremely stressful process, and one that merited me many tardies in the fifth grade, which was just as well. Shirsti and I bonded over the ordeal, and I spent a good month of the summer sleeping on her floor next to the bird cage.

Ah, Shirsti. I thought to myself as I slowly shampooed my hair. I thought about how we also searched for wild cats, tried to tame squirrels, and bred hundreds of guppies in a twenty-gallon tank. She is the only one who has known my secret dream of finding an orphaned fawn in my backyard, or nursing a premature kitten with a bottle. I thought about how she had to bend the rules to keep Abilene, my pet bunny. We are the bleeding hearts of our family, our sweaters matted in fur, fostering wounded animals in secret. With bird poop in our hair, we come together to tame the world, one baby bird at a time.

Happy Birthday

I grew up with an uncanny resemblance to my sister, Koseli. In order to distinguish my individual personality in seventh grade, I dyed my hair with henna. The result yielded hair roughly the color of beet juice. For different and otherwise unknown reasons, Koseli was doing similar-- if less dramatic-- things to her own hair, and so we really weren't ever that different at all. We were the orange-hair twins, the Henna sisters; our faces were round, and our teeth full of braces. We were practically interchangeable until I hit a growth spurt and sprouted six inches in less than a year. Stand us in a police line-up and a witness could easily tell us apart-- I'm the huge one, she's the tiny one. Take photos of our faces and recordings of our voices, however, and anyone would be hard-pressed to discriminate. When talking to her on the phone, I often mistake echoes of my own voice for hers and demand to know why she's mocking me. In also talking to her on the phone, I mistake her real voice for an echo and yell loudly into the receiver, "Hello? Hello?" to which she responds in a similar fashion and we're both equally confused.
"Am I you, or are you me?"
I'm not her identical twin exactly, just her identical twin delayed by three, solid years. If I need to look into my future, I need only gaze as far as Koseli has been, and I can, mistily, see myself in the distance.
Despite all these similarities, we're more different than anyone can see from old family photos. She is the next Sharon Creech, Martha Stewart, Editor-in-Chief, and whatever else in the world she wants to be because she is KOSELI--the one-and-only-- and there is no one else in the world like her.
Except me.
Happy birthday to my intelligent, beautiful, and always sweet older sister.

Clean?

You'll forgive me.

Despite my dabbling in the beautiful, my feverish fascination with the pretty, and a real, definite love for perfume, I relish in the disgusting.
Oh yes. It's true.

Playing in mud holes and irrigation ditches as a child is no rare thing, but the satisfaction of squeezing a pustule or clipping toenails, for me, has not lessened with age.

From some unknown irritation, when Louie was in middle school, her ears started to produce a surplus of earwax. Perhaps it wasn't all earwax-- it could have been skin-- either way, great yellow flakes the size of my pinky toenail were coming out of her ears and it excited me. Waiting with eager anticipation, I took to skulking around corners, armed with a handful of Q-tips, hoping to persuade her to let me clean her ears. More often than not she didn't, so instead I resigned myself to eyeing her beadily as she cleaned them herself, hovering uncomfortably close and shouting frantically, "Deeper! I can see some deeper!" if I fancied she'd missed a spot.
On the rare occasion when my exhortations worked I came away triumphant, curiously studying the fragile earwax-flakes perched precariously on the top of my Q-tip, and then reluctantly throwing them into the garbage when I finished.

Having never suffered from allergies myself, I was surprised months later when this same child came home from the eye doctor announcing her blurry vision had been caused by an excess of mucus under her eyelids.
Such unfortunate circumstances but such delightful grossness!
"The eye doctor lifted up my eyelid...he rolled the Q-tip underneath and the mucus started rolling off in a big, long string!" she told me.
She expressed embarrassment when the eye doctor had accidentally exclaimed his surprise at the great excess of mucus residing thickly under her eyelid, and also at the fact that the mucus continued to wind around and around the cotton without apparent end.
I was enthralled.
After coming down with a bad head cold several years later, I noticed my vision was a little obscured. Standing in front of the bathroom mirror, I hardly dared to hope. Cautiously I raised my eyelid and slid the Q-tip across the edge. It came away wet and shiny.
At last!

Yesterday, when Bart told me he had popped an impossibly enormous zit on his back, my immediate response was,
"I missed it?!?"
To make the situation even worse, Bart went on to explain that not only had the zit yielded a substantial amount of pus, but it was also a large blackhead-- roughly the size of a sewing pin head. He had to pick through three scabs before he got to the core. He mentioned that the process was supremely disgusting, but he regretted to have gone through it without me, knowing full well I would have enjoyed it.
And it's true. I would have.
Little has changed.

And so, beneath my love of beautiful things, there is a deep and very real part of me that would gladly clean your ears, your toenails, or the mucus under your eyelids.
All I need is permission and a hand full of Q-tips.

Favorite Things Part II

Have you seen this man?

I have.

He has been touring the country for the past ten years, educating children about the differences between candy bars and carrots and intimidating them with 20 foot long models of their intestines. From the first time he slipped behind a door and emerged in this tightly fitting body suit, Slim Goodbody has never managed to entirely leave my thoughts. Perhaps it was the shock of seeing a grown man wear a flesh colored unitard, or maybe it was the afro. Either way, he has danced and sung his way into my long-term memory.
I was a faithful patron of Inside Story as a child. The only specific thing I remember learning from the show is what happens to a dinner roll when eaten by a person with a normally functioning digestive system. This was through a series of original Mr. Goodbody songs, the first having to do with the mouth and the salivary glands and the last ending abruptly with Slim running to the bathroom and slamming the door.
When thinking about Slim, I can't help but wonder to what low levels adults will stoop in order to convey a message-- any message-- to kids. This is apparent in shows like Barney where sharing is epitomized by a Tyrannosaurus Rex and his brightly colored protoceratops friends. If you think you're in a bad spot now, imagine playing a Teletubby or a Boo-Bah for the entertainment of three-year olds around the globe. Better yet, imagine yourself in spandex singing a song outlining the entire human digestive system.
You won't feel so bad afterward.

The Dance of Youth

While talking to Koseli on the telephone yesterday, a peculiar memory surfaced that had not graced my mind for many years.

Jane Spense's Dance Academy procured some of the strangest costumes I have ever worn in my entire life-- and this includes years of playing dress-up with Kathy (see the photograph of us dancing in sparkly spacesuits and human-hair wigs). Glowing green warm-up pants, a black unitard with a tall, sequined, red-and-white striped top-hat, a neon-blue Mina bird outfit ornamented with feathers on the head, and a Pink Yink ensemble, complete with a magenta collar were some of the more mild outfits we were forced to wear.
While every year yielded stranger costumes, Koseli and I reflected on a particularly bad performance in which the whole school inacted "Sally's Room," a short story about a girl whose abused furniture and dirty clothes follow her around until she is forced to clean them. With four girls enrolled in dance, our mother felt obliged to involve herself in this spectacle, and played the part of a battered chiffarobe which she artfully decorated with an enormous, dangling bra she had purchased at the D.I. Koseli was a Karate Doll, and she wore a black jumpsuit and a yellow tie around her forehead. I was jealous of this particular costume, as I had opted to be a bedpost but instead landed the part of the half-eaten bologna sandwich-- a double insult as the costume was much too big and nearly impossible to maneuver. My simple task was to chassé across the stage, but the two stiff bread slices slung over my shoulders made bending my knees nearly impossible. I remember falling and skidding face-forward onto the front bread slice during the dress rehearsal, unable to stop myself or to stand up again without assistance.
From all of this, I like to imagine what my father would have seen from his seat in the audience: his wife's head sticking out of the middle of an enormous dresser, his daughter doing high kicks punctuated with interpretive dance, and me, the paper lettuce crinkling as I stiffly skipped across the stage, the slightest hint of rubbery bologna pinned between the wooden bread and my back.

These are a few of my favorite things...

B.M.

There we were, all of us Christensen siblings, separated for months and reunited once again. We were lounging on couches, chairs, cushions-- whatever we could find in the heavenly mishmash of furniture our mother keeps around the house-- talking, laughing and feeling content. Kristian ambled away and returned moments later from the kitchen. He was holding a container of cookies in one hand and a can of prunes in the other. In a gesture of generosity and genuine good will, he walks up to my sister, Koseli.

"Cookie?" he asks.
She replies, "No, thank you."
He turns to leave, but then, almost as an afterthought, he turns again and questions, "Prune?"
"Ooh!" she says as she looks up with sparkling eyes. "Don't mind if I do!"
She takes a single prune and Kristian moves on to Kari.
"Cookie?"
"I really couldn't... but I will have a prune," Kari replies promptly.
Shirsti is next. Without a word she pries the lid off the can of prunes and takes a small handful.

Slowly Kristian makes his way around the room. One by one, cookies are denied and prunes are taken in their stead. I watch in growing wonderment.
When Kristian arrives to me I hesitate. I do not want a prune, but I feel obligated to take one. I look around at my siblings, happily munching, and I remember the faraway and much younger voice of my mother asking a much younger me, "Have you had a B.M. today?" I feel my mouth twitch at the corner and I say, in a far more demanding way than intended,
"No prunes. Cookie."

Our parents' push for healthy digestion must have made a lasting impression on us.

Right and Wrong: Learning it the Hard Way

I admit it. I have a history of breaking and entering. But from my experience, I am convinced that even the most hardened criminal must have encountered something, some object in some house, that makes him blink before he gathers his loot and causes him to wonder, "...What the hell?"

Because my father has been slightly obsessed with the cat house he has built for Libby, I find my mind wanders frequently to the subject of cats and cat-doors. This leads inevitably to the only house I know that has a cat door on it. It belongs to John and Carol Platt, our elderly and rather feeble next-door neighbors. The moment the Platts enter my brain a photograph I saw once flashes into my mind and refuses to leave-- a particularly ugly thought that sticks like glue and won't be undone. It is because of this photo that I can never think the same of the Platt family again.

Many years ago, Shirsti, Koseli, and I were asked to cat-sit the Platts' kitties while they were away in China for several weeks. At first that is all we did, and the whole affair was quite innocent. For some reason however- and it honestly escapes my memory why- Shirsti and I decided to break into our neighbors' home through their conveniently flimsy cat-door. The task proved quite simple. We sneaked in like burglars, barely letting our fingertips brush the banisters as we tiptoed downstairs to watch movies on the big screen.
As time went by we became increasingly bold. After finishing the seemingly endless task lists my mother had set for us each day, we would escape gleefully, exclaiming as we skipped out the door,
"The cats must eat too!"
We invited friends to join us. We began searching the kitchen cupboards for food. Soon the basement floor was littered with popcorn kernels and stale fruit loops. We spent entire evenings sprawled out on the couch and soon we were completely at home in somebody else's house. We exhausted the movie supply. Not wishing to return to our real home, we started exploring. We stole about the living room, peeked into the bathrooms and down darkened hallways and then eventually- and really I'm ashamed to admit it- we entered an entirely forbidden area-- the bedroom.
The focal point of the room was an enormous canopy bed with 90's style drapes hanging from the top. Everything was neat and orderly and quite respectable. Through some sheer hanging curtains one could enter the bathroom which was adorned with a round porcelain jacuzzi. On the crowded counter top near some bottles of antiquated perfume I saw the photograph I mentioned earlier for the first and only time ever. It displayed Carol in a blue feather boa and nothing else. She was younger in the picture-- maybe mid-thirties. Her hair was curly and short, and her pouty lips were adorned in bright pink. A dreamy cloud framed the corners of the photo. No one expects to see their next-door-neighbor in a scanty, sumptuous boa. I held it in my hand for some time, stunned, not knowing if I should cover my eyes or run first.
"What's that?" Shirsti asked from the linen closet she was nosing around in.
"I...am not sure," I replied.
When the Platts returned from China, they brought us each back little silk purses as souvenirs. With eyes downcast and a guilty feeling in my heart I took the gift, hoping against all hope that they wouldn't notice the lopsided cat door on their house.
I had thought myself quite clever when we figured out how to unscrew the cat-door and crawl in, as slippery as snakes. Though I was slightly scarred I should be grateful for that photograph. It undoubtedly saved me from a life of crime.

Fear of Falling

I've always been overly cautious. In the wintertime, I walk the sidewalks like a ninety year old grandmother. My body hunches over, my knees stiffen. I rake the ground with my eyes searching for any potential peril.
My timidity has even been caught on tape. We have a video of me at a swimming lesson in 1996. In this video, I'm wearing a pink swimsuit with one ruffly strap and big purple flowers everywhere else. Amid the splashes and screams of other children echoing around the pool, you can hear my mom asking me questions as I doggy paddle and struggle to keep my chin above water.
"How do you like swimming lessons?"
"I...." The water laps up over my mouth and I gurgle incoherently. "I don't know if I like it..." Gurgle.
When I talk you can see that I have one front tooth. My enormous glasses are still on. They are dappled with water droplets. It's a miracle I can see at all.
The teacher takes my class to the deep end of the pool to dive off the board and I refuse to go. You can hear my mom coaxing me on the other side of the camera, occasionally adding a side narration to the camera itself,

"COME ON JOS! YOU CAN DO IT... she's not very excited about jumping in. Look at the way she's just standing there... YOU CAN DO IT, JOS!"

At this point I'm standing at the edge of the diving board. I look skinny. Terrified.
I would like to say that I faced my fear and jumped. I would love to paint a picture in your mind of a young girl, triumphantly throwing off her enormous glasses, raising her arms into the air and gracefully swan-diving into the pool while everyone cheers.
However, this is not what happened. Eventually I exit the diving board via the stairs, looking completely defeated and pathetic. I stand, dripping and awkward, and look at the water.
"That's okay, Jos. Maybe next time," my mom says.
While the other children cannonball themselves into the water, I gingerly sit on the side and then gently scoot into the pool-- both hands safely anchored to the wall.

I've never been one to put myself at risk. I'm not sure how I feel about this. Though I never suffer from broken bones or bruises, I've never jumped off the high dive or kicked a soccer ball more than five feet for the fear of falling.
It's a lose-lose situation.