Twomey-Smith holiday season: joying up the everlast

At our house, the holiday season is looooooong.  Encompassing the traditional Thanksgiving/Christmas/New Year trio with particular emphasis, because those are our 3 official yearly-trade alternating holidays with Caleb (and whichever ones we don’t have on any given year we thus tend to either try to do more with, to fill the silence/take advantage of having more hands, or replicate to share with him, it also stretches backwards through November: it used to start on Caleb’s birthday, because having several families and grandparents shipping gifts from overseas meant that the birthday went on and on, and then we’d blink and it was Thanksgiving already, etc.  So, really, it started on Halloween, which is just a week before his birthday, since the birthday treats were always a bit overshadowed by Halloween candy anyway.  And then Evanny was born at the end of September, and that became the start of holiday season: A holiday or two for every month, four-in-a-string.  And then Tabitha was born this year at the end of July, and Mummy’s birthday is at the beginning of July, and at that rate, we may as well just count it as starting in May, when Daddy has a birthday before school’s even out for summer!  This year, Daddy’s birthday was a pretty quiet affair, and Tabitha’s birthing wasn’t a party–yet–although it was a bit wild and crazy, and Mummy’s birthday was a wonderful, relaxing, delightful, week-long friends-visit full of happiness in a gorgeous setting because Daddy insisted that we go all out and embrace our forever indebtedness by doing something fabulous, but all the wild carousing was done by other people, because Mummy was an incubating walrus at the time (in the best pictures, a walrus in a homemade, sequined, ruffly dress and a cowboy hat!), so it wasn’t quite the long, slow avalanche that future years are likely to resemble; the lake house week felt like a visit to another (peaceful) planet, and summer, thanks to my dad being around, was a different sort of quiet magic, but it did eventually kick into gear.

Tea with Grandma, with a brand new Peppa Pig tea set!

Parading home from the park on Daddy’s shoulders–without even once hitting him in the head with the maraca

Evanny’s birthday, at the end of September, was a sweet little success: on her actual birthday, there were school-friends cupcakes at Katy’s and presents with Grandma, and then, that weekend, with her Papa and great-grandmother Mammy still in town, and Grandma just arrived for her 3-week autumn visit, and Papa’s girlfriend Lynn up to visit for the weekend, we had a superhero-themed playdate at the neighborhood playground with her neighborhood friends, then came back to the house by way of a costumed parade to have presents, cupcakes, balloons, and more playing here at the house.  Caleb wore his Superman costume from last Halloween (the up-north version, since he was Bilbo here with us), and she was Ladybug Girl, at least for the first half of the party; we had to find new clothes to wear back home once the stripping started!  Kids were happy, grown-ups got to visit, some wonderful presents blessed my little ladybug’s entrance into the years-club (no more counting months), and she went to bed in her big-girl room sugared and happy.

Gathering the throng before the march–Strathmore neighborhood kids in costumes, ready to parade the streets (Andrew aka H.P. waves his wand behind our little ladybug)

Tabitha and Darcy, in pumpkin attire, staying in on Halloween night

Halloween was warm and wonderful too: I did a Zoo-Boo outing with the kids and our local friends the Gregories early in the week, we marched for the first time in the neighborhood kids’ parade a few days before Halloween, and then friends Todd and Jenn were in from Maryland to spend the actual holiday’s weekend, and our neighborhood BFFs came down for the evening’s festivities , wherein we made little naan pizzas for everyone, and then the daddies and the grown-up friends took the four big kids–I’m still struggling, sometimes, with the idea that Evanny is one of “the big kids,” but it gets easier every day–out trick or treating while Lydia and I stayed in with the babies, lit some candles, and took pictures of the little girls in their pumpkin shirts.  I was jealous to miss the outing, as the reports were adorable: my little ladybug, I heard, went bravely and fearlessly running up sidewalks and up to strangers’ doors, cheerfully crying out “trick or treat” with the bigs and welcoming herself into houses to say hello, whether she was actually invited or not!  I wanted to be there, watching her take on the world and learn, firsthand, these critical American childhood rituals of wildness in the cold dark, with her brother at hand to keep her safe, but a little scary himself, in a Darth Vader mask with no face to recognize.  Even so, I heard, too, that she and Nathan both tripped over their boots at one point or another, but were plucky enough about their adventuring that, despite the cold and the threat of rain, no one came home crying about any skinned knees, and everybody was generous about candy-sharing at the end of the haul.

Caleb posing for his mom’s phone photo, beside Will and in front of his Star Wars figure adorned zoo cake

Caleb had a zoo birthday party this year–a major achievement unlocked in that he had only one party, finally, with his mother, members of his northern family, and some of her-side family friends as well as our down-here friends and our family, all together to celebrate the beginning of his seventh year.  There were games and arts-and-crafts; there was sugar, running-around time, LEGO Star Wars, an animal to pet, temporary tattoos in goodie bags, and lots of opportunity to play, making it everything a boy could want.

Birthday hug-for-all: Will, Andrew, Caleb, Silas, and Nate, with Matt and Dan goofing off in the background

Thanksgiving Matt and I are still patting ourselves on the back about: we had Caleb this year, giving us three kids, one a needing-to-be-carried-a-lot 4-month-old infant, and we had no grandmas or other helpers this year, family or otherwise, and yet we still managed to not only make a Thanksgiving meal, but we got it on the table at a reasonable time in the afternoon, when everyone was awake, without burning anything or destroying the house, and then everyone sat down together to eat it.  We’re not sure how that happened, or if we’ll ever be able to replicate the miracle, but as a first-Thanksgiving as a family of 5, it was a tremendous tone-setter to grow from!  (Maybe next year, we’ll work on making sure everyone is dressed by dinnertime!)

Thanksgiving project: the Christmas photo shoot that never became a card (again)–also known as “dancers and divas: the Santa Hat edition”

Our Christmas season somehow felt a little too stretched this year: we did all the right things, mostly even in the right order (if not necessarily on the right day), and yet I’m left still waiting for something; I’m not sure what about the season seems to have passed me by, or seems to be hovering offstage waiting for its turn to arrive.  Maybe it’s the cards we didn’t send (again, despite trying again to get posed pictures ready, and actually having three kids dressed cutely and at least taking turns cooperating, even if they refused to all do it at the same time), or the CDs I never found time to play; maybe it was not having a pre-Christmas dinner with the Gregories (although we’d had one a bit earlier in the year when Grandma was around) or missing Paul and Teri’s late-one-evening come-caroling party after a too-long no-napping toddler sort of day.  But if we write off “stretched” as a function of adding a tiny baby, growing with a toddler, and trying to work around a calendar-juggled second-grader, thrown in with the usual end-of-the-semester grading madness on my end and some threats of vast doom for next year from Matt’s school (he’s still adored, but to say they’re having money problems is to put it mildly–local folks know a lot more than that just from reading the papers, and anybody else can search it if they care; I’m making an effort to devote as little of our time and energy as possible to worrying about it), and just add up what we did have, we end up with quite a picture of abundance: we accomplished “holiday party” with the 2nd annual neighborhood cookie swap, where all three kids got to play and play and play, two of them glutted on sugar until they staggered, and Matt got to chill on the couch and drink beers and chat with the dads, and I got to visit with mommies, chase children, and wipe sugar-paint off Evanny’s everything!  Our tree bulged with gifts from friends and neighbors even before any wrap-a-thons began, and my mom was in town the week before Christmas, baking and decorating sugar cookies with Evanny, rocking and cooing with Tabitha for a few days, and leaving candy canes on the tree to sweeten her wake with peppermint. Christmas eve was unseasonably warm, so we took the stroller and the baby carrier out after dark and wandered Strathmore to look at everybody’s pretty lights, then wound up at the Mumfords’, opening an early gift, borrowing books, feeding the kids Lydia’s homemade shortbread, letting them run rampant in mad circles, reading a few books, and tossing Evanny and Nate into a Christmas eve 1.0 bath together way past bedtime.  Daddy and I stayed up late wrapping in preparation of both days, but since “Santa had agreed to come a few days late so Caleb would be here,” there was no one to leave cookies for, and Christmas day 1.0, just us and the girls, started epically early with up-in-the-night babies and then epically late; Evanny didn’t make it downstairs to start opening gifts until almost 9:30.

Little watcher, bedecked with bows, holding a new bear amidst the wrappings and packages

We spent the day with bows and paper, playing with new toys together, nibbling on cookies for breakfast and cheese for lunch, taking naps, watching movies, making a few overseas family Skype calls, and then getting excellent take-out from China Road to start an off-year we’re-not-making-Christmas-dinner-twice tradition. Boxing Day, when the English traditionally do their tromping about to visit and trade gifts with extended family and friends, we opened up an array of snacks and invited the Mumfords and local friends Danielle and Nicole over to visit and play.  We then had a day in between to clean up and regroup a little, and then it was time to pick Caleb up for Christmas eve 2.0,

Caleb (in his new Angry Bird pajamas) and Evanny opening presents on Christmas morning 2.0

featuring the yearly craft (painting some ornaments Grandma bought from Caleb’s school sale while she was here), a seasonal movie (I think they watched Rise of the Guardians again), cookies and rum left out for Santa, wrapping for Caleb to do to ready his presents for the girls, and one more round of last-minute wrapping (and rum-sipping) for us before everybody finally went to bed.  Christmas 2.0 was more presents, more playing with new toys and art supplies, more movie-watching, lots of Caleb-and-Evanny wrestling, and baby-juggling while mostly-Daddy made dinner… and then he looked around, said “we have way too much food here!” and asked me to text Lydia, so we ended up doing a friends-and-family style Christmas Day anyway, the adults eating together, the toddler nibbling from our plates, the big kids too wrapped up in toys and movies to bother (Caleb had his first taste of Christmas dinner for supper that night, after Evanny and I went up the hill in the dark to fetch him back from Andrew’s, since he turned the family visiting for a mid-day meal into an all-day play date–and she found this experience, going out in the cold dark to walk, at night, all the way to the Mumfords’ house on her own two feet through the thin dusting of snow, under a thin dusting of stars–it was her first real sense of winter night and her own skin in it (the Christmas eve walk, safely buckled into a stroller, hadn’t made the same impression at all)–“wind immy hair!” she cried, touching the edges of her hat with her coat-cuff-dwarfed fingertips as we stepped carefully out onto the icy front steps).

And then after one day off again, to clean house and buy more snack foods (and ingredients for Matt’s favourite spicy mussels), it was time to cook and shine and throw the doors open for New Year’s Eve, which we’ve cleverly volunteered to host as a small local party for 2 years running, letting us see some adult friends we rarely get to spend time with without having to leave early or chase our kids the whole time–they can run around and play with their own toys, and when it’s bedtime, we only have to pop upstairs!

Bat-family (“Tyra,” Caleb whispers, “…but you’re a BAD GUY”)

In England, NYE parties are costume parties, a Halloween redux without the zombies (apparently a longer standing tradition, actually, and it’s the bleed-over of American Halloween that makes it a doubling-up), and, conveniently, Santa had brought our whole family Batman-themed pajamas for Christmas, so Matt and the bookends wore Batman jammies, Evanny was a little Robin, and I was in a hodgepodge of a Harley Quinn sleeper and bat-themed stockings.  Our friends Chris and Jessica came over in geek-themed pjs of their own, and friends Kira and Carrie brought treats and games, and new friends David and Lindsey brought more games and they and late-night joiners Jeremiah and Sarah were dressed all posh and more in

Batmen and Robin

line with American party expectations, so the photos are a nice hash of silly and sparkly.  There were sweets and savories to snack on, movies and board games for Ev and Caleb and his friend Silas, a long bout of kitchen-chatting and an eventual meanderingly long, winner-less round of CAH for the adults after little Robin, sticky with “choch-choch” and strawberry ice cream, went off to bed; Harley spent half the night with her motley open and an itty-bitty Batman on her boob, Kira took the boys outside to set off sparklers, and the new year was rung in with a many-waves round of clinking classes, some champagne, some cider, all bubbly.  And then, in the morning, most of the same crew descended upon Jessica and Chris’s house for brunch before I brought the littles home to nap while Matt went out to do a little guitar-balladeering for a New Year’s Day showing of painted skateboards at a downtown art gallery and then fed them cheese and crackers and leftover pie for dinner.

So here, on the second of January, in a kitchen still glutted with a mercifully declining array of party leftovers and a veritable army of used glassware (we were too busy yesterday to even address the issue), we find ourselves facing a startling, beckoningly spare calendar for a while: there’s housework to do, school to attend, small projects to finish (a few Christmas art-gifts from the kids still need to be finished and sent away), healthy patterns to consider and, we hope, re-establish, new semesters to plan and start, and a welcome span of wintery stillness on the horizon.  The air outside is a confetti of tiny flakes with no real intent of piling anytime soon, we’ve got half-made plans for work-time later and maybe some friends-time for the kids, and in the meantime, I’m stealing a few moments to sit and chisel a few words into the electric stone tablet, to prove that our world was here, that too busy to stand still doesn’t mean we’re not dancing as we live, that our kids spend their days swimming in a ball-pit of loving people and fun, most of it self-created by being left alone together to play and invent and paint and imagine, fueled by some Disney/Pixar magic now and again (but so far Merida is our only “princess,” and she’s a far cry from a worrying example of the archetype).

I’ve been resting up a bit, reading my way gradually through Peter V. Brett’s The Demon Cycle (which is more about people and magic than demons, thankfully, and the extensive demon-fighting bits are easy to skim), usually while lying down for slow, nap-creating nursing sessions with tiny Tatha, fixing some old blog posts, taking and culling photographs, imagining bigger creative projects but not committing to anything yet, thinking about making more soups this winter (I say that every year), plotting a potato-pancake fry-a-thon over text messages with Lydia, looking forward to Evanny’s return to Katy’s house of mess-and-wonder next week, and thinking about keeping my resolutions as simple as possible: this coming year, I’m looking forward to moving out of the sluggish post-baby era and into a phase of having more mobility and opportunity to take better care of this middle-aged body I suddenly own, and promising to do my best to approach this not as “fixing” anything about it; instead, I want to see what it’s capable of in terms of reasonable health-and-fitness, mostly with the goal being to use it to play with my children, who like running and jumping and crawling around on the floor.  I’m looking forward to facing the dramatic life changes Matt’s school’s wobbles might bring about with flexibility and optimism instead of anxiety, and at the same time using that as an opportunity to help teach our children to be flexible and optimistic instead of anxious.  I’m looking forward to continuing to improve Matt’s and my shared skills of productive arguing and of NOT arguing–and hoping to add a few other shared goals and talents to the mix, like more dancing, and never letting a day go by that doesn’t include at least 5 kisses.  And most challengingly, but very, very importantly, I’m looking forward to improving my relationship with our boy.  I promised him on NYE night that I would delete the pictures of him pouting from my phone (done) and that I would stop picking on him so much–which, really, means laughing less at his ridiculous melodrama and trying to listen more instead.  There’s a lot to look back and celebrate, but I’m tired of holiday season now.  I’m ready for fresh, simple foods, becoming reacquainted with my muscles and bones, quiet evenings featuring more books, guitar-practice serenades, and papers-to-grade (and fewer movies/TV shows, at least until April!), snuggles with my little family, early bedtimes, and a don’t-blink-now, but it’s really not that far off spring full of walks with 2 kids big enough to sit up in a stroller together–little Tabitha isn’t sitting yet, but she’ll be ready by the time the weather’s ready for her.

So Happy New Year, everybody.  May she bring you a few small dreams’ fruition, resting safely in your hands, and a few big dreams to chase after, so that you may throw yourself into living the chase, with the wind in your hair and the stars calling you forward.

Growing a little sister–and a big one

It’s true what they say about growing baby #2–you spend all your time pregnant with your first baby worrying about your first baby, and all your time pregnant with your second baby worrying about your first baby.  Except it’s less worry, in our case, and more just a matter of attention.  The belly-baby has to kick me to get noticed; otherwise she’s just a basketball in the way of whatever I’m doing with Evanny and a logistical puzzle for how we’re going to manage putting which things where in our little house to get through the infant stage (when E is still in her crib, but the changing table is still in her room, because it won’t fit in ours, so where are we going to change an infant while E’s asleep?) and her baby-dom (when E gets her own room, at least for a while, because she’s too light a sleeper to subject her to another baby’s nighttime fickle-ness, but that means we have to lose part or all of the office I work in, the TV room, and Matt’s music-space (all of which occupy the same room currently anyway–the one that will have to become a bedroom)) and how we’re going to get three carseats into one car–the bigger models are out of our price range, and we’re locked into our lease so we can only shift over within what the same company offers, but there’s no way to get 2 seats and the booster Caleb has to be in until he’s 9 into the one we’ve got.

“Ev, where’s Mumma’s baby?” (I had to clarify–when I first said “where’s the baby,” she pointed to her own belly.  For a few more months, anyway, the baby, for all intents and purposes, is still herself.)

Basketballs impede efforts to bend over the tub to wash a toddler, to bend around the floor-toys and furniture to crawl after a toddler, to reach the dishes (again) so I can keep up with all the sippy cups generated by said toddler, to chase the toddler around the playground, etc. etc.–we’re doing okay so far, though, and it’s only a month until Daddy’s home for the summer and able to take over the bulk of the gymnastic chasing.  It’s more the mental switch that’s hard to practice for, although we’re trying.  I don’t know how many times I day I refer to Evanny as some version of “my baby,” and although I try occasional corrections, and am making an effort to say “big girl” at least once in a while, I’ve never liked “big girl,” really (having been the older sister myself, and a chubby one at that, might be behind this), and it’s still so ridiculous to imagine: this baby, with her waving little changing-table naked legs and thin hair only barely now shaping itself into a single, lop-sided, almost curl behind her left ear, being anybody’s big sister some 3 1/2 months from now.  She says “baby” when she points to pictures of herself, and I can’t really dispute the claim.  “We’re going to have two babies,” I end up saying.  “Where’s the other baby?”  And most times she’ll point at my belly, because she knows the answer, even if she has no idea what we’re actually talking about.  Sometimes she points at my boobs, with the same twinkle-eyed look she’ll get when she points at Daddy’s to ask if she can nurse, but when we were in for a belly-baby check-up a few weeks ago, and the doctor got out her doppler wand and said “Do you want to listen to the baby’s heartbeat,” Evanny quickly raised up her shirt to show her belly, because that’s where babies are.  “She’s smart,” said the doc, impressed.  “We do try to talk about it,” I said, because it’s bragging to say “Yeah, I know,” when people tell you your kids are smart, but they are, and we know.

It’s possible the belly-baby won’t be smart at all; maybe she’ll be madly artistic instead, or twice as gymnastic as her physically daring older sister.  Maybe she won’t have any stunning talents, she’ll just be terribly kind, or bizarrely patient–there are so many ways she could add something currently-missing and magical to our little family’s dynamic that I’m not hanging any hopes on any particular version of what could be.  Well, except for one.  I really, really, really want her to love her sister.  I always wanted a sister, growing up; I cried when my parents called from the hospital to proudly announce the birth of my only sibling, a little brother.  My mom had sisters, and my friends had sisters, and I wished and wished that I had had one too, but it wasn’t in the cards.  So while I pretended that I was only a little hopeful that our sonogram would promise us another girl, I was actually irrationally and unwisely attached to the idea, and gleefully relieved when the tech made her identification (especially when, moving through her checklist of measurements, she came back across the bottom half and said “still a girl!”).  My head is full of pretty little pictures of their two heads bent together over some book or toy (preferably in one of our rare flares of green-grass and sunshine, but in a winterized room framed by snowfall or by dim firelight would be lovely too), of them chasing each other across the park on tasseled bicycles, of play-curtained bunkbeds (when they’re old enough that we can have our room back!) and other, yet unimagined illustrations of togetherness.  I know that’s not a guarantee; I’ve known sisters who hated each other, and sisters who, more like my brother and I, simply never really felt like they had anything in common when they were kids.  But I hope and hope and hope, for their sake and for my own attachment to my fantasies.

In the long term, I’m not that worried about her because I figure that, no matter what I plan or wish for, she, like Evanny, will choose her own paths and priorities, and make those things known–hopefully in ways that allow and encourage her family’s participation!  I forget, sometimes, though, that not worrying shouldn’t be the same as not noticing.  We’ve bought her one whole toy of her own–a little rattle with an elephant’s head that makes pretty little wood-chime noises–and I’ve got a few new hand-me-downs that are more summery newborn things, since she’s due in mid-August instead of late September, so at least at first, she’ll be a little off-season to what fit her sister.  We’ve told her brother and our families her name, and sketched out some possible solutions to the logistical problems noted above, and my friend Lydia and I–she’s due with a girl in July–have made half-promises for summer welcome-baby parties in her yard and matching Halloween outfits when the littlest girls are two.  Most of the time, though, I just don’t notice much beyond being tired–and I’ve been tired for so long, at this point, that that’s hardly noticeable either, it just is.  So at least once a day, I’m surprised by my own belly in the mirror, or by the growing gap between what some of my shirts cover and how far down the maternity yoga pants  slide (the regular ones fit far better!).  It’s hard to imagine the little yellow room being somebody else’s bedroom next year instead of Evanny’s.  It’s impossible to imagine my snuggly (although only because it’s a sick-day) little armful of baby daughter being somebody’s older sister, or how tiny a newborn is going to feel in those same arms.  And don’t even get me started on the total fog of impossibility that blows in when I try to imagine combining the incredible time-suck of infant-care with the madcap activity of toddler-chasing.  That, I imagine, you’ll never even get to read about, because where on Earth would I ever find time to do both, teach 3 classes, and blog?!  But there might be a retrospective, sometime after they both start school (at which point, dear Lord, their brother will be in middle school).

My favorite part of the waiting is how taken Evanny is with babies all around her–I feel this bodes well.  Her favorite Peppa Pig episodes are the ones about Peppa’s cousin Baby Alexander–and the one where Peppa and her friends look at their own baby pictures, and when those come on her little rotations of 5-minute episodes, she always asks me to go back and play them again and again.  She points out, and wants to get closer to, every baby we see when we’re out shopping.  Sometimes she asks for them–“baby me?” she’ll say, which in Evanny-ese means “baby, please?” (Daddy started trying to teach her “please” before she had a p-sound, see.)  Two of our playgroup friends have just had new babies–we saw one at the playground Monday, and that was her immediate response to meeting tiny Emmett.  “Not yet,” I told her; “Emmett’s sleeping, and it’s chilly anyway.  You’ll have your own baby soon enough.”   When older babies come to playgroup, she likes to get close to them, and I like to practice holding them; she always crawls into my lap too, to share the space, and if they’ll let her, she holds their hands.  When we hear babies crying, she’ll reenact the crying, hands over her face, and say “baby ooooh.”  And all of it, the attraction, the empathy, the simple interest, I know, is mercurial like everything in toddlerhood and might not last, but while it’s here, while we’re here growing (especially in the still “early” spring of late April in New York, where everything outside is rainy and grey, planted seeds don’t sprout, trees are just starting to shiver with buds, and the idea of an end-of-summer baby seems as improbable as the idea that summer will ever come, when all we’re doing is growing, and growing crazy in the house), it’s delightful.

Playgroup = magic

As all parents in the lonely houses of Western-model child-rearing know (and any non-parent with a scrap of imagination will have no trouble believing), there is nothing on Earth that will ever make you feel as stupid as finding yourself responsible (solely or jointly) for the maintenance and happiness of a tiny human, one who doesn’t actually know anything, but can with a single half-focused look convince you that you know ever so much less than nothing and are being judged as so, so lacking.  So there’s a lot about baby-parenting, after 15 1/2 months of doing it, that I’ve learned–I must have, because somehow, working with that afore-mentioned less-than-nothing, I’ve kept her alive.  For 15 1/2 months, most of which Matt’s had to work long days all week during.  There’s also a lot I’m sure I’ve done completely wrong, and a few things I might even feel confident that I might have guessed at in a not-entirely-awful way.

Hands down, though, there’s one totally, definitely smart thing I’ve done as a first-time baby-parent: I started a playgroup.  This may seem silly and obvious to more experienced parents who have done playgroups for years, and it may seem dull or even utterly mad to people who aren’t expert at the stuff–especially the expecting-parents, who can’t really imagine one child running around rearranging everything in the house and spreading crumbs like a snowstorm, and who therefore would never guess that multiplying that insanity would be a good idea, but I swear.  It’s not just a good idea.  It was my best idea.

Let me tell you about the magic that happens here on Tuesdays: kids come over and run around.  Sometimes they squabble, always they spread crumbs; they play with Evanny’s and sometimes Caleb’s toys; they eat whatever snacks we’ve made, they push my kid down sometimes, they have diaper accidents…not sounding magic yet?  Try it this way: they give my kid free lessons in sharing, playing together, picking herself back up, coping with conflicting interests, taking turns on the slide, being gentle with babies, and seeking help and comfort from other mommies–all really important little-kid life lessons that I, on my own, could never teach her.  Free.  And because we’re the ones who usually host, free-without-leaving-the-house (an amazing asset when the wind chill is -22).  And the even better part?  Those kids come with moms (and once we even had a dad!), and the moms bring not only snacks to share but adult conversation: advice about all kinds of little-kid problems to solve; local-expert recommendations for where to go with little people, where to buy what they might need, what kind of sling, available where, works best for carrying what age baby how; instructive stories about nursing and adapting and discipline and room-rearranging; different parenting styles to watch modeled in real life–and, again, it’s all brought, for free, to my living room.  All we have to do is clean up the house a little (which those of you with little kids of you own know never happens unless people are coming over, so it’s a serious hygenic boon, really–like having an excuse to “have” to shower!), put day clothes on (sometimes), put the kettle on so there’s tea to share, and be downstairs by 10:30.  Ish.

So, sure, it’s a dim, domestic sort of miracle, the sort with no hint of an angelic choir anywhere around to herald its arrival, but there is only so much you can say to the cats and a baby (and I talk to all four of them all the time) before you start to go a little mad. And sure, it’s not a dishwasher (whose arrival, in this house, would absolutely be accompanied by an angelic choir)–and as tea cups count, it does tend to make a few extra dishes. But for the wonderment of both of us having other voices in our ears besides our own, conversations to listen to that we didn’t start (and maintain, and finish, and by “we,” I think it’s pretty obvious who I mean), faces to watch–and attention to capture–other than each others’, it’s an amazing, life-affirming, we-might-survive-our-second-winter-after-all sort of thing without (choir or no choir) earthly parallels.

Want to make your own?  If you have a baby, you probably already have the basics: wherever and with whatever you already play with the baby, invite other people with babies to come do it too.  Our starting ingredients were living room + baby toys.  The other really important ingredient is other people with babies.  We found ours on Facebook–our neighborhood, luckily, had a page for neighborhood news, announcements, questions, lost pets, etc. already, so I just build a sub-page and invited anybody in the neighborhood with littler-than-school-age to join the group so we could share little-kid-parenting contacts and recommendations; then I basically said “who wants to come over on Tuesday,” and that was that.  Magic.  If your local kid-pool involves kids older than yours, or a lot younger, you might remind folks to bring some age-appropriate toys so their kids don’t get bored (with Caleb’s stuff here, we didn’t have that problem, but I’ve noticed that mostly the 4- and 5-year-olds who come are happy to spend at least half of their time playing with toddler toys anyway).  If you only have a tiny baby still, buy a cheap pack of sippy-cups and a box of Cheerios at the grocery store: those, a pack of wipes handy downstairs, and maybe a roll of paper towels (we’ve done fine with cloth rags) have been enough to solve any problem we’ve run into for the last four months.

We didn’t start ours til she was about a year old, but that was more because I didn’t find out about the neighborhood page to get the Facebook thing started until late May, and then we were too busy all summer and had Caleb and travel plans anyway, so we didn’t have time to be bored or starved for company.  But if I were doing it over, I’d start earlier, because goodness knows I could have used people to talk to last year and role models for dealing with toddlers before I had one!

These precious things

So I ran faster, but it caught me here…

In high school is where I think of it starting: the framing of my world through Tori Amos songs (and not so much “songs” as the whole tales she intended, as finite units, but more notes, tones, chords, trills, and chains and ladders of words, the micro-stories in a run of any line or three. I don’t think that’s actually accurate–I remember the first time I saw the video for “Silent All These Years” on MTV at my parents’ house, but I think I was in college. Most of my friends were still in high school, though, so the location was still prominent (the halls, the furtive staying-up-late in each others’ bedrooms, the gyms of other high schools for Winter Guard shows where girls in white dresses danced and whirled and threw heavy wood rifles to the driving heat of “Precious Things”). At the time, and through the ten or fifteen years that followed (I’ve missed a few recent albums; she lost me, and then I lost the drive to chase her down to try to understand), I found myself in those little strings of language, the swells and plummets and pirouettes of sound. I saw a lot of concerts, her alone in a cone of light, making love to a piano, and it helped form my sense of what to be–not talented, because I couldn’t fake that, but intent, and intense. And, of course, red-headed (the fact that hers is dyed is and always was irrelevant to the outcome, although interesting for cause/effect purposes): she embodied the iconic sense of the color in the culture, by choice and charismatic giftedness. Mine was born there, implying in the first visual impression I made everything I wasn’t: beautiful, daring, fierce and wild–rather than just stubborn and bratty–and also mystical, as if somehow connected more directly, the current deep and harder to sever than other people’s, to the planetary heartbeat revealed in mushroom faery-circles and the way a sunny ray of light would snag among the misty needles of a morning pine.

So I learned to fake it, until I could hold enough of it in my hands (we held gold dust) to feel a little mystical myself, to feel if not connected (and sometimes that, as well) but at least worthy of connection, magnetic enough. This led to poetry–to making my own strings of language that told stories in little confetti slips of implication, captured memories and mental photographs in tiny drop-of-water worlds tossed across a window’s glass while the rest of the world went by, too big to hold on to, and mostly not of interest anyway, by comparison to the dazzling microcosms. It led to a lot of hope and bitterness and burned-sugar richness in how I thought about love (and all of her associates, “crush” and “friend” and “boy” and “girl.”) All of which kept my twenties very, very interesting.

But the world doesn’t end there, in one’s interesting (and gorgeous, and exhausting, and also anguished and extreme and emotionally violent, with fallout I still find myself wishing I could erase, wishing I’d never created: wishing I’d been just a bird, winging through some pretty scene, and not the bomb that shattered it) twenties. The tiny hour-clocks of the dandelion give way to the slow-paced counting of the oak, season, year, decade, aeon.

And so after all of that, Tori’s voice is with me still, telling different stories between the lines of the same songs, and re-telling the same tales to a me with different ears, interweaving changed narrative with the musical paintbrush-trails and piano-hammers that still touch and slip around and twang the same heartstrings (because after all, we’ve each of us got only the one heart to play upon), and this morning she, with her “southern” girl stories (Baltimore, though north of where I met this me of mine, is south of the Mason Dixon line) finds me in a northern town, my mouth closed against the tiny butterflies of words her words release, feeling only a hundred miles away, instead of the usual thousand or more, from a poem’s wings of breath and condensation taking off along the runway of my tongue, rocking my red-haired daughter against my chest in front of a picture-window full of winter (I run off, where the drifts get deeper) and watching her future and my past blur here in the middle.

For example, this: three cats rolling in a little crushed-leaf dizziness on the floor are teaching her to love quick, lithe-muscled creatures, to admire their speed and shape and physicality. Her father, who is all of those things to me, wearing his own set of the taut boy-shoulderblades and pretty lips I watched before I even understood to recognize the feel of pining, is right now teaching a class of distracted teenagers in a room where someday she’ll look at girls, and boys, and the words for “friend” and “love” will take on form and character and bicker in her mind… so much awaits, so much tripping on youth’s chemical stew in all the colors language can imbue, so much giddiness and the heartache without which we would not know the shapes or recognize the borders of our hearts. I know that she’s a new creature, this tiny-fisted ball of hot breath and slippery little lizard tongue and flickering lids who dreams against the rhythm of this heart I’ve learned the shape of through an awful lot of sharp-tooled edging, yet maybe, too, she’s (never “just”) pieces of me you’ve never seen.

It’s going to be a beautiful unfurling, to see what wings she grows (and probably a point of high frustration, to hear whose tones and voices she chooses to guide her way–let’s hope popular music does some significant backsliding toward lyrical complexity in the next fourteen-to-eighteen years!). I can’t wait, and I wish she’d slow down already; she can’t even understand me yet, but every day I’m losing time, and there’s so much I want to tell her…

It’s your turn now, to stand where I stand

with everybody looking at you–here, take hold of my hand

A First Noel

Baby’s first Christmas coincides this year with Matt’s and my first Christmas on our own: last year we had Caleb, and the year before we did pre-Christmas with the little guy and actual Christmas with my parents in VA, followed by an extended post-Christmas tour of Matt’s family in England. This year we don’t see the boy until boxing day, and the girl has no concept and no expectation, so really it’s just us. And Picabo, I suppose; the other two cats have never seen a Christmas either, and will be surprised and disappointed when their tree goes away.

So for all intents and purposes it’s just us: but us with only two hands at a time, and only one of us drinking, and neither of us doing enough sleeping to make much, if any, making out by the tree likely. Matt says this is part of Evanny’s plan to defend her territory: making out by the tree last year is how we got ourselves a baby! Territory defense also involves a whole lot of yelling, which is not really the carols-and-bells sound of things we had in mind, and a persistent refusal to be as acquiescent and sleep-able and calm as her older brother was at her age, which causes fights when daddy wants to turn the discrepancy into a battle of wills with an infant and mummy wants to search the Internet for answers. The Internet is confusing to the researcher and insulting to the man with the psych degree and actual baby-parenting experience. The battles are exhausting for everyone and usually end with the baby nursing anyway (while daddy mutters darkly about how she always ends up getting what she wants). But at least, with ornaments to destroy and pine needles to puke up around the house, the cats are happy!

It’s hard to reconcile this with images–in our heads and all around us in ads that bombard the house, in the cards on the mantle, in our friends’ Facebook posts–of what Christmas ought to look like. Ours looks like ingredients no one has free hands to make into a pie, burp cloths all over the living room, cats in the pack-n-play where the baby won’t be put down, a fridge full of food no one wants to eat because constant baby-bouncing causes indigestion, and a tower of gifts left to wrap–but at least we have until boxing day to try to catch up. And so we’re both a little frustrated and disappointed, although we’re trying to stay upbeat and enjoy what morsels and moments we can. But it’s hard, being so far away: babies at Christmas are supposed to be passed around full houses, to grandmas and grandpas and aunts and uncles and older cousins and family friends, and we’ve gotten to do the latter for a little while one evening (the only way the tree was going to get decorated at all!) and yesterday morning for a nice pre-Christmas brunch, but for the rest of the time it’s been and will be just us, and there’s no family to share her with–my mom’s going to come up for a while late next week, but all the aunts and uncles and the other 3 grandparents are even farther away, so the family gathering of the TV-land Christmas is going to have to stay just that: a story for TV.

It’s too bad there’s no OkCupid for families: we need an online hub to match us up with some old folks who would like to play grandparent, some other stranded families who’d like to pretend to be our siblings so our kids would grow up with “cousins” to squabble with and food fights at the kids’ table. Social networking is nice and all, but it’s really not living up to its holiday potential.

Still, as the evening settles around us, Evvy’s snoring against my chest in her little sling, we’ve managed between the three of us to get one pie into the oven, Matt’s on the phone to England making cheerful small talk with his mum, there are billions of presents, mostly for Caleb and mostly in Amazon boxes, scattered all over the living room, we have a tin of mince pies we’re meaning to deliver to the neighbors if Ev ever lets me put on clothes instead of last night’s pajamas, there are sax-heavy Christmas songs on our hand-me-down stereo (thanks, John-bird!), and the next item on our list is to light a fire.

So it’ll be a while before it looks like the cottages on glittered cards, but Merry Christ-mess, everybody!

Generative demolition

This is what the main bathroom in our house looks like right now:

Matt tears out the floor around the toilet while his dad starts rebuilding the floor of what used to be a closet but will shortly be a bathtub/shower.

Since Wednesday, the crew of two–Matty and his father, Gary–have been gutting things and making startling discoveries, like that giant window none of us knew was there.  Go ahead, mock us; we’ve lived in this house for a year and didn’t know there was a window in the bathroom.  But from the inside, it was completely walled behind a vinyl three-wall shower-unit, and from the outside, well, okay, it’s completely visible.  BUT.  That side of the house was a no-man’s-land of old construction debris belonging to our next-door neighbors and giant weeds taller than our heads, and the house next door is only about 6 feet away from our own anyway, so we were never on that side of the house to look up and count.  Never.  Like: not even once.

Does it make me nervous?  The gaping holes in what used to be the bathroom floor, the wild plans that have grown into mid-room steps and archways while I’ve been running loads of dusty towels and sweaty work-clothes, the fact that it might be days yet before we have a shower… in July…combined with how we have a friend coming into town and a child coming back to our house day-after-tomorrow: they don’t worry me much at all, really.  I have no doubts about the capabilities of this crew.  Last year, they built a powder room downstairs where there were no walls and was no plumbing (which is why it’s not a problem for Matt to be tearing up that toilet, which won’t be replaced until sometime next week, after the floor is rebuilt and then tiled), and it works beautifully and has served us well.  They did that in only a week, and this year they have two weeks, so a more ambitious project seems thoroughly feasible to me.  Of course, I’m the one at the computer, alternating between working on editing projects, uploading Flickr photos to populate albums of life-two-years-ago, and catching up on Questionable Content, only occasionally sneaking in to where they’re sawing and hammering to take a dusty picture or two and retreat rapidly, while I still have working lungs.

I’m finding it all a bit delightful, really.  In the mornings, we have tea-and-coffee together out on Matt’s backyard patio, and I usually find something to put into them at lunchtime, and then in the evenings, I try to feed them properly, although last night we broke with that tradition, as the menfolk had bought meat they wanted to grill and then decided they were too tired to grill it and they wanted to go out, so we borrowed showers from friends/neighbors Alex and Tina and drove downtown, so the fellas could have a few pints at Kitty’s and we could all have a dishes-free (and very good) dinner at Empire.  Back at Kitty’s after, we met up with one of Matt’s friends, who brought one of his own friends, who turned out to be Empire’s master-brewer, and Gary charmed him thoroughly by telling Tim that his amber was as good as those he drinks back home, so we’ve been promised a beer-tour.

So far, it’s acting as a good metaphor for me, where I am, looking around from inside this changing skin.  They’re breaking things.  Loudly.  Things I was used to, a few things I even liked and valued (somebody sat on the shelf we used to have in the bathroom, the one I planned to clean off and put books on for the baby’s room.  It might still end up with books on, depending on the sturdiness of how they’ve screwed it back together, but it isn’t quite the same…).  In theory, they’re making something awesome in the process, but there’s nothing awesome about the work-in-progress.  That room is a drywall scrap, wood-splinter, saw-on-pipe-metal, rusted-screw, rotten-floor, plaster-dust disaster.

And when I look at this immense body I’m wearing around, most often shoved into the ballooning tents of whatever clothes I can force to fit (I do have a few maternity things that actually look like they’re supposed to on this body, but it’s July–it’s too hot for pants with belly-bands that reach all the way up to my bra and add thick extra layers), I feel very similarly about it: it’s a disaster.  It’s supposed to lead to something awesome, of course.  And the theory is that, someday, in addition to the something awesome coming (literally) out of it, it will return again to being not only functional but maybe even good, maybe small enough to be inoffensive, maybe even a little bit pretty.  (The bathroom I expect to be far more than “inoffensive,” and a lot sooner than “maybe someday,” but tools and building materials tend to behave in predictable ways, and the human body is famous for doing anything but.)  So in some ways, to me, that picture of the filthy, shattered mess, is a bit like a picture of me–nothing where it belongs, nothing looking like I imagine it doing, some reminders of what it used to look like, some hints at where it might be headed, but mostly a mess.

The last post was made on the first day of the temporary–really temporary–class I taught at MPH this summer, a week-long class in college-essay writing/revision for a group of what turned out to be four junior and senior boys from four different area high schools.   It’s long-term optimistic, that post, but it was also a bit of an island of sadness, moving into that space knowing how short a time I would be there for (6 hours total), knowing that it wasn’t a “real” teaching job, and that the adjuncting life, hard enough to justify when not a parent, and ripe with the potential to fail utterly at feasibility once childcare enters the equation, was never wanted to do anyway.  I meant to teach in a school.  I got a degree and certification from college 1.1 (in a program college 1.0 cancelled after I arrived) in teaching in the schools.  I intended, when I went for my master’s, to get the degree so I’d be worth more money (I was bored with teaching SAT prep classes and there was too much competition for school positions in Fairfax County for me, at the time, to land one at the time, so it seemed a good use of energy and time) when I went back to teaching in the schools.  And then I got lured into the academy with promises of professorships and cushy research credits and classes full of students without parental interference, and I liked it, so I kept doing it for a whole degree (and accompanying decade) longer than I meant to, only to strike out at finding a professorship and end up on the long-highways-for-few-pennies circuit instead.

The sadness is because I failed–the adjuncting I could have done with the master’s, and thus the decade I spent on the PhD was for naught–and because I quite foolishly got myself stuck in everybody’s least favorite dead-end corner of the American job market maze: overqualified for everything, with all the wrong experience.  I can’t teach in the schools in New York.  a) My certification is expired, b) it wouldn’t count here anyway, c) I’d have to pay for 2 years of coursework out of pocket just to get re-certified, and d) the system, beached on an epic swath of budget cuts, is firing right, left, and sideways anyway.  I might, in a few years, be able to work at a private school like MPH (they don’t require New York certifications, necessarily, so the rules are a little more… bendy), but I can’t do it yet.  A fundamental belief gets in the way: I want to do this mothering thing right, and I need to do teaching right if I’m going to do it at all–both the baby and the students have a right to a full-on commitment.  And at 38, I don’t have the energy to learn to be a new mother and start first-year-teaching all over again.  Something–or more likely both things–would get its corners cut until it bled, and that’s not fair to anybody involved.  So the demolition is more than the physical space of the bathroom, and more than a metaphor for the rotundity baby-incubating requires (and all of the unpleasant extra places it seems to accumulate: there is no reason, at all, that carrying a baby in one’s belly should require one to have fat arms).  It’s also a photograph of my career, the shattered boards all of the failed interviews I’ve been to in the last few years, the dust all that remains of thousands of things about my field and discipline I used to know that I, realistically, will likely never use again.

This doesn’t mean I’m destined for gloom and doom, of course.  Failures are also opportunities to do something different, and just like the bathroom’s inevitable demolition is leading to the creation of a beautiful thing, my crashing-and-burning career is setting me and the careful, observant, scientific, hopeful, research-and-data-addicted brain I’ve spent all of those years in school honing up for new challenges that I hope to grow into new knowledge, skills, and maybe even areas of art and expertise.  There are things I plan to finish writing, and other things I plan to start.  There are physical challenges to meet, like how to cradle a nursing baby effectively while writing.  There are a lot of things I want to learn how to cook, since I’ll be home to do the cooking for a while, and a lot of tricks about feeding a family healthy food without a lot of money to spent that I need to learn too (this is where the research-addict and the typing fingers merge!).  There’s a crash-course ahead in diapering and laundering and trying to make the cloth-diaper-thing work (which I know it can, because I’ve seen people do it, but I don’t yet know if this child and I are going to be those people).  There’s also a lot I have to learn about patience and sweetness and nurturing, because I’m not nearly as any-of-those-things with Caleb as I want to be, and I can forgive me somewhat, because I came to the job late and with a role and a personality already somewhat established, and because I’m sure some of my shortness with him comes from the back-and-forth switch of his instability in our house: he’s the center of the family sometimes and gone other times, and so never really takes up a position of being one contributing member, which means the adults end up competing with him for each other’s attention in ways we never learn our way around, because every few days he’s gone again, so we’ve never had to.  There are going to be a lot of “have to”s that make me different, that grow me up into actually having to learn to be a mother, and not just play one on alternating weeks or sets-of-days.

I’m okay with the “have-to”s, though.  Matt worries, every time I phrase anything as a worry or an obligation, that it means that I’m unhappy.  Every time I talk about growing up, he gets apologetic on me, like he thinks somehow that his job as my spouse is to spoil me rotten and perpetuate my youthful fecklessness a little longer.  Me, I don’t see these recognitions as complaint.  I had a fine childhood, and between my friends’ outlooks, their generosity in sharing what they had, and the simple truths of what it’s like to stay in school and live with roommates for fifteen years past when many people stop it, I had a very, very long American adolescence, and I’m immensely grateful for both of those things, and yes, they were at many points awash with love and beauty, but I don’t regret, at all, that they’re behind me and that it’s time to move into a different role and a different part of this life’s story.  It’s not a hardship to have “have-to”s at 38.  It’s not a hardship to grow up, to leave some things behind, to take on new things.  (It’s going to be a hardship to be in our 70s, still paying off student loan debt and trying not to be bitter about the myth of “retirement” we were fed in our youth, but that’s still a long way off, and there’s an awful lot of stuff we get to do in the meantime!  It’s going to be a hardship to have to choose between food and heat this winter, if I don’t get enough editing jobs lined up to pad our sharply dropping income, so if anybody’s still feeling generous in February, feel free to advertise my services–or send baked goods!)

All in all, though, the smashing?  It’s fascinating.  I might be “bathing” tonight with a washcloth at the downstairs sink, standing in a bowl to gather drips–it’ll hardly be the most primitive bath in human history, and I’m sure I’ll survive it.  It might even be kinda fun.

So I guess it’s time…

…to out ourselves about what some of our friends (I’m looking at you, Crista, for walking into a room & saying “I knew it; you’re glowing,” and at Madeline, who isn’t even here but dreamed about it anyway) have already claimed is completely obvious:

(This metaphor brought to you, by the way, by Pi day)–I am become an oven, and there’s a baby baking.

We have no pictures for you yet (unless you’re really interested in what I look like pudgy from 3 months of eating starchy things constantly to pacify the first-trimester tummy, because that’s all we’ve got so far: no discernible bump in the pudge, but plenty of pant-fitting-wreckage because of the pudge).  And we’re not telling the little boy yet, both to stretch further into the safety zone and to reduce the amount of stress he’s already under (more on that in the next post, maybe).  But we’ve made it to 13 weeks, and I’ve had the all-day alcohol-free hangovers, highly annoying waking-up-starving-at-4-every-morning sleep interruptions, and crippling exhaustion to prove it (I think I’ve missed as much school to stay home and sleep this semester as I did the Fall I had pneumonia). Most importantly, we’ve got the happy little heartbeat as evidence–next time we go in for a check up, I’ll see if I can figure out how to use my phone to make a recording!

Localized announcements started last week, and I got my first unsolicited and un-“do you mind?”-ed (but totally welcome) belly-touch from our friend Francis, which I found fitting since I once sneaked into an academic conference about nothing I’ve ever studied just for the free booze by pretending to be his wife.  A couple days ago, when I ran into his actual wife, our friend Christy, at the thrift store (she was buying a gorgeous picnic basket that some fool had abandoned, to keep books and toys in for her daughter, who’s just one and loves things that open and close, and I was hoping for bigger pants), she was the second.  We’ve also been “selectively” telling people at Matt’s school and online–using the selection criteria of “who’s in the hall/logged in at this exact random moment when I want to tell somebody”–so don’t think if this is the first you’ve heard of it that you’ve been not selected.  Never mistake this totally random (ooh, shiny!) approach for a system.

We’re due in mid-September (calculation-methods disagree about which day exactly, but since “calculating” is a ridiculous practice anyway, I don’t much care).  My old friend Jeff (not a remark about his age, but about how long we’ve known each other–since Junior High) and his wife are expecting their fourth a week or two later, and I’m hoping they go early (without me having to be too late) so we can match: this would be charming because Jeff and I already share a birthday.  But if I’m earlier than the guess, maybe we can land on my brother’s birthday instead.

Matt has been a superstar so far–he’s working insane hours and is as tired as I am at the end of most days lately, but he’s hanging in there, and always finds the energy to rub my feet and put lotion on the sore boobs he rarely gets to touch otherwise (poor boy).  His best trick is an ability to feed me when I hate food but am starving and cranky about it, which happens all the damn time.  The man has a gift for walking into the same kitchen I have just stormed upstairs railing against and coming out with food in his hands that I had no desire for just minutes previously, but somehow he picks the right thing or combination of things–I might have to be the baby-cow later, but so far he gets full credit for feeding the creature.

He keeps calling it a satsuma, which is probably pretty size-accurate for the time being–having no idea where he got the term, though, I’m now wondering if he’s going to move on to other Japanese fruits as it grows!

acoustic echo

Straightforwardly, that’s exactly what’s here: Matt & Paul playing Oasis with un-wired guitars in the empty rooms of the old apartment after our final round of cleaning–the only light is one bulb from the kitchen and the last grey daylight leaking across the shiny floor.

“I wanna SKA-ify it,” Paul’s saying, laughing, about “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” in answer to Matt’s “it’s an anthem, man.” What Matt meant is something between “o god will the nineties ever die” and “don’t hate us for all the fights you had to listen to before we moved away–both through the wall when we lived next door and through the windows when we came over here,” but he’ll take the laugh; it would be the answer anyway.

Less straightforwardly, the last-night vibe makes the echo metaphoric: i’ve lived in this less-than-100-yards of earth-space for five years, and there have been a lot of songs, a lot of stories, a lot of loss and a lot of ground gained, a lot of changes, a lot of late-night talks, a lot of gatherings in three of the four kitchens in these two houses, a lot of friendships made and fed and grown and some released like little birds with new migration patterns in their empty bones. Paul’s voice and his guitar are a two-toned twisted thread (denim blue and wheatgrass) that have woven through the whole, and if not for his and Matt’s open mic intentions, they’d be the thread that hurt the most to cut and leave behind. But i don’t have to. And that’s a marvel: moving away and getting to stay. Keeping the people who want to be kept, giving the others the freedom to fade, and not having impossible geographies to hide behind or blame, because it’s only a ten-minute drive, really; it’s the best of both kinds growing and moving with people-and-places.

We’re still coming back at least once a week anyway, to gather CSA veggie from Paul & his roommate Katy: many things can change in a month, but the planet still turns at its pace, and the harvest still comes when it comes. This morning’s breakfast, on our new back porch–the one “room” that looks like a room and not like a lorry-crash–was CSA farm-egg omelets of sweet, buttery CSA onions & cheddar with chopped CSA cherry tomatoes on top. I have designs on making a pesto tomorrow that combines the small bunch of cilantro that came in this week with some of our happily burgeoning basil, the only real success from our gardening attempts–the watermelons look like a nest of limp sticks, the tomatoes never made it beyond 2-inch shoots, the cilantro bloomed-and-died while we were traveling, and the chives are thinner than hairs and about as full of flavor. But, dangit, they look like a jungle of varied food-life out on the not-a-lorry-crash porch, and creating a space filled with many shapes of green was one of my primary objectives in planting them in the first place, so i consider the project (especially in the light of how we moved them across town after abandoning them for 2 weeks to drive 3,000 miles up and down the east coast) a success.

There are lost days that warrant recounting: Montreal was a blur of bright colors (the pictures all collected somewhere I can’t get to yet), and the road trip and five-day house-party with the little charmer just dripped with goodness and luck and the kindness and generosity of friends new-and-old, but they’ll have to wait until we get the wireless hooked up–that’s one of many things that don’t work yet in the new house, alongside the chicken/fox/corn puzzle of how the bookshelves can’t be moved into place because there are too many boxes of books in the way, and the boxes can’t be unpacked until there are shelves to put them on. The details are just details, though; it’ll all come out in the wash (once Enda calls Matt back and we work out a way to borrow his truck so we can buy a dryer and actually do the wash!).

There are, still and yet, a million things I’m going to miss (even, as hard as this would have been a few years back to fathom, “Alison” (my aim is true). But the idea of leaving here when the singing’s over, leaving the keys behind, and going home for good–not “to the house” vs. “to the apartment”–is so right it gives me the shivers (just like Matt leading into each Crowded House couplet and Paul picking it up by sliding in on the high notes):

and I know I’m right
for the first time in my life
and that’s why I tell you:
you’d better be home soon

alternate lives

I took both of these pictures on a morning walk during our brief stint on the North Shore of Oneida lake–a visit M’s own blog post has captured aptly and illustratively, so I’ll skip that step and let you chase down his depiction if you’re in the mood for more of that.

Morning light, through a perfect filter

For me, what else was so captivating, aside from the light through the greens (which is one of the biggest perks of any country lane anywhere–that and the fact that somehow, when you’re out there, you always find the time to walkthose lanes, which in the city you never seem to do), was the contemplation, walking through the deep woods of the fire-road, the meadows between its parallel depth and the rural highway, and the sides of those fast-tarmacked rolling roads where sign after sign vied for attention, claiming waterfront when it wasn’t–and when it was–exactly true, that it might actually be possible, especially with the lake that, or the meadow and the secretive laughter of the deep creek that ran behind it, to live out there, not nearly so far away as other people’s versions of “the country,” just 45 minutes from downtown or the suburban “centers” (i.e. the nearest Wegman’s). “It would be,” I acknowledged, “the end of having a take-away Indian ever again.” “True.” “But we could learn to make our own, if we bought the right spices.” “Also true!” And (although we’re still hoping–or at least pretending to hope–it doesn’t come to that, it would make for a shorter transactional-commute with the realnorth country where my step-son’s parents live and she’s still holed up with him during her halves of the weeks. “Imagine falling asleep to water-noises every single night. Just imagine.”

These logs were made for sawing

There’s a lot about the country that’s plumb crazy, of course (we learned where that expression came from today, in the visiting home inspector’s session in our how-to-buy-a-house class, mandatory for everyone begging for grants, whether our applications meets the standards or is deemed not to: lead poisoning), like the pervasive belief in the local grocery store’s that the smell of cold fry-grease is a good advertisement for impulsive purchases from the deli-slash-fish counter, or how they put giant tubs of “fluff” in the peanut butter aisle to be fed to children as a lunch staple. But some of the kinds of crazy one finds in the country are arty and liberating and beautiful, in ways that invite you to re-purpose whatever you want, too, because clearly ain’t nobody got a speck of room to talk about it. This self-explanatory gem is my favorite of this past week’s treasures.

In other lives I don’t actually lead, one of my very best friends got married today in sunny California (pictures on Facebook have already confirmed that the weather was perfect), and one of M’s best friends is getting married tonight in Cleveland (pictures on Facebook have already confirmed, anyway, that her dress is gorgeous), and we made at least seven versions of plans that took us, in our imaginary-perfect worlds, to one or sometimes both of those places in the same weekend, but in the life we actually live, we had to spend the day in a conference room watching the world’s longest, driest powerpoint presentation about process-details that might have been valuable three months earlier in the home-buying game but were all by this point either factoids we’d stumbled across by accidents or tricks it was too late to use to save us. also, the wee boy is with us (he spent the day with friends, so at least someone got to spend this nice June day playing in the perfect green and sunny weather), by legal requirement because tomorrow is Father’s Day, and for various logistical reasons bringing him along on either venture wouldn’t have worked anyway, so we’re at home, raising rattling ice-cubes in our everyday water glasses, which are full of tonic and gin this time, toasting years and years of good fortune and happiness to those we miss, missing the hell out of their perfect weather and gorgeous dresses, and plotting out the tiny domesticities of tomorrow’s quiet holiday.

Maybe we’ll invite them out to sample sugary New York wines next Autumn, and maybe they’ll come. Maybe we’ll buy a house on a lake some years from now, and then they’ll come, and bring their kids, and build bonfires by the water. Maybe we’ll have a postcard from Spain to hang on some new wall, and maybe it’ll be from France after all, instead. Maybe next year it’ll be postcards from St. Lucia, or books of poetry instead. Maybe we’ll just read about a lot of possibilities on the internet, and take quiet walks down our own new street, and paint new walls, and pack old boxes, and send wishes like pipe-smoke into the ether, for our loved ones’ happiness and for our own. And maybe we’ll do none of those things, and fall into an entirely different scheme instead, one we can’t even currently imagine. But part of the fun is in the possibilities, in how they’re all alternate possibilities from one another and from where we thought we’d be, in how a year-and-a-half ago, where we’d have thought we’d be a year-and-a-half from then looked nothing like this, and this life was only a dim glimmer of a far-off maybe.

Maybe we’ll send a postcard.

recipes for melody and discord

for enough hours that it’s starting to feel like days, the wind has been thrashing like a mosh-pit around the house–a mosh-pit trapped in the high-beams of a search-helicopter and somehow, improbably, delighted to see it: it’s been sunny and brilliant, fat, fluffy clouds racing across the sky much faster than they look like their girth should allow, the leaves in the maples out back and the linden out front throwing themselves around in a mad frenzy of chimes and branch-clatter and high notes and low roars and the constant flag-snapping of leaves on leaves on leaves, somehow managing not to tear each other loose. it makes me, us, and the cats, want to race around the house, tearing strips off the walls and yowling. they race; we argue about nothing at all and then tear the clothes off one another instead: it’s all very rock and roll, really.

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the boys–which is how i’m going to have to refer to Paul and Matt as musicians until they give themselves a band name–now that all the clothes are back on and evening has fallen, are practicing again, harmonizing to “Walk On,” and giving me shivers, not trying to blend in with the wind-chimes that are past the door still announcing that the mad hair-tossing of the outside world isn’t over, but blending anyway, despite the discrepancy: in here, each note is aimed-for and almost each one captured in the fluid nets of the keys on screen, the vibrating strings of two guitars, and the other man’s voice.

they’re very different, and only a little bit alike, but they complement each other grandly, and their voices are a perfect metaphor, a kind of music-bent metonymy that itself harmonizes with the goofy photographs i took earlier in the week of the two of them, with friends Donovan and Francis, launching their sweaty shirtless selves at the basketball net with pained, stern, accidentally silly faces.

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the music’s good for writing; it leads to sentences that lead to other sentences and words that dolphin-leap in and out of them, self-selecting for tune and rhythm. it’s not always good for focus, though. this was supposed to be a list-post about vegetables, and the music took it right on over. so here’s what we’ve been cooking lately:

tonight’s dinner, as noted above but now with more detail, was red pepper and mizuna quesadillas (the base was whole-wheat tortillas and shredded pepper-jack) with store-bought salsa and heaps of fresh cilantro. a little of what my dad calls “poor-man’s guacamole” (although the recipe–smash an avocado with as much as you like of whatever flavor salsa you have at hand, plus a squeeze of lime if you have it–has more to do with laziness than poverty) was also involved.

last night’s dinner, abandoned in favor of following the wind through argument and out of clothes (the gin helped too) and repurposed as lunch today, was black beans cooked in a mash of cooked, chopped spinach and baby mustard greens and a little too little rice, mixed with yellow curry, cumin, coriander, and tamarind and mint chutneys (left-over from the indian take-away we ordered as a reward for safely getting our house-guest home and our half-time child delivered to his mother’s house even though we only had one car because of some tire-blow-out excitement Monday evening on our way to take the 3-year-old out for his first sushi, which, by the way, was every bit the success we’d suspected it might be, right down to him mimicking his new japanese words back at us: “sashimi.” “edamame.”), served burrito-shaped in whole-wheat wraps with romaine lettuce.  last night also involved a few roasted asparagus, but they got forgotten in the oven thanks to the gin-haze, and ended up more like asparagus-leather (which still tasted good, but was hard to chew).

while my mother was here, we ate pasta with chicken-herb sausage, grilled red peppers, and thick handfuls of chopped fresh basil; green salads every day with herbed feta and olives; thick slices of zucchini marinated in italian dressing and grilled until their skins were carbon paper; black-bean-and-lime burritos with tomatoes and lettuce and cheddar; ginger and cranberry scones with a bowl of cherries, blueberries, and raspberries for accompaniment; cod Matt cooked in garlic and lemon-butter accompanied by vine-tomatoes layered with basil, mozzarella, olive oil, sea salt, white pepper, and balsamic vinegar; egg-salad sandwiches with fresh spinach; and perfect poached eggs (thanks to Jamie Oliver) with buttered multi-grain toast.

we’ve also been throwing yogurt (like most Americans, i call it yo-gurt, Matt in his English-ness calls it yog-urt, and Caleb oscillates between the two) and bananas into smoothies so often that i’ve started wondering if it’s worth cleaning the blender or if we should just blend in the dregs to each new batch, and last week we learned that goya’s frozen guava, while excellent with just a little honey and milk, is even better with fresh mint chopped in. the mint was here because we bought it a couple of weeks ago to make this, Summer Rice Salad with Feta, Citrus and Mint, which Matt liked okay and i thought was awesome, if a bit of a pain in the ass. mostly, i’ve included that link as proof that i do, every once in a while, actually consult a recipe instead of inventing food by simply throwing together what’s already lying around the house. not usually, though. i do recognize, by the way, that the above, all in paragraph form, is definitely not a list. but i at least wanted to keep a few of those morsels immortalized in prose so that when the creative well runs dry, i’ll have inspiration to return to.

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oh, and that mint was on the kitchen counter long enough, before the last leaves were torn off, to start growing roots, so now it’s in a pot outside with the other herbs and future foodstuffs (chive seeds and a few seedlings, basil, cilantro, watermelon and tomato seedlings, a sweet-lavender plant and three hangers-on from last-year’s stubborn, squirrel-resistant pepper-plant collection, plus, for company but not consumption, “bruno” the snakeplant (also a denizen of the afore-mentioned light), a root-bound anthuriam, a don’t-call-it-a-comeback potted azalea, and a cactus i’ve had–and is still green, despite having grown by only one segment in all this time–since junior high) getting thrown around by the chimes and vicious, drunken, swooning, crooned-song screaming dervish of the trees.

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their voices are shot, but the meander of the notes is slower and richer than the album and a wonder to sit unnoticed in the immediate presence of, and there’s nothing cuter than the back-and-forth of the straining chorus-bridge-potpourri of “Mr. Jones”:

believe in me–help me believe in anything–gray is my favorite color–all of the beautiful colors are very, very meaningful–i felt so symbolic yesterday–mr. jones and me tell each other fairy-tales–i wanna be a lion–bought myself a gray guitar–everybody wants to pass as cats–when everybody loves me, i will never be lonely

the close-out of the eve is a re-rendition of “The Cave,” which probably means all sorts of other things about limits and separation to the writers, but the little perfect scales of up and down that their two voices weave like braids tonight are telling me a tale about what creates us and what holds together and where and how we learn from one another how to recognize ourselves:

but i will hold on hope
and i won’t let you choke
on the noose around your neck
and i’ll find strength in pain
and i will change my ways
i’ll know my name as it’s called again