Kate Ristau's Blog, page 39

Strategic Bushery: Drawing Dragons Day 48

There are bushes, and then there are strategic bushery. I learned about them in the first few days of drawing dragons. You see, you can either, you know, draw the legs (it’s hard, Simone!), or draw a bush. Strategically.

Rowan asked me to draw this dragon:

from this book:

His hand is hiding the strategic bushery, but here it is in all its glory:

And now, dear reader, a blessing for you:

May you wear wonder all your days,

and if ever it fades,

may all that is good grant you

strategic bushery.

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Soup: Drawing Dragons Day 47

We made soup today.

Big chunks of carrots and potatoes with tiny onions threaded through salty broth.

I peeled the carrots — long, orange strips dropping into the big white bowl in the sink. Slow peels. I cut my finger a couple of years ago, a big red slice that still makes me awkward around the peeler.

Sometimes, I let my son use it. But not today. It’s so hard to forget the possibility of red. The blood on the cutting board. And there’s days when I’d rather protect him, then set him off on the road to culinary freedom.

He has a little red chopper.

He cuts up the carrots, steals a potato, and tries to peel it by slicing off the edges. He barely has any potato left once the brown is all gone.

I stare at the fat peels, remembering potato skins at the Deck Motel and Restaurant. Truck Stop off the interstate. I was eighteen, and working the late shift. I remember picking the platter up from the silver counter, placing them on my tray. The fried brown peels covered in cheese and sour cream and bacon and more cheese. And something green — depending on the day.

“I cut myself, you know.”

He’s holding his hand, staring over at me.

“Come here,” I say.

He comes over, stands by the sink, and we rinse the cut clean. We find the heart-shaped bandage and wrap it tight around his pointer finger.

“How do you think that happened?”

“I don’t know,” he says, pulling the soccer ball from under the table. “Let’s play.”

He won, tiny feet flashing by me. I pulled out the bowls, ladled in the vegetables. Bob dropped ice cubes into his bowl.

The soup was good — salty. The potatoes dissolved in my mouth.

“I have another cut, you know.”

I look over at him. He’s holding his hand toward me again.

“Come here,” I say.

We walk to the bathroom where we rinse the cut.

“You got that one too.” I say.

“I did,” he agrees.

“I’m sorry. That looks like it hurts.”

I placed the potato skins down at a family’s table. The mom helped the boy out of his coat, his fingers reaching. The girl grabbed for a big cheesy peel. Their teeth sunk in. They smiled.

He ate his soup, and now he’s asleep. I glanced at Facebook.

My friend Sam was in lockdown for two hours today while they searched his college campus for an active shooter.

Sam is safe, and his students are safe. No shooter was found.

It’s getting late. The story is almost done.

My sixteen-year old self picked up the empty plate.

My thirty-six year old self rinsed off the cutting board.

And then I drew a dragon.

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Pudding: Drawing Dragons Day 46

These two women

Names on my calendar

Waiting

A small reminder

In the crazy of the day

Still

All the expectations

The distractions

And the urge

To crawl back into the den

But out come the shoes

The scarf

The keys

The door

The goodbye

The restaurant

The table

The hello

The smiles

The laughter

The talking

The wincing

The anger

The frustration

The nods of understanding

We know

We linger

We order dessert

Butterscotch pudding

With these two women

 

 

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This time last year: Drawing Dragons Day 45

This time last year I was flailing. Drowning. Reaching for straws. Making imagery and metaphors out of everything.

Rowan’s surgery was just around the corner and there were literal hearts everywhere. Confetti hearts. A heart-shaped box of chocolates. Mylar heart balloons, swaying in the air above his head. Those Sweethearts-brand heart-shaped candies.

I still remember standing in that candy aisle, staring at those Mylar balloons, and explaining what “Be Mine” meant.

Here is my essay that Literary Mama published  last year about Valentine’s Day.

Be Mine

“I love you so much,” I say.

Rowan snuggles his face into my shoulder, then pulls back to free his mouth. “I love you to the moon and back.”

I kiss his forehead. “I love you to the stars.”

He stiffens up, excitement rolling through his body. Ideas push away sleep. “I love you around the world and to the galaxies and back around 50.”

I push his hair back from his face. “I love you to the sun. As hot as the sun.”

He nods his head hard. “And your feet would burn. You’d need ice.”

“It feels like that sometimes,” I say. “Love does. Like burning feet. Superhot.”

It starts this way. Declarations of love. Adoration. He cuts out pink hearts and pastes them to white paper, sprinkles them with glitter, and signs his name. I’m his first valentine, and he is mine. Someday, he’ll find another one. Hopefully, I’ll like them. Hopefully, they’ll be smart and funny and kind, and they’ll treat him with the kind of love that keeps you patient when you’re raging and brings you coffee when you’re tired. The kind that snuggles you in and holds you close for no other reason than you are who you are. That kind of love. A really big love.

But until that day comes, and he finds that love, his hearts are for me.

Today’s cupcakes

The candy, though. That’s all for him. He knows about it. He’s seen it. He loves candy—almost as much as he loves me. He says it’s his superhero power: He’s the Sweety Eater. All cookies shall crumble beneath his touch. Cakes shall collapse and crème brûlées crack. Sugar shall fail, and he shall prevail. Bring on the Valentine’s Day sugar-filled declarations of adoration.

Me? I’ve always been apathetic about Valentine’s Day. It rubs me the wrong way with its shoddy red bears and chalky candy sweets and stale heart-shaped chocolates.

But this year, it’s different.

~

Confetti hearts. A heart-shaped box of chocolates. Mylar heart balloons, swaying in the air above his head. Those Sweethearts-brand heart-shaped candies.

He stares down the aisle, looks at the shades of pink, red, purple.

Today’s cupcakes disappearing

“Can I have one?”

Could you say no?

“Which one?” I ask.

“All of them,” he says, then laughs maniacally, his sugar-crazed eyes sparkling.

He picks up a box of heart-shaped candies, shakes it twice, then gazes through the tiny plastic window on the package to the heart shapes underneath.

“What does it mean?”

“Be mine,” I read. “What do you think it means?”

He stares down hard at the tiny heart. “That you should be with me. All the time.”

“That’s right. I’ll be with you.”

He smiles that smile. The crazy one. The one that has ideas. “You’d come to school. You’d do work with me.”

“We’d play on the playground.”

“And you’d go down the slide. The two slides. I’d go down one, and you’d go down the other. We’d hold hands. You’d have to.”

I would. I’d go down the slide.

I’d do anything. I’m flailing. Drowning. Reaching for straws. Making imagery and metaphors out of everything. But I see his real heart everywhere, big and red. It explodes from his body and rains down confetti and sprinkles. It’s the donuts, the chocolates, the Snoopy card with the big red heart that says, “You’re PAWS-itively special.”

I’m trying to find a way around the thing that I can’t get away from. I’m trying to be in the moment, to love what we have right now, and love him as real as I can, but it’s hard with all these symbols crashing into my face and his heart enlarging inside his tiny body and me without a plan for how to move forward or away.

We’re working on staying sane and staying open. And, we’re working our way through a hell of a lot of candy.

That’s the plan, for now. Candy hearts. Valentines. Boxes of chocolate. Declarations of love, like the tiny white heart with splashes of color that my friend knitted for him. It filled him with joy. We’ll keep filling him up, straight to the top, showing him how much we care. We’ll raid the grocery stores today and buy out their old stock. Send him notes and cards full of sweetness and love. In the face of the unknown, the pain and the grief, we create. We tell stories, shape our symbols, and bind together what we can in the best way we know how. We bring out our pens, our paint, our knitting needles, and our soup pots. We hold onto each other.

We can’t fix Rowan’s heart—that’s the surgeon’s job. It took me a long time to accept that. I wish I could be in control, or that I could make it all go away, but I can’t, and that sucks. But you and me, we can hold him up, pull him in, and make him stronger. We can cut and glue and paste and glitter. We can make our symbols, share our love, and push down the ache. We can create our own kind of magic, full of stories and light and possibility.

At the end of it, that’s all I know, and all I understand. We can’t do any of this alone. We’re made for each other, like sprinkles on a donut, the words on a candy heart, or glitter on a valentine. The sweetness and the sparkle hold back the pain.

Today

We ended that post by asking for Valentines:

We’ll heal his heart with hearts of our own, great big red and pink ones. We’ll make him feel safe, and happy, and strong. We’ll cover him in glitter.

The Valentines poured in, and we taped them on the wall heading up the stairs.We just took them down before Christmas. We placed them in his memory box, and wondered what this year would feel like — when there was space and air and we could breathe on the other side of his surgery.

After a day of cupcakes and chocolate for breakfast, I’m not going to lie: Today was delicious.

So, here’s a ridiculous dragon made of pink hearts. May your days be as sweet as mine.

Be kind to each other. We need it.

And keep creating.

Kate

P.S.: You can read more of my essays at Literary Mama . They are a wonderful community of writers and mommas.

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Little Pink Dragon: Drawing Dragons Day 44

Amazing things have happened the last few days.

The New York Times shared our story. 

I talked about Shadow Girl on OPB’s Think Out Loud.

My story “Star Crunch” went up on Storytellers Telling Stories.

And I drew this little pink dragon:

She is looking at something over there. It’s really important. I’ll let you know what it is later.

Wonder loves pink, so I drew the dragon for him; a little pink valentine.

After the busyness of today, he settled into bed easily tonight, ready for sleep. But he tricked me…there was a book underneath the covers.

I remember growing up, sneaking books to bed, reading by the light of my alarm clock, just like my friend Christine Hanolsy. She tells the story of how she used to do that, and now her son does too.

So does Wonder.

Apples don’t fall far from bushels or something.

The only problem is: Wonder doesn’t have an alarm clock.

I think I should give him a flashlight.

Keep creating,

Kate

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Little Dragon: Drawing Dragons Day 43

My little dragon shoots fire sometimes, but he has a sweetness to him. Sometimes, it comes out in drips. Sometimes, it shoots out like a fire hose and YOU CAN’T EVEN HANDLE IT.

Today, I drew my dragon from this reference. The artist, hardstyleravers, is clearly referencing a whole genre of art that I’m calling it SUPER CUTE BABY DRAGON ART (Google it and find the glory).

Here’s my rendition, to be inked tomorrow. I’m going to put my little dragon to bed. Send me sleepy blessings instead of fiery ones.

Keep creating,

Kate

 

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Momma and Baby: Drawing Dragons Day 42

Wonder used to call me Mom. At some point last year, he started calling me Momma. It falls off his lips like a question dipped in hope.

He took a nap today — which hasn’t happened in months. He said, “Momma, I’m tired.” I set my coffee down on the nightstand and curled in next to him. We played a game to see who could keep their eyes closed the longest.

He won.

But I took a nap too. Head dipped toward his chest so my breath wouldn’t hit his face. My coffee went cold. I reheated it two hours later, when he bounded out of my arms and out the door.

Sharing his story on Friday in the New York Times was strange and wonderful and heartbreaking. Hearing stories of other parents who’ve loved and held and hugged and lost their kids in the same situation left me wanting to draw what I felt: this big love for this little boy.

So, here you have a little dragon and his momma. Love doesn’t always have to be big enough to set a blazing fire; sometimes, it just needs to be warm enough to snuggle into.

Happy creating,

Kate

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Coloring Pages and Stars: Drawing Dragons

I finished drawing my dragon before I headed out to celebrate my friend Robert’s birthday in an escape room that we could not escape from. When the staff came and let us out, we continued the celebration with lemon tart. My friend Robert is amazing, smart, funny and kind. And he’s a librarian.

Luckily, he escaped from that room one way or another.

When I got home, my boys had made coloring pages of my dragon. I think you’ll appreciate them:

Here is a big dragon for you to color in too. She’s holding a little star/sun for my niece Lily’s star birthday. She shines as bright as the sun. Happy birthday, little dragon.

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Block after block: Drawing Dragons Day 40

Our story appeared in The New York Times this morning:

Block after block, we’re building up time with him, we’re living in the moment, and we’re creating the memories we want to have, and guarding against the ones we can’t escape from.

You can read the whole essay here.

So much of life feels like that — like you’re building and creating, balancing blocks on top of each other, one by one. Like you’re trying to create something that’s not just stable, but also beautiful and big and important.

Sometimes, it’s easy. You see the form of the thing. You trust the line, the shape. You know where the work will lead you.

And other times, it’s like this dragon. I erased his whole body yesterday, and had to come back to it today. Bob showed me a way I could do it, and I snapped at him, then tore away at my lines.

I wanted advice, and I didn’t want advice. I really just wanted it to work — for the whole thing to make sense.

There’s more work to do here, but I’ll finish it tomorrow. Time to go to sleep before my sassiness explodes the house and I burn up the pencils and all of the paper for drawing dragons in the first place.

We’re lucky, really. To have this time together. To love each other this much. But I should also know when to put the dragons to bed. When to wait for the morning.

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Our story is in The New York Times

Anybody who visits our house knows that our son LOVES Legos. Today, our story about Legos came out in The New York Times. Here’s how it begins:

“Can I get it?”

His tiny hands are outstretched, his feet firmly planted in the Target toy aisle. He is holding up another Lego set.

Rowan is 6 years old, and his admiration for Lego building blocks is unending.

My fingers tap the red handle of the cart. He’s getting spoiled. Everyone knows it, but no one says it, and the reason is simple: He had heart surgery in April. He was born with two holes in his little heart. One closed, but the other one stayed open. We watched it. We waited. We hoped that it would close on its own.

But it didn’t. Instead, his heart became more and more enlarged. Over time, that can permanently scar his lungs’ blood vessels. It can lead to arrhythmias, shortness of breath and swelling. It can lead to valve damage. It can lead to death.

I grip the cart, feeling the tightness in my own chest, the ache and the pull of the stone that dropped down into my lungs the day we scheduled his surgery. For months, that stone has been stuck there, somewhere between my lungs and my throat, holding back the tears and the weight that grab me unexpectedly in the long hours of the night. That stone never disappears.

Now we’re standing in the Target aisle five weeks after his heart surgery. His hands are outstretched, and I’m thinking of all the Legos he’s gotten — four sets the week before. He keeps asking, and we keep saying yes. We’ll never stop.

Read the rest at The New York Times OHMYGOSH!

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