Fair or Foul?

The pitcher’s mound is dark with rain.  The path from home to first is sloppy.  But the puddles have been filled with sand, and the fathers have just put down a fresh white line clearly delineating fair and foul.

Little girls in raincoats attack their own field with rakes.  Watching them, I find myself thinking back to when my daughters played softball and all those years when I didn’t say a word despite the cold burn of resentment I saw smoldering in their eyes.

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This Situation is Only Temporary: And Yet...

Squints and my family are no longer able to care for Destructo on our own. 

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Beauty or the Beast?

Well, it’s eight o’clock in the morning and I’m at yet another baseball practice one hour before yet another baseball game.  And I have to say, I’m cranky: The shower drain suddenly decided to block itself up this morning.  Houses have a funny way of making up projects when it thinks things are running too smoothly for you.  So, here I am, parked in a folding chair for the next three hours, Destructo at my side, my husband chauffeuring V and Filibuster to work and yet more aptitude tests before meeting me here, hopefully with a large coffee from Starbucks.  After the game, there will be the obligatory team photos, and this makes me even grumpier.

* * *

I despise pictures.  If someone brings out a camera at a family event, I’ll turn my head so as not to be captured on film.  If there’s some obligatory family photo, where we all have to line up by generation and height, I’ll duck behind someone tall at the last minute so that, when the picture is printed there’s an empty spot where I ought to be.

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This Situation is Only Temporary: What’s in a Name?

“I’m sorry,” Bruce said to me last week.  He shook his head sorrowfully.  “You are no longer permitted to enter this library without the puppy.”

So today, Squints packed him up and we were off. 

“There’s the little guy.”  Bruce came out from behind the checkout desk.  The other librarians emerged from their posts.  “Look at how big he’s gotten.  Look at those ears!  Those paws!”  Bruce bent over and rubbed the back of Destructo’s neck.

Destructo responded by gnawing on Bruce’s index finger.  His coworkers laughed.  “Puppies chew, Bruce.”

It was as good a time as any: I held up the library book I’d been hiding behind my back.  Destructo had pulled it from a shelf and bitten through several pages before tearing the cover off.  “Apparently, he’s not a fan of Shakespeare.” 

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Unmasked

Baseballs smack against leather gloves.  A man in a Phillies hat pushes a wheelbarrow down the path where a group of volunteers paints the new gazebo.  A woman rakes the mulch around the dogwood trees that were planted last year in honor of two athletes who died too young.  It’s getting dark, but there’s a gentle warmth to the air.

In the dugout, the boys chew heartily on bubblegum—watermelon, cinnamon, mint chocolate chip.  Impossibly large bubbles emerge from their lips and splatter on freckled faces.  The brothers of the pitcher whine in the bleachers—they want a snack, their DS, a drink.

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Baseball Tryouts

Deep pot holes collect snowmelt. Crocuses, purple and yellow, spring up, lifting tiny, hopeful faces towards the sun. Hyacinths, daffodils too, reach tentative arms from the soil. For once, garage doors are thrown open wide. Kids ride by on bikes, scooters and skateboards. Colorful chalk drawings fill driveways. Starlings gather at the top of a leafless tree, chattering at the dogs on the sidewalk. Despite the chill in the air, a boy helps his father wash his truck, soapy water trailing down into the street. Released from winter’s icy grip, people emerge from their homes, pale and bleary-eyed and hopeful.  Eager for summer, they rake flower beds, spread fertilizer, cut away dead reminders of winter.

Across the street, hopeful ten year old boys try out for the baseball team: red bats…blue bats…black bats…silver…all with that unmistakable ping when they make contact with the ball, a sound as undeniably a harbinger of the season as the spring peepers that will sing me to sleep tonight. 

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