Smoked

My sister and I were talking about our kids the other day and I told her that some days, I just want to curl up in a cave and hide for awhile.

Because recently my daughters told me that living with me is like living in the military.

I admit that I want the house somewhat picked up: While I’m not into decorating the house with fancy-schmancy things, book bags and shoes and textbooks strewn all over the house aren’t quite the look I’m going for.  And, yes, perhaps I do get a bit cranky when I wait ten minutes for them in the school parking lot.  

And, well, yeah, I do get grumpy when I’m asked to drive too much. 

I mean, isn’t that what stay-at-home moms are supposed to do?  Stay at home?

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Prom Season

Robins wake me in the morning now.  My daffodils are ready to burst into bloom.  I have a feeling the peepers will be starting within the week. 

Spring is here. 

And that, unfortunately, can mean only one thing: It’s time to shop for prom dresses.

V drives us, carefully adjusting the seat for her five-two height before backing out of the drive and heading out to what she calls “new territory”—an area she’s never driven in before. 



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Let's Keep on Dancing

“What’s wrong?” I asked my husband, commonly referred to here as Darth.

He sighed “I’m in my What’s it all about, Alfie mood.”  This, of course, was in reference to the song my mother always used to begin singing whenever my brother, sisters or I would question the meaning of life.  Mom has another favorite she used to pull out, too.  Is that all there is?  …then let’s keep on dancing.

I understood my husband’s mood: His kids are growing up—and away from him.  He’s no longer their hero, but more of an annoyance. 


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Spin Class

So I finally returned my husband’s holey sweatpants and invested in a pair of yoga pants.  To celebrate, I signed up for a spin class.  I arrived with my daughter this evening, late as is our custom. 

We were woefully unprepared: We’d forgotten hand towels, of course.  And water bottles.  One of the students grinned at us, taking in our trendy yoga pants.  “You might want to invest in some thick bike shorts.”

I smiled.  I didn’t need bike shorts.  What was a spin class other than riding a stationary bike just a little bit faster than normal?


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Driving Lessons

A sunny day. High forties. Fluffy white clouds streaked across the sky.

A man stands outside with his young daughters. There are two bikes out in the driveway: A two-wheeler with training wheels. And one of those newfangled bikes, bright red seat a couple of inches off the ground. Pedals in front. A giant red handle in the back so that the child can be pushed along the sidewalk.

* * *

“Watch the curb! Watch the curb!”

Filbuster gets too close and scrapes the front tire on concrete.
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Holey Yoga

I tell myself, when I need to put a positive spin on things, that I take pride in the worn clothing my husband and I routinely wear.  The holes in the knees of our jeans; the wear around the necklines that no needle and thread could ever hope to repair; the sad, frayed sweaters—all are symbols: We are Frugal.  We are Salt of the Earth.  We Use Things Up. 

I tell myself we’re not Poor.  We’re not Cheap.    We’re not Waiting to Lose Weight before buying new clothes.  No, this fable of mine goes, we’re Putting Money By for college and retirement.

But this month, we had just enough leftover cash to pay for six weeks of yoga classes for my daughters and me. 

Because yoga’s good for when you’re thinking about college expenses and how to pay them.

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Ordered Lives

Well it’s midterm week in our neck of the woods.  Every day after I pick them up from school, my daughters begin studying for the next day.  One daughter goes to the basement and reads aloud until well after two in the morning.  The other one types frantically on her computer, trying to outline two quarters of work in an effort to remember all she has learned.  They’re stressed and grumpy beyond belief.

Squints decides this is the week he’ll cook: pad tai and Japanese fried chicken and wonton noodles stuffed and deep fried.

My husband’s been in London for a week.  He calls when he can, tries to diffuse the stress long distance; reassures the girls that they’ll do fine; everything will be fine; tells Squints he’s sorry he missed his dinner again.

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Christmas Past

Yesterday, our recently-adopted kitten officially became an outdoor cat.  There were a number of factors leading us to this decision: The stash of pooh I found two nights ago beneath the basement stairs two feet from the litter box; the copious amounts of cat urine on V’s mattress; Squint’s allergy flare up; the stealth attacks on the other unsuspecting cat; the jumping on the counters; the stealing of food from dinner plates.  Sometimes I get the feeling that this cat is Destructo back from the dead. 

Squints took him outside and re-introduced him to the great outdoors: He was a wild cat, born in the wild likely to a feral mother.  He took to being outside immediately.  He ran here then there.  He sniffed. 

He chased. 

He meowed. 

He ran away.

“Mom!”  Squints said.

“He’ll be back.”

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Halloween Costumes

“Mom,” I said, when I was in second grade, “I have a Halloween parade at school tomorrow.  I don’t know what to be.”

Mom looked at me.  She put a hand over her mouth and tilted her head, thinking.  She glanced at the bowl of plastic fruit on the dining room table: shiny red apples, perfect pears, and clusters of grapes, purple and green.   A smile crossed her lips.  “Hang on.”  She went to her sewing room and returned with a piece of green felt and her scissors.  “Here.”  She folded the felt in half, cut a V into its center, and threw it over my head.  She knelt and cut a line of similar V’s into the bottom of the fabric, giving it a jagged Fred-Flintstone look.  She grabbed the grapes from the bowl and began safety-pinning them to the felt, which sagged in response.  She found a pair of green tights and pinned a cluster of grapes in my hair.

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A Lot of Treasure

“It’s too early to pick out pumpkins,” Filibuster groused.  “I’m busy.”

“Yeah,” V added.  “It’s hardly fall, anyway.”

“It’s a nice day,” my husband said.  “Besides, if we go early in the season, we’ll avoid all the crazies.  Let’s go.”

We piled in the car and drove to the patch we went to last year.  I remembered it as a modest patch; hidden away from the crowds with only a few touristy items here and there: a flyer advertising a haunted house somewhere nearby; a goat and a cow you could pet; owners who would talk with you; a field you could actually walk into.

“Form two lines,” I read aloud as my husband pulled into the patch.  “I don’t remember that.”  I continued reading.  “Two dollars to park.” 

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The Good House

There was a sign over the massive Halloween candy display at Target yesterday: “Be the good house this year.”  The message was clear: Buy the good candy.  Buy lots of it.  Be the trick-or-treaters’ favorite house on the block.  You won’t be the house that hands out dog biscuits as a trick.  You won’t be the one known for handing out glow sticks that invariably split and leak all over the kids’ costumes and into the washing machine.  You won’t be the one who hands out the toothbrushes.  You won’t even be the one known for handing out the crappy candy.  No.  This year you will be cool. 

You’ll be the good house.

I almost fell for it.

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Falling

“Mom?”  Squints shouted down the stairs, even though he knows we have a rule in this house against shouting.

“What?”  I shouted back up the stairs.  I was busy crocheting; crocheting a hat to go with the scarf I made him last week.  After that I’d have to make hats to match the scarves I’d made my daughters two weeks ago.  I took up my crocheting again and began counting stitches to see where I’d left off. 

“You know how my glasses are always slipping off my nose ever since Zoe crashed into me?”

“Yeah?”

“They just slipped off.” 

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Hooked

From the vantage of the back seat, my sisters and I could immediately tell when we were in danger.  In the rearview mirror, Mom’s eyes would get a wild look in them; she’d hum a little under her breath; drum her fingers innocently on the steering wheel.  But we knew.  Oh, we always knew.

It was the turn signal that confirmed it.

“Mooooomm!” 

“Oh, just for a couple of minutes.”

The three of us would stagger out of the back seat of the station wagon; toe the asphalt with the white rubber tips of our tennis shoes; drag our feet, sighing exaggeratedly all the way to the entrance.

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Detachment

I see that the temperature is supposed to go down into the forties tonight.  This morning, I threw open the windows to chase away the heat and the humidity that has hovered in the air since May.  The flies appear to have been listening to the weather forecast: A group of them has taken up residence in the kitchen and I find it fair sport to chase them with a dishtowel.  It’s a battle I often lose.

A couple of days after I lost the War of Tug with Destructo, my eye started flashing—a quick burst of lightning that disappeared immediately.  The flashing began on an inconvenient day: the day of Filibuster’s photo preview: The studio owner greeted us warmly at the door and seated us upon a plush velvet couch before a gigantic movie screen.   She dimmed the lights.

My eye flashed.

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Back-to-School Weather

The night of Irene, under the threat of tornadoes and ninety mile an hour winds, the kids and I slept in the basement.   We awoke in the dark.  We climbed up the basement stairs and guessed at how long the power had been out and made coffee with boiling water poured over a sieve of coffee grinds. 

In the evening, my husband and I went out to assess neighborhood damage and to bring home ice cream in celebration of power restored.  Irene had hurled walnuts and sweet gum pods to the street.  There were branches and leaves: ginkgo and maple and oak.  Beneath the footbridge, the water, smelling faintly of the ocean, gurgled past.  Someone had moved the feral cats’ food bowl from the woods to higher, dryer ground.   

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Twenty Minutes More

“How many more minutes to the bottom?”  A woman gripped her daughter’s hand.  The girl’s knee was mildly bloodied, the result, I was certain of a fall against rock.

I looked at my husband.  “Twenty minutes?”

He nodded.  “Yeah, about that.”

By all rights, we, too, should’ve been heading down the mountain at that hour.  At three o’clock in the afternoon, we were pointed in the wrong direction.

People climb Cadillac Mountain for a variety of reasons: Some attack the mountain, seemingly wanting to prove something to themselves or the other climbers, running up as fast as they can, stabbing feet and cleats and ski poles into the face of the mountain.  Others leisure their way up; stopping here and there to snap pictures of Bar Harbor posing prettily amid colorful boats in Frenchman’s Bay.  Some people, clearly ill, stagger and huff and crawl up the mountain, refusing the hand of a sister or a son waiting patiently a few steps ahead, and it’s these people who I hope make it to the top. 

But this day, we hurried up the mountain.

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Eyes in the Clams

Six years ago, on our first trip to Maine, we went to a restaurant that came recommended by the locals.  We like these sorts of places: You know the food and the service will be good.  Plus, we like to act as if we belong; as if we’re in the know; as if we’re, above all, not tourists. 

This restaurant was really more of a shack than a restaurant and it specialized in fried clams.  It was a dive, but sometimes the worst-looking places turn out to be the best, so we remained stalwartly hopeful. 

We went into the dining room and discovered that all eight of the tables were full of the memories of previous diners: stacked plates, empty corncobs, piles of clamshells, a forlorn-looking exoskeleton of a lobster that an hour before had been swimming in a tank labeled: Caution.  Keep hands out. 

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Fragile

“Do you want some chicken feet for the dog?”  The owner of the farm where we’d rented our cabin nodded at Destructo.  “We’re slaughtering Thursday.” 

“Do you do the butchering yourself?”

He gave a satisfied nod.  “We used to pluck by hand until we were able to make a plucker.” 

Although the farm was hundreds of miles from home, we found we shared a connection: The owner sold wool to a highbrow place near our home; a sterile place whose shoppers, I was sure, wouldn’t give a moment’s thought to the farm and the people and the animals that had produced that wool.  Thus connected, we were invited to gather the eggs from the chickens just outside our cabin; to visit the turkeys and the pigs and the sheep.  We could pet the goats and the horses used to plow the fields.  We were free to milk the cow, provided we got up early enough.  And, of course, the hundred acres were ours to explore.

And we explored with abandon: We passed a hundred-year-old farmhouse and went on to the pigpen where baby durocs no bigger than our—admittedly fat—cat ran round the pen en masse while their mother looked on wearily.  A pasture down, there was another pig, sequestered from a lamb and a couple of horses by a wire fence.  Drying on a wooden fencepost was the horned scalp of a goat.  Here and there, where the rocks would allow, were patches of garden: Scallions and tomatoes and lettuces to the right; Further down the path a bed of peas and green beans, still in season in August.

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With Peaches...

With peaches, it’s easy to get carried away.

Noon and it’s already ninety degrees.  The exhausted air seems unable to support itself.  Here and there, it will appear to wrinkle under the weight of all that heat.  A tree will ripple and I’ll catch myself blinking, staring, testing my vision, or perhaps my sanity.

Across the street, the neighbors' Yorkshire terrier is wearing a tiny red jacket with black straps and silver buckles, languishing beneath the shade of a sweet gum tree. 

And if that dog dreams, surely he is dreaming of growing—growing so big, he bursts out of his little red jacket with black straps and silver buckles—growing so huge, he can exact revenge, rounding up his owners, dressing them in red woolen coats with black and silver buttons and setting them upon the front stoop.

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Fifteen Dollar Mistakes

“What do you want me to get, Mom?”  Squints grabbed a cart and wheeled it to the produce section.

“A couple of pounds of cheese for sandwiches.”  My kids live on grilled cheese during the summer.  For each sandwich she makes, V puts on four slices of cheese.  And she’ll eat two sandwiches for lunch.

“Snacks?” He waggled his eyebrows at me and grinned.   

They also live on snacks.  Unhealthy, expensive snacks that disappear minutes after they enter the house.  “A bag or two.  We’re on a budget.”

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