When I drove up to the Kennesaw house, after traveling cross country for days on end, this is what greeted me. This. Cornucopia. Of a house.

One year ago, w hen I pulled from the driveway headed for ,Taos this is what the house looked like.

It's an old cedar home and the interior has always been cedar-lined, decorated in dark rusts, greens and umbers. In the last days of May 2008, having just completed a huge moving sale, (which included nine hundred and eleven auctions on ebay, which made a small dent in our personal and business inventory) we pulled out of the driveway eager for home. Silas and I had three greeting card lines to conceive, design and deliver and we couldn't wait to get back to the studio. Mernie was staying in Kennesaw, and to relieve her boredom and revive her sense of joy, she started remodeling the house.

It all started with a hail storm. One dark and stormy night, winds blew in from the North, and they blew hard. They huffed and puffed and blew our roof down. Or at least a few shingles. At any rate the roof had to be replaced which got a home repairman out to the house, which got Mernie's jaw to flap open when said repairman pronounced, "You're lucky this house hasn't fallen down around you! Half the wood's rotten!" Over a year later, the siding, decks and roof have been replaced, it's been painted, and half of the interior has been redesigned and updated. On top of it all? The explosion of joy that is the color. Mernie admits to going a little over the top with it all. But there'll be no apologies. Over the top is where she lives. (Can you imagine how popular this has made us with our Pine Tree Country Club neighbors? Oh yeah. It's that good. Think six o'clock news.)

Mernie says "don't look too close! The carpet still needs replacing, wood floors are going down and the painting has not been finished!" So there. 

My personal favorite--the washroom! Finally a cheery place to do laundry! I can't help but feel joyful every time I'm in it.

 You're not gonna freakin' believe what happened to me last night. I mean, I don't freakin' believe what happened to me last night. In the space of thirty minutes we had crying, rending of garments, gnashing of teeth and more than one belly-crawl around the studio's cold, concrete floor, my face scraping along the cracked, uneven surface.

But I should back up. I'm standing at the top of the stairs, ready for bed (we sleep in a loft) looking down into the studio where I can see the duirmouse's cage clearly. He's eating peacefully, but I know he's saving up strength for his Trapezius Maximus routine, which will last all night. (Haven't seen his acrobatics? You must! Click here.) "Honey?" I call down to Silas, too lazy to move my collage-sore body back down the stairs. "Will you secure his cage for the night?" I watch as Silas goes to the cage to remove the wire upper deck, which our mouse (aka Houdini) is fond of sneaking through. Silas calls to Mernie, "Will you put the board on when I lift the cage?" Mernie secures the foam core board over the aquarium and adds the thick art book we use to weigh the board down. We've had to be incredibly crafty keeping the duirmouse alive. Aside from all kinds of gastronomic issues related to raising an abandoned newborn, there's the physical threat of being a small creature in a vast environment filled with natural predators. And then there's Houdini himself, who loves squeezing through the metal bars of the upstairs portion of his Townhouse.

Again, I should back up. It's a windy summer evening in early July and we're staring at The Townhouse in disbelief. Houdini's gone. He's not asleep in the gondola, not hiding in his grass nest, not pounding plastic on his spinning wheel. He's simply. Gone. The midget is only six weeks old - healthy, active, but not yet climbing upside down or dangling from his water bottle one-armed. We'd selected The Townhouse carefully, conscious of the mouse-habit of escape by means of gnawing, digging or squeezing through very tight spaces. We purchased a ten gallon aquarium with one of those little wire cages that sit, double deck-style, on top of the aquarium. We measured the spaces between the metal bars and bought the smallest, tightest configuration available on the market. And on this night he'd managed to find the one bar, slightly bent upwards to accommodate his spinning wheel. Silas pointed at it. "Aha! The little Houdini must have pushed and pulled at it in the night. He created just enough space to crawl through." But where was he now? My heart turned over. The thought of my little guy in a house that's so...that's so...well, let's just say that in an instant I experienced a throat-tightening, heart-splitting, ashes -and-sack-cloth appreciation of the cliche "needle in a haystack." It's not that our house is large, unless you're an inch long and short-sighted. The sheer number of things he could crawl over or under that could maim or kill him astounded me, and the overwhelming opportunities for him to get stuck or lost or, god forbid, find his way outside, threatened my sanity.

So picture me looking around frantically, checking all the shelves. We'd placed The Townhouse on top of a bookshelf, situated between Silas's computer and my painting table so we'd both be able to watch his antics. But that meant his cage was five feet off the ground. What a giddy height from which to fall. Dangerous for a mouse so young. I checked the floor. And that's when I saw it, a little face peering up at me behind the bookshelf, between the tubes of Golden paint, next to the Gesso jar on my art table. "So this is how it's gonna be?" I whisper into my hands as I hold him. "Yanno the third time is not the charm. Three strikes you're out."

It wasn't the first time and it won't be the last before the end of this tale. But once again, I should back up.

Imagine being four weeks old and already you've been abandoned by your mother, force fed by a weird smelling person, bereaved of your brother and sister who die from digestive complications, all while you're blind and half deaf. I'm considering the Shakespearean drama of this little mouse's life as I scurry around the back of my Toyota 4runner, searching frantically for his tiny form. On the two hour trip home from Santa Fe to Taos, he'd jumped his box. We called it The Nursery, a fortified cardboard box with a heating blanket inside. Its sides were at least twenty times Houdini's height at four weeks old. I cannot find him among the plastic bags from PetSmart and Target and am afraid any moment he could squeeze through a crack or jump out the door as I open it to search for him. He could make a dash toward Izzy's car seat, and she'd be only too happy to help him disappear. Forever. His new cage (The Townhouse) is among the very bags he's hiding between. "I can't believe he's done it again! And with the board on top!" I say, hands on hips.

Allow me, once more, to back up. Twenty four hours exactly. Silas and I are driving back from a dinner in town. Houdini's in the back of the car in The Nursery, for he's still fed every few hours and we'd planned to be away from the house for most of the afternoon and evening. That's me in the pitch black night on the side of the road in the purple dress with the fringed shawl, climbing into the back interior of my SUV and closing the door behind me while trying not to squash a little grey blur in the process. The back storage area of a 4runner is not huge unless you're smaller than a Post-It note. "He could be anywhere. Watch the dogs!" I shout to Silas. He pulls their car seats into the front. "What'll we do?" Silas asks as I move boxes destined for our storage unit this way and that.  I see nothing and panic. "I don't know...but if we all get out of this alive we're driving to PetSmart in Santa Fe tomorrow and marching ourselves directly to the hamster cages!"

Still backing up. And in backing up I should not be surprised to find that two days after Houdini was born, he single-handedly escaped from the nest his mouse mother built for him under our washing machine, thereby saving himself and his two mouse siblings from starvation. He crawled out onto the cold, concrete floor and squealed til he exhausted himself. I found him the next morning and this is why I am now, last night, shaking my head with disbelief. How could I expect him to be anything different from what he is? An adventurer? A dare devil? A wanderer and a rogue? Still, it does not stop the tears from falling, for I fear this time is different. This time, he managed to squeeze out of an impossibly tight situation, escaping the weight of a six pound book on top of his cage! And since he's older now - ten weeks old - he's fast. When not in my hands or on my body, he's a darter and a jumper. A certified scurrier. The spinning wheel. My heart is on it. I can hear it in my ears. whirrr whirrr whirrr. Round round round.

But one last time, let's back up. It's last night around midnight and I'm going to bed. That's me on the stairs asking Silas to secure the mouse cage for the night. He obliges, Mernie assists, we all turn out the lights and head to bed. Hours later I wake suddenly. In the dark, on my bed, in our upstairs loft, I feel Houdini run across my hand. It lasts just a second. A delicate pink paw, a flurry of soft fur and then...nothing. I shoot up in bed. Am I dreaming? My heart settles. I wipe at my mascara-encrusted eyes. It must have been a dream. I lay back down, willing myself toward calmness. Still, I can't quite get rid of the sensation. It's as if he really was upstairs. But it's not that time yet.

You see, when we bought The Townhouse, we also bought The Spaceship, a futuristic-looking contraption full of translucent tubing. Silas says Houdini is Buddha incarnate, a soul worthy of luxury and adoration, for he rides around all day in my shirt, sleeps in my cleavage, eats the kinds of nuts and berries a wild field mouse would slay a cat for, and plays in not one but two palaces. The Townhouse is good for climbing, but with its food dish and sleeping nest, doesn't provide much room for playing and exercise. So I deemed it fit he have a second cage, one where he can get full-on calisthenics. He wakes as I am going to sleep. Since we cannot leave the second story of The Townhouse on at night (given his propensity for escape) he's bound to a fairly small space during his most active hours. Being the over-indulgent, adoring, mouse mother I am, when I wake each morning at 4am to pee, I fetch mousie from his townhouse confines and take him upstairs to The Spaceship. It sits across from our bed and allows the boy to run and play for hours while we're still sleeping. The Townhouse, with its upper deck for climbing and its lower space for sleeping is for day. The Spaceship with its compartments and super fast wheel is for night. Maybe Silas is right. Maybe he is Buddha.

I roll over and look at the clock. It's 2:30am. Not yet time to spring him. Still, I can't get rid of the sensation that something is amiss. I can feel those paws on my arm. I crawl out of bed and down the stairs. I flip on the light and breathe a deep sigh of relief as I see the foam core board still secure to the cage, the Tricia Guild's Pattern book still on top. I decide to take him to The Spaceship early. The whirrr whirrr whirrr of his spinning wheel always makes me sleep better, deeper. I take the book off while my eyes search his cage. At 4am he's usually buzzing all over the place, spazzed out like a coked-up rock star in the back room of Studio 54, practically jumping into my hand to escape his night-time confines. Something's wrong. Everything's too still. And that's when I realize it. My hands run over everything in the cage. He's not in the grass nest, or the cotton one. He's not inside the paper roll. He's not under the maze of twigs. He's nowhere. Gone.

But how? The top was still secure when I came downstairs, the book still weighing down the board to keep him inside. Houdini. He must have figured out a way. I go into the living room and wake Mernie and then shout up to Silas in the loft. "The mouse is gone!"

I won't bother to detail the next half hour. It was one of the longest fractions of time I've passed. I could not fathom where to begin. Every time I got down on my belly to crawl under tables and furniture, to squeeze around heavy, cold, appliances searching for an impossibly small needle in a gargantuan haystack, I could feel those paws run across my arm. I asked Silas to check our loft. "He couldn't possibly be up there," he said, and I knew he was right. Still, I begged him just to look. Mernie took the living room, I volleyed from studio to bathroom to office. When Silas came downstairs I decided to check upstairs. Mernie continued looking in the living room. "I don't know why I'm up here," I called down to her. I opened the hatch of The Spaceship, hoping against hope he might come back for  food. Then I realized I was upstairs, an insane distance for a mouse to travel. "This is ridiculous," I muttered, checking the contents of the food bowl. I mean really, a mouse? Climbing stairs? Fifteen of them in a room where he's never even touched the floor? And the dogs? Izzy and Tinky sleep in bed with me, so for him to have crawled across my arm he'd have to face down both dogs, the dark, a set of stairs and broken free from an enclosed aquarium?  Please. All this from a mouse who so much as catches a whiff of a dog and scurries and buries in whatever shelter is closest? Pah-lease. I scolded myself back down the stairs and decided to search the closets. I grabbed the flashlight and headed back to the studio. Mernie called after me. "I know this sounds weird, but Grama was an ace when it came to finding things. She always turned up the impossible. Every time. I can hear her in my head saying 'Be still.' " I turned around to see her sitting on the couch, watchful. In my sleep-thickened, grief-stricken state, I could hear her truth, feel it, but I could not rest. I had to do something or face the feeling of him being lost or hurt or. Gone. I took the flashlight into the studio and crawled on my belly into the clothing closet.

I'm shoulders-deep into the storage closet, not five minutes later, when Mernie comes into the studio. "Angi, I heard something upstairs. What does the spinning wheel sound like?" I sat up too quick and saw stars. "It sounds like a whirr whirr whirr, like a really fast heartbeat," I spat, tongue tripping over teeth. Mernie reached down for me, offering her arm. "Then come quick, I swear I just heard that noise up in the loft."

I raced up the stairs, my heart whirring, Mernie right behind me, Silas on her tail. I ran to The Spaceship, looking all around it, on the floor, in the book shelves, under the blankets. "There he is!" Silas yelled, pointing to The Spaceship. He sat inside, on top of the wheel. I grabbed him and held him to my chest. whirrr whirrr whirrr. Relief. whirr whirr. Gratitude. whirrr. Love.

I'm not actually going to back up again. Instead, I'm going to hover. Around the question Silas posed to me a few weeks back. We were standing outside on our porch, watching the sunset colors shift and dance on Taos mountain, when mousie poked his head out of my sports bra to sniff the air.

"I wonder what it's like to be him," Silas pondered.

"You mean what it's like to be small? Or what it's like to be royalty?" I teased.

He reached out a finger to stroke the little grey head. One pink paw escaped my top to rest on Silas's thumb. "I'm thinking more like how does he translate his world? What does he think? Does he see your hand and think 'mother' 'friend' or just 'food'? Does he see your cleavage and think 'nap!'? or 'lunch'? as I would?"

I smacked him lightly on the bum. "He thinks 'comfort'," I said, holding my hand up for mousie to crawl into. He rested in my palm, eagerly sniffing the air. "Even though when I feel those pink paws on my hands, I think 'love'."

"Maybe he thinks 'home'," Silas mused pressing his nose up to meet twitching whiskers made of silk.

I liked that. I still do. But hovering there now as I do, I can sense my hesitation. My logical mind asserting that animals imprint with the person or thing that feeds them, the entity that tends them in the first few weeks of life. I was that entity. It doesn't change the DNA of a mouse suddenly into a being conscious of emotional relations. Our bond is chemical and behavioral. It's science, not love. But what a charming, enjoyable petri dish we are!

Or so I thought. Until last night. I still don't freakin' believe what happened to me last night. That little science experiment escaped a closed space under six pounds of pressure, then jumped or fell five feet to the floor and found his way into the kitchen, through the living room, into parts of our home his feet have never touched, and up a flight of stairs to my bed and across my arm. Facing down mortal chihuahua enemies at perilously close distances, he found me. And when I thought it was only a dream, and woke to the real-life nightmare of his absence, he managed somehow to stay alive in the loft, a very tiny space suddenly crowded with twelve panicked human and chihuahua feet.

In the middle of the night, in a mild July summer,  a mouse answered a man's question, turning a woman's heart into a spinning wheel: he found his way home. I race up the stairs and there he is, atop his wheel in The Spaceship. I grab him and nuzzle him to my cheeks. It was you! It wasn't just a dream! I hold him for a time, gratitude humbling me. But how? I can't wrap my brain around it, and my heart is spinning too fast to meter out the weights and measures of the moment. I'm tired. And more than relieved. As dawn peeks timidly from behind Taos mountain, I place Houdini in The Spaceship, hoping to get a little rest before the day begins. As I close my eyes, exhaustion and elation battle for my attention. As they both escort me toward sleep's horizon, I hear the soft thunder of the running wheel. He's been on an Odyssian journey and there's still energy left over for a spin on the wheel.

It's the last thing I hear as I drift away. whirrr. whirrr. whirrr. Like the heart. Like home.

***********************************

Watch "whirrr"on youtube. A little film about a whirring heart.

Life has ceased to exist as I knew it.

It started with the road trip. One food poisoned man, two chihuahuas and an acrobatic mouse kept me company as I drove the thousand plus miles from Taos to Kennesaw. After several balloon-infested parties, we put Tooley to rest on July 1st, cleaned house, packed the car and hit the road for the return trip. Yeah. You could say I was a little tired. But then you could also say that Michael Jackson was a tad eccentric. There and back again in ten days and the morning after our homecoming in Taos we unpacked the Uhaul and hit the streets for the fourth of July parade. But since July 5th? It's all a blur. Mernie's been our house guest, coming and going to Austin to see the rest of our family--which, I'm delighted to report, went swimmingly!--and we've been out to visit the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge, the John Dunn shops, the Enchanted Circle, the Mabel Dodge House, Kit Carson Park, with day trips to Arroyo Seco and Santa Fe.

Whew.

All this while trying to complete two magazine articles, eight new calendar designs and that forever-in-the-process recording of my audio book Duirwaighs and Dreamfields: A True Fairy Tale. But what's actually been completed? A whole lotta frettin' over What Comes Next. You know what I mean. That space in time where you're bombarded with change? When you no sooner get adjusted to the carpet of new circumstances than feel said carpet rushing out from under your feet, the world ablur, toes over your head as you tilt-a-whirl into the unexpected? That's been my July. I keep repeating to myself "I believe in Happy Endings." Translation: "No matter how shitty dinner looks, just keep going. Dessert's coming!"

No answers. Few ideas. Lots and lots of upheaval and change. And guess what? It's just about impossible to live anywhere other than Here and Now when your cheese is tossed around by the winds of change. So here I am. Watering plants. Filling hummingbird feeders. Nestling a baby mouse. Writing. Emailing. Wondering. Daughter. Mother. Wife. Working. Waiting. Tending.

That's me in the corner, losing my agenda...tending the What's Next cookfire.

Tooley loved balloons, sometimes, much to our collective chagrin. As soon as she spotted one, anytime, anywhere, she went ape-shit. Like Beatles-on-Ed-Sullivan screaming, fainting girls ape-shit. So even though her body was full of cancer and her bloodstream was pumped up with steroids to keep her pain low, Tooley had several balloon parties during our trip to see her. I video taped a few minutes of one such party so you could appreciate the unbridled lust of her fanaticism.

We all miss her. 

But perhaps I should back up and tell you a Polaroid-snapshot view of our trip cross country. We left on Saturday afternoon around 4pm, stopping once for dinner at a Subway restaurant in the middle of Bum Luck, Oklahoma, finally arriving at the La Quinta in Tulsa, OK at 5am. As we snuggled down into the cold sheets to try to catch some sleep (as the sun was coming up) The Duirmouse decided it was circus time, and his night-time antics kept us awake for another hour as we giggled and howled with laughter. We'd never seen him do backflips, and did not know that other mice (and apparently hamsters) are acrobatically inclined. We thought it was just our little adorable crazy mouse, which has earned him the nick name: Trapezius Maximus.

Sunday was father's day, and because Silas is such a good daddy in so many ways, I dedicated the day to him, but apparently Subway had other ideas. Silas's belly roiled and coiled in upon itself for hours, and in his own words, he "burned a brown trail from Oklahoma to Georgia." We stopped in St. Louis so Silas could tour my old stomping grounds, but he didn't see much for three days besides the inside of a La Quinta bathroom and the giant maw of its porcelain facilities. But on the last day! LUCK! Silas was well enough for us to get to the City Museum, one of my favorite places in the world! Do yourself a favor and visit citymuseum.org. I'll be writing more on this museum as I get time, cuz this place deserves it's own entry and a pilgrimage BY ALL. Where else can you find above-ground caves, real-life turtles, adult sized rubber-ball playpins, nineteenth century opera posters, a giant corn dog display and an antique doorknob collection? All in one place? You. Must. Go. Now.

We tried to have fun, and managed to let go a bit, sandwiched as we were between Silas's fevered brow (we think, in the end, it was food poison...) and Tooley's fate. I should probably relate to you here that the Duirmouse enjoyed the City Museum and even managed to go with me into the jungle gym. He also enjoyed the trip through Union Station, the journey to the Arch, the mermaid fountain downtown and of course the obligatory trip to the Delmar Loop, where we consumed a hickory burger--Duirmouse ate the lettuce--and attended a showing of "Away We Go" at the Tivoli. 

After three days in St. Louis, Silas's belly fully recovered, we climbed back into the Toyota and headed toward Mernie, Tooley and Petie, who were waiting in Kennesaw for our pack's reunion. When we pulled into the driveway, after the hugging, squeezing and squealing, I made my way upstairs and into the living room where Mernie keeps the balloons in a glass candy dish. Time for a little fiesta.