Lazy Blogging

When I began this blog just a few months ago I really did intend to update it regularly. I love to write. I want to be better at it and in order to be better at it I need to indulge in it more often. But, as has been the theme of this year, life seems to get in the way of all of those well-intentioned projects that live in my head surrounded by daisies and ponies and that seem like such a marvelous use of my time. Perhaps 2010 will bring with it the inspiration to bypass my Sagittarian tendencies and actually blog/decorate/read/scrapbook (delete as appropriate), which is what I really want to do with the time I have to myself.

I'm thinking about this because I just read my wonderful friend Paula's most recent blog, at Confessions of a Slightly Neurotic New Mother. She is cramming every spare minute outside of work and wifery into being with her beautiful baby girl, and still finds time to write heartfelt, inspiring blogs about the challenges that go along with her new role as Super Mum! All I have to deal with is the occasional run around the apartment with a Swiffer and remembering to feed animals twice a day - I should be able to blog more consistently.

Anyway, Paula is not only my inspiration for motherhood, but also my inspiration to write something - anything - today!

So, in keeping with the theme of poetry that started this blog off all those months ago, along with the desire to obliterate my MySpace page (where my original blog lives from many years ago) and the fact that today tastes like winter for the first time this season, here's a poem I wrote while deep in the throes of my first NYC winter in 2007. And now, as I look out of my office window on a wall of grey, the building next door blocking out any real notion of what the weather might be doing, I imagine it is dusk in this city I love, and starting to snow, and somewhere in the HBO version of my life the camera is panning up and away over Manhattan to the sounds of Baby It's Cold Outside (the Tom Jones and Cerys Matthews version, obviously), gearing up for Christmas. And I find myself wondering what will be waiting for me when this winter passes, as they inevitably do, and I come face to face with another spring...

The First Kiss

You creep up on the city.

Silent,

Breathless.

With an icy whisper

You catch me,

Almost home,

And make me listen for you.

You caress my face

Dancing on my cheek,

My tongue,

The inevitable eyelash.

I linger.

The air is crisp like sheet glass,

The streets blurring in your presence.

And a man in a long coat says,

"How perfect."

And holds the mittened hand of his

Wife of twenty years

And smiles.

The first kiss of winter.

The promise of long nights

And warm fires

And good wine,

Playful and inviting,

Fluttering in my path.

The first dusting of days to come

Gently teasing the romance out of

Another January.

But you don't stay long.

This is just a sigh for you.

You sway,

You fade,

You slip away.

And in the time it takes to notice you were here

I am left wanting, wondering,

And waiting for spring.