Spring

We're not permitted to look at the dresses until we're assigned a consultant, someone who inquires with eyebrows raised about color and size and price, of course. "Ask my daughter," I say, pointing. "I don't pay for prom."

Technically that's incorrect: My husband and I kick in a hundred bucks towards the occasion. But between up-dos and nails; shoes and makeup; flowers and a limo; tickets and alterations for a made-in-China gown costing between two- and twelve hundred dollars, our contribution is laughable.

We select an armload of dresses and are directed to the bank of rooms at the back of the store. Our consultant misspells my daughter's name on a pink sticky note in the shape of a heart and affixes it to her dressing room door.

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The Gap Between Stitches

My daughter is teaching herself to knit.

Her college friends mock her: It's a rocking-chair hobby, they tell her. An old-lady hobby. Still, she persists.

She frowns over her work, each hand tightly clutching a gold needle, a multi-colored scarf slowly taking shape between them. I watch her take up the yarn and incorporate it into the scarf. I listen to the clacking of the needles in the perfect stillness of the house. Listening, I am reminded of my mother and my grandmother and the work that has come from their needles: scarfs and hats; dishcloths and blankets and the long-outgrown sweaters that I keep in my trunk for my children's children.

My daughter sighs. The clacking stops. She holds up the scarf revealing another dropped stitch. “I hate knitting.” The comfortable quiet is replaced with frustration. “Should I tear it all out?”

“No,” I tell her. “Just keep going.”

“Then the problem will just continue,” she says, taking up her needles again.

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Bridge

Well, Filibuster's college tuition suddenly went up two hundred dollars a month. I sent her a message on Facebook the other day: “Call them and see what's up.”

She messaged me back. “I don't know who to call.”

“Business Office.”

“Can you?” She wrote.

“No.”

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Adrift

Every morning when I check on the progress of my late-summer garden, I discover the empty cicada shells, dark brown and crunchy, clinging to trees and fence posts.  The shells are neatly split down the back where the insect, transformed by nature and time, emerged new, all silver-bodied and long-winged, to fly to the tops of the trees and join its brethren in a scratchy wooly song:  irritating and pleasant at the same time.

* * *

My neighbor sent me an email the other day; asked me if I was interested in adopting the rabbit she’s been babysitting for another neighbor.  Actually, she used the word bunny.  Bunnies are cute.  Bunnies are soft.  Bunnies are fuzzy.  Rabbits, you eat.

She told me that with two dogs and two fish and two cats living in our house, the hamster might be feeling a bit unbalanced.  She thought that our family ark was listing to one side.

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Gift

Well, for some reason Squints thought the living room floor would be a suitable place to store his retainer.  And, of course, Filibuster found it with her foot and snapped it in two with a sickening crunch.

Squints called the orthodontist, inquired about the cost about a replacement.  “We don’t have that kind of money hanging around, Squints,” I said, thinking about the four new tires on my husband’s car.  “You’re going to have to help pay for it.”

He frowned.  “I don’t have a job.”

“You’re going to have to work it off.”  And suddenly, Squints’ pocket money; the money he makes from moving the lawn every week, has disappeared. 

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Leaping

Well, it’s two days before V’s next driving test.  Naturally, she wanted to practice parallel parking again.  We got up early this morning and headed to the testing station before it got crowded.

“OK,” I said confidently.  “You’ve got this.”

“Uh, Mom?”

“Yeah?”

“Could you be the cone?”

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Progress

Squints and I were talking about pocket knives the other day.  “Why would a kid want one of those, Mom?”  He asked, glancing up from his iPod. 

“I dunno’,” I replied.  “I’ve always wanted one.”

He squinted at me suspiciously.  “Why?”

“To whittle?”

He rolled his eyes.  “Mom, kids today are different.”  And he returned to his iPod.

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Native

It’s a rainy day today.  As I walk to the library, people pass beneath bright umbrellas.  A little boy splashes in a puddle and giggles.  Inside the library I tuck myself into a corner and set down my computer and my bag of crocheting.  A woman punches numbers into her calculator and frowns, pencil poised over her workbook.  She’s got an open can of Red Bull with a yellow straw poking out of the top.  She takes a long drink and stares out the window before returning to her work; jamming her left hand into her hair and resting her head there. 

I pull out my book: Becoming Native to this Place by Wes Jackson.  In his essay “Nature as Measure,” Jackson says that we cannot just save the remaining wilderness we have, but must work to save all the other places in our lives—the places where we live and work and go to school.  “Either,” Jackson says, “all the earth is holy or none is.”
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Growing Up

I’m courtside, watching kids tentatively size up one another.  In his left hand, Squints has what he calls a girly racquet—likely a hand-me-down from one of his sisters.  In his right hand he carries the one tennis ball we own, dug out from the bushes.  He wears his baseball cap and his dingy grey jacket with the cuff nearly torn off.  He’s got the wrong shoes.  He’s got the wrong pants.  I notice I’ve forgotten water and sunscreen.

The coach takes one look at Squints and hands him a racquet—why don’t you try this one, buddy?  

I wish for a chair, something else I’ve forgotten.  Specifically, I wish for my husband’s rocking chair.  We just picked it up yesterday.  Maple.  Amish made.  Six weeks to complete.  It would be nice just below that oak tree. 

But I have no chair.

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Esteemed

Once a week, Squints takes an enrichment class some distance from the house.  Usually, I drop him off and hang out at the local library for a couple of hours to pass the time.  Yesterday, just before heading to pick him up, I hit the bathroom. 

The center stall was occupied. 

It was occupied by a very productive little girl.

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Goodbye, Friend

In the end, Destructo lived up to his name.

Every day, he tried to get into the trash to find something to satisfy his insatiable hunger.  He tore up the  basement carpeting.  He chased the cats.  He pulled the blankets from Squints’ bed to cover himself.  He tore holes in clothing.  He destroyed the acorn tree I’d grown from seed.

But we forgave him.  He was just a pup, after all.

And I say lived here, because this morning, Destructo was killed.  Correction: my husband and I had him killed.  Put to sleep.  Put down. 

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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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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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The Beginning...

At eleven o’clock at night, Filibuster discovered we were out of cat litter.  My husband sighed and changed out of his pajamas and he and Filibuster headed to the grocery store, which was open until midnight.  At four-thirty in the morning, my husband discovered the dog cage was too large to fit in the trunk and that the garbage can had leaked all over the garage floor.  Worse, his car emitted a strong odor that filled up the garage with the smell of gasoline.   

Vacations always seem to start this way.

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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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Curb on Trust

There’s a bookstore close by my house.  It’s a huge bookstore, with a separate section just for movies and music, and when you go in, you’re immediately accosted by the sole employee who never appears to have anything to do.

 “May I help you?”

“No thanks.  Just looking.”

But this employee won’t leave you to look.  Instead, she—most often it’s a young woman—will lean on the counter, staring at you, occasionally walking behind you, hands clasped nonchalantly behind her back, as she watches to ensure you aren’t stuffing videos down your shirt.

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Hard Labor

So on Tuesday, my husband and I lassoed Squints and V into helping us with our yearly service at our community garden.  For the second year in a row, Filibuster escaped the event, as she had to go to work. 

We pulled in and parked.  In the distance, we heard the tractor in one of the fields.  D, one-half of the farm partnership, met us at the barn, wearing sandals and a floppy hat.  She was deeply tanned and, I could tell, deeply happy with her circumstance, despite the long hours and the backbreaking work her job required.

We heard a car on the gravel drive.  D nodded.  “There’s the rest of the work party.”  A man walked up eagerly, jabbing a thumb over his shoulder.  “They’re coming.”  His wife and daughters approached at a more leisurely pace, as if not so sure about the whole thing.  The daughters had long, thin, tanned legs and were carefully made up for the occasion.

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Posers

My family never used the front door, preferring the easy informality of the back of the house.  A visitor would turn in and drive along the fence, tires crunching over gravel, as the horses and cows kicked up their heels in the pasture.  There would be a slight bend in the drive—in the fence, too—and the visitor would find herself at the brick sidewalk we put in one year under my father’s supervision.  I say herself here because chances are, if the car was parked at the house, the visitor was a woman, come to see my mother.  If the visitor was a man, he would continue around the next bend and follow the driveway to the barn, where he would most certainly find my father making repairs to the farm equipment, occasionally grumbling beneath his breath.  The men visitors would pull in quick.  Leap from their trucks.  Get right down to business.  The women visitors, however would leisure their way up that brick sidewalk, pausing to admire my mother’s lush perennial gardens, before finally walking up the back stairs and entering the coolness of the house. 

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Please, God, Let Her Choose Archery

Well, V will be belatedly celebrating her Sweet Sixteen at a local fast food restaurant.  And her father and I won’t be spending a dime.  No, this shindig is courtesy of her employer, who likes that sort of thing.

We laughed, looking at the invitation.  This has got to be the oddest Sweet Sixteen birthday party in history.

Sure, V is sweet.  Sure, she’s sixteen.  But spending exorbitant amounts of money on a fancy-pants party with semi-formal dress; a hall; updos and I-pods for door prizes is a real quick way to turn that sweet into surly.  V’s birthday celebration, in fact, was downright subdued this year: Quick bite for lunch and a homemade cheesecake for dessert.

“Should I go?” She gestured to the invitation.

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