Back to School

Filed Under All Posts, Environment, Family, Melissa Howden | 12 Comments

In the waning days of summer, Melissa Howden ponders the markers of time.

I heard on the radio today that here in Northern New Mexico we always know school will be starting when the sunflowers bloom. Sure enough the sunflowers are at their peak, and the school buses just started rolling.

As a child my seasons were pretty much “school” and “summer”. I happened to be a child who liked school, but I also loved summer. Now as an adult who does not have children, thus the markers of the beginning and the end of the school year—my seasons tend to mush together which in some ways I think creates the sensation of time speeding up.

I do find myself longing for more specific touchstones in the year. Recently I visited my niece and nephew. The days of my visit coincided the last days Emily’s summer. As a result I was gifted with some summer nostalgia as we lolled about in the swimming pool eating popsicles, and picked out new tennis shoes for school (in this case we designed high tops online). Emily went back and forth to the neighbors Slip n’ Slide and sleepovers, squeezing one in for each remaining day of the summer. But even as we slept in, and went for mani-pedis, the lazy days of summer were being squeezed out with the start of soccer practice and the posting of her class lists and teacher assignments coming hand-in-hand with the promise of early mornings, car pooling and homework. Read more

Indelible

Filed Under All Posts, Group Posts, Melissa Howden, Relationships | 7 Comments

Studies show that people with pals lead longer, healthier and happier lives. For our group post this month, we’re each sharing thoughts on friendship.

Melissa Howden reflects on the enduring impressions left by friends, real or otherwise.

Cindy Atkins had a long blond ponytail that swung from side to side. Invariably the bow in her hair matched her dress. At six, Cindy Atkins was my first real best friend. During the course of our friendship, which lasted until about third grade, I spent hours trying to coax my curly frizzy hair into a ponytail like Cindy’s. In the bathtub I would lay my head in the water and swish my head back and forth to get the feeling of a swinging ponytail. For a time, while my hair was wet, my ponytail would be smooth and organized like Cindy’s, but then one by one, a frizzy curl would pop out of my tight ponytail, all my effort defeated by nature. Be it for our friendship or her ponytail I have never forgotten Cindy Atkins. Read more

WTF California?

Filed Under All Posts, Melissa Howden, Politics, Relationships | 17 Comments

I’m getting gayer by the moment.

I’m guessing my burgeoning gayness is in part my indignant response to those intent upon denying me and my tribe, our equal rights in this country. The rights to marry, to adopt, to care for our loved ones, to have the benefits of insurance, inheritance and whatever else all ya’ll get as standard operating procedure.

It’s a strange time this. On the one hand being gay is like a newly desired accessory tantamount to seasonal fashions—the color, a hemline or a purse (Ellen DeGeneres is a CoverGirl after all). One newly “out” celebrity is proclaiming to any media outlet that will listen that she has always been out, which, I happen to know, is absolutely not the truth and who really cares anyway? So while some are scrambling to proclaim their gayness and claim their seat as the new gay poster child, the California Supreme Court upheld Proposition 8, which denies gays the right to marry in the state. Well that is not exactly true either. The 18,000 gay couples who were legally allowed to marry by the same Supreme Court last year in the window of time before the Mormon Church essentially paid for the Proposition to deny that right, those couples can be married. Are you following? I did say it was a strange time. Read more

Here a Mother, There a Mother, Everywhere a Bit o’Mother

Filed Under All Posts, Family, Melissa Howden | 10 Comments

Melissa Howden finds new ways of acknowledging and remembering mom.

In the days preceding Mother’s Day my girlfriend and I were particularly sensitive to all of the Mother’s Day promotions: Mother’s Day bouquets, special brunches at our favorite restaurant, and numerous grocery store displays. We took to saying to each other half jokingly, “We ain’t got no mothers!” My mother died nine years ago and my girlfriend’s mother died two years ago. So while we were both making some light of our “motherlessness” in the face of an advertising onslaught, there was no denying the presence of our mother memories.

It occurred to me that while I was saying I didn’t have a mother, I in fact did have my mother, in two containers; one in the care of a friend in California and a smaller one here with me in New Mexico. My mother knew she was dying. As such she had time to prepare, paying in advance for her own cremation and for the distribution of her ashes off the coast of Santa Barbara, California. Read more

Bird Books and Other Wonders

Filed Under All Posts, Beauty, Melissa Howden, Politics | 10 Comments

Melissa Howden believes in the power and danger, the wonder and necessity of art.

Last week, my friend Stefanie sent me a link to the image above, entitled The Language of Birds. The image of a site-specific installation across from the famous City Lights bookstore in North Beach, San Francisco made me gasp out loud in wonder. The “birds” are books in flight. Below them on the street are phrases embedded in the walk from over 90 authors, as if their words have fallen out of the books. The piece, by artists Brian Goggin and Dorka Keen, was commissioned by the San Francisco Arts Commission.

Seeing the “bird books” ignited delight and made me thrill at the prospect of a pilgrimage to the site when next I am in the area. The fact that such a piece exists at all, and was commissioned by a public agency for the benefit of all, is also incredibly heartening.

Thanks to my mother who began taking us to live theatre at a very early age (she always got seats in the last row so that we could stand up in the seats to see and not disturb others) I grew up with an appreciation for art as something as vital and necessary as the air I breathe. Art that is successful, no matter its form, has the affect of rearranging my cells, creating a sense of expansion and challenging my beliefs. Read more

Refuge Re-dux

Filed Under All Posts, Family, Melissa Howden, Relationships | 8 Comments

It used to be that every summer afternoon in Santa Fe, New Mexico was cleansed by a monsoon. As a child, I spent many summers in Santa Fe with my grandmother, my Nana. Those summer monsoons came like clockwork—hard rain with thunder and lightening for about an hour—cooling and cleansing everything in the high desert.

Until the storms rolled in, my brother and I would play outside creating forts, running races, building little villages out of sticks and leaves peopled by rocks with painted faces: imagination unfettered. When the rain thundered in we’d head inside for tea and cinnamon toast.

My grandmother’s mother was English, so tea with milk and sugar was a staple in her life. Admittedly the tea my Nana made us was a little milkier and sweeter then, but still it instilled in me the sense of tea and toast as refuge—from the storm. Read more

My Purposeful Life

Filed Under All Posts, Melissa Howden, Relationships | 10 Comments

I try to be an adult.  By this I mean I try to act with maturity, awareness and with consideration of others. I am, after all, 51 ½ and “this many” months old. Sometimes though I just want to act on my impulses, which is to say ACT OUT!

Recently, I was having a difficult time with a loved one. We were in one of those cycles of talking and fussing, fussing and talking. It was a circular form of talking in which nobody was being heard and nobody was listening.  Going nowhere.

I guess one sign of maturity, which I’d like to think comes hand in hand with age, is that I am able to recognize patterns and occasionally access some of my adult tools to improve the situation. In this case I knew that what I needed was to just quit talking and get quiet, while my loved one, on the other hand, wanted to forge on through to a resolution.  Read more

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