The archives.

Today, around 11 a.m., I was driving along 5600 West, from West Valley City through Kearns to West Jordan. During one part of my life, I drove along that road a lot--for soccer games, especially, and for a few blocks, it was also the westernmost leg of my daily walk. One year, there was a huge migration of tiny orange butterflies, and we saw them, in flight and grounded, all along this road

Like every other place in the valley, lots of things along this road are still recognizable, and many things have changed. When we lived out there, our subdivision was called "Oquirrh Shadows," because the Oquirrhs loomed to the west. The wind blew fierce and wild. The road still feels like a wide, windy corridor. All the shapes of the houses seem familiar, except for the new ones built in big developments to the west, in what were once fields.

There was a new building, a plain boxy structure built of some kind of beige brick, not a single frill or ornament, except the letters spelling out SALT LAKE COUNTY ARCHIVES. I wondered briefly what might be archived there. Wondered if maybe something fanciful, or scandalous. Probably not--probably just minutes and records.

Early this morning, my daughter left. Her flight was at 5 a.m., which meant she left the house at 3. I got up to give her a kiss and a hug goodbye. All day, I've been in a little haze--of interrupted sleep, of the end (almost) of the holiday visits--and thinking about the new year, what I want, how to focus my efforts to those ends.

I have a document called "Daily Writing" that I have been keeping--not daily--for a few years now. So when I turn my attention back to writing, I usually start there. Sometimes I look through it. Does it create momentum or drag, to look back at what I've composed there? What is this activity, anyway--recovering pieces of memory from the shred of a voice, a little note, an old poem or part of a poem?

In my archives--it is an unsystematic archives, it is unstable, it has no specific focus, it is copious and diffuse, it is unsearchable by any method but the delve--there are old journal articles, college papers, drafts of poems by myself and others, letters, drawings by my children, immunization records (although I cannot be asked at this point to find them at any point when they might be of use), certificates, photographs. Sometimes I think it is time to get rid of all, or most of it. That prospect overwhelms me. Periodically, I will find myself in a ruthless mood, and will just toss things with very little examination of the specific things I'm getting rid of.

Would a complete purge constitute a clean slate? Sometimes I think so, but mostly I do not. The deep structure of the archive, as it turns out, is in my brain, where there are and will be--have never been-- any more clean slates.

Today's stats:

New music: Whatever they were playing on KRCL midmorning; Foster the People
Long walk: one
Writing: added notes to "Daily Writing"; this blog post 
Enjoying my life: two grandsons came over for pancakes, watercoloring, block-building, and Spiderman. A quiet moment with the historian when he came home from work.

"It."

Recently, I read this (a post on Terrible Mother which makes reference to a now-notable accusation made by Alice Walker's daughter that she was a bad mom), then this (an article on Salon that talks some more about that accusation, following through to a consideration of the question about whether a mom can be an important writer and an attentive mother--the answer the author comes up with is, "Trust me, a woman really cannot do both. The myth that we can is a dangerous one."), and I have ever since been wondering about this question:

when women ask, "can women have/do/be it all?" what is "it"?

This is a serious question. Now that I am officially old, I really do look at my life with a different filter. For instance, when I look at my 20s, I think, there were people who could have, or maybe should have, given me advice about, say, how to "do" grad school, and maybe I could have learned from others how to focus and sharpen my ambitions beyond, say, getting good grades and keeping my scholarship. But, and on the other hand, if I had become a different kind of person--a person with sharpened and more focused ambitions, or a person who made more of her grad school experience--my life might have turned out quite differently than it had. At this point, I'm not sure that would be all that much of an improvement.

What if "it" is "a rich, full life"? Is that so impossible? (As you can see, I am conducting an argument with myself. Feel free to jump in at any point, though I can't promise you I will yield the floor.)