Home at Last

"The light is so rich outside," I said to Helen last night as we pulled down the blinds in the front room. "Don't you think the light is so rich?"

She just kind of nodded at me, preoccupied. The blinds are a technical challenge that don't really admit distractions like mom nattering on about the light. But really: it snowed yesterday during the night, after a day of heavy wind that threatened to keep my plane in the air, circling, bumpily, forever, while my house was down there, just right there, and I couldn't get to it; and as night fell, the snow was this deep royal blue and the trees and sidewalks and streets were almost violet. The lights on behind us in the house and superimposed over the deep blue snow were a homey yellow brown and it was so calm and beautiful I wanted to stay in that light forever. However, there was dinner to make, and spelling tests to prepare for, and et cetera et cetera, and when I turned around again it was night and everything outside was invisible.

So: it is good to be home. The kids really missed me this time, especially Silas, which caught me by pleasant surprise. Sometime I think he doesn't really miss anything except his Wii, during those long, long hours he is forced to be at school or asleep, and indeed, one of the stories he was anxious to share when I came to say goodnight was how he rented Modern Warfare Three from the Redbox at King Soopers (ye gods--really, must we go there? Modern Warfare? Isn't that for 16-year-olds?). It's been nice these first few days home to be not rushed, too, so I haven't been snappish at all. That part has been so nice that it's made me wonder if snappishness is something I could actually give up, like, for good. I mean, it's not like it accomplishes anything, and it's not like being rushed as a state of being is really enhanced by also shrieking at people to get their teeth brushed, now, unless you want your teeth to fall out of your head. Hm.

The work trip went fine. I managed meetings and booth duty and sessions and socializing without undue melancholy; I ate some terrific food and went on long runs along the waterfront and tipped the maid appropriately (this is always something I agonize over). I saw the Gum Wall and had tea and crumpets and bought 3 pounds of smoked salmon at the Pike Street Mall. I kept up on typing my meeting notes and came away with a list of action items that was invigorating but not overwhelming. And I read a lot. I finished The Sense of an Ending (blew my mind, a little, although I still prefer Flaubert's Parrot and I'm not sure I ever really had the narrator's back, so to speak) and Heavenly Questions (this one did blow my mind and I'm still amazed that this little blue book can hold so much inside of it). I cried over the tsunami parts in Lives Other Than My Own but otherwise this assemblage of reading material was not as sad as I expected it to be. The essays in Pulphead (by, correction, John Jeremiah Sullivan) are fantastic and humbling--the first few are just good writing, plain and simple (or complex and delicious, David-Foster-Wallace-style, without the desperation), and then he gets into scholarship, for the love of god, and it turns out he's good at that, too, and it kind of makes you reassess your own talents and wonder why, exactly, you don't bring half this energy to your own work? Also, I really want to visit some Midwestern cave paintings, now. And listen to Robert Johnson.

And under all of it, real life. The sword of Damocles that hangs over us all. I'm not forgetting. I just don't like to talk about it.

The city of rain and fog and coffee

Yes, that IS a tiger costume.

In a few hours it will be daylight and I will go get on a plane and fly to Seattle. This is a trip for work; it's the big annual event that everyone stresses over and plans for and prepares for. I assess my level of stress right now: moderate. It feels less like stress and more like "I have forgotten what it is like to ever sit down." Which is true. It seems like I spent most of my twenties either hiking through the mountains,  trying to figure out how I could be hiking through the mountains, or lounging around. With a heavy emphasis on the latter. Now I'm not even sure how it's done. Wait, you mean I just sit here? Like this? On the couch or what--a chair? Does this look right? Shouldn't I be picking things up or making someone some food?

At the far end of the plane ride there will be rain, and (presumably) seafood, and a lonely hotel room for which I'm simultaneously longing and dreading, and coffee shops. Oh, and lots and lots of meetings. I meant to buy a new suit of clothes for the meeting, something that actually resembled a suit, but on Wednesday, which was the last-minute day I had set aside for the task, I couldn't face driving through the rush hour traffic to the mall. Or trying on suits, or looking at price tags. Especially that last one. So I will be wearing what I usually wear, with some extra snuggly warm things thrown in. I'm assuming I will be cold and damp the whole time, although I don't really mind cold and damp. I also kind of thought about buying some makeup, but--well, that's just too complicated. I haven't bought makeup for twenty years. So I will be my usual slightly faded self.

After careful consideration, I whittled down my bringalong books to five.

1. Pulphead, Jeremiah Sullivan. Essays. Just came in from the library.
2. Lives Other Than My Own, Emmanuel Carrere. Another library hold item that came in just in time to go.
3. The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes.
4. Heavenly Questions, Gjertrud Schanckenberg. Poems.
5. Masque of Africa, V.S. Naipaul. Just renewed this for a third time so I could bring it along and maybe actually get a toehold in it.

So: hipster essays, memoir of the 2004 tsunami, a novel about death, poems about becoming a widow. Naipaul's book is the only one that won't make me want to hole up in a bar and howl. Well, luckily it's the fattest.

I'm still on the fence about whether Lewis and Clark will come. I'm getting rather fond of them both, with Lewis's continual but competence-induced fretting ("a terible calamity , the last thermometer got broaken and that was the most uceful pece we owned I beggan to dispair") and Clark's untroubled report of events ("horse fell 32 feet doan the montan was hurt verry bad destroyed my desk. shot 3 deer 6 elk a white bear") and the deliciously awful spelling. However, I'm near the weight limit for my baggage and my copy of the book is very fragile.

Well, daylight is almost here and I have a quick run to fit in and a shower and a hairwash. I may try to bring the camera, although I fear I'll be cramping Helen's creative output if I do so.

Snow Day

When I went for my run this morning, a huge yellow moon hung low over all the houses, an ethereal visitation that made the boring old neighborhood feel like a magical city on another planet. It helped that it's been snowing a lot this week, so the neighborhood is prepped to feel otherworldly and strange. But it got me thinking, as I ran down Caley, trying to remember to watch my feet, about the spirit of place, the senseness of things.

I'm often mindful of the spirit of the place this used to be. I'll put myself to sleep at night imagining the grassy barren plains that used to stretch from horizon to horizon where my neighborhood is now. I'll think of yucca and Bouteloua grass and rabbitbrush and sage and how lonely and calm this exact spot once was; sometimes I'll pretend it's still like that, under the streets and the houses and the garbage cans out for weekly pickup. It relaxes me.

But I'm not often mindful of what's here now. That's partly because I don't have to: it's here, with that dog barking two streets over at five a.m. and the snowplows going through in the night and the vague distant hum of I-25, a mile away. It's neither lonely nor calm. It's here, and if I think of it at all I soon slip into particularities of specific people and specific routines and how I need to remember to put the recycling out in the morning and we really should have the neighbors over for dinner again and have I checked that spot on the front sidewalk that ices up, lately? I get distracted.

But with that moon hanging low and beautiful over everything this morning, I did start to sense the spirit of the neighborhood itself. It's a head-down, eyes-on-your-own-work kind of place, older and shabbier than most of the surrounding neighborhoods but still prosperous, with flashes of wild longing for something else. It's cozy and well-stocked, with an occasional need of a good airing. This is a neighborhood where half the people park on the street because their garages are full. It has a hive-y, warren-y, connected feeling. Not perfect, not idyllic, not the kind of place you'd dream of living if you were a kid growing up in Ohio--but comfortable. Not bad.

It's been a busybusy two weeks. While I was flopping all over the place bellyaching about Si and his lack of interest in a second language or possibly even a first (relieved/mixed feeling update: he accepted my offer of compensation for education and he will be taking Spanish in the fall), I was up to my panicked elbows in organizing a before-school Spanish class at school for my other child. This is far and away the most involved I have ever gotten as a parent in the affairs of the school; while I'm a genial attender of meetings and enjoyable school fundraisers and have even helped to "host" an event or two (this mostly entails following some other mother's pleasantly detailed instructions on which fruit to buy where), I'm the sort of parent who would really rather mop the floors of the school, twice, with a toothbrush, than walk in and ask a business to sponsor Muffins with Mom. And they already have a janitor, so.... Plus my eyes start to glaze over when other parents start getting excited about how many thousands of dollars were raised at the auction or how great it is that every child has a smart board of his or her own. But! A Spanish class. That I can get behind. I'm even talking about trying to organize a summer Spanish camp, which, I suspect, involves levels of organizational perseverance and salesmanship that I simply do not possess. However. Busybusy, and I can say with relief that the class has left the ground.

In other project news, I got all het up by The Wild Table and went foraging last week before the snow fell. I'm very proud of my haul:

That's at least 6 oz of premium January sour dock, right there.

I found some dock--sour dock? curly dock? some other kind of dock? not sure--growing on the sunny south-facing side of an irrigation ditch, and later went back and cut a bunch, along with some dandelion greens growing nearby. It felt reasonably back-to-the-land-ish and adventuresome, although also "I'm a forty-year-old-mom-trying-to-pretend-I-know-what-I'm-doing"ish. There was also a carpet of a delicious-smelling umbelliferae plant growing in the ditch, and although it smelled as though it might be addictively rich like arugula I thought it might also be deadly water hemlock. So I passed.

Dock was the first wild plant I ever went out and harvested and tried to eat--I think I was in college at the time, and I want to say I made quiche. Is that even possible? According to all the guidebooks, dock tastes like spinach and could thus be used, theoretically, in a faux spinach quiche. I don't even like quiche, though. I guess I might not have known that yet.

In any case, both then and now, I have to say: dock kinda tastes like leaf. Not like a yummy lettuce or spinach leaf, either. Just: leaf. Endlessly sourish and leafish. It's the kind of wild food that might make one abandon eating wild food for twenty years, in fact.

Not that it didn't taste great when stir fried in olive oil with garlic:

Those look like eggs but they're garlic.

But I think the take-home message from that recipe is that you could fry grass clippings in olive oil and garlic and they would taste great.

So. I haven't given up on the wild food yet, but I think I'll wait until later in the year, when there are plants that are actually good growing out there.

Under the leaf canopy

M. has had this philosophy, probably forever although it only came to my irritated attention about two years ago, that a person is healthier in well-appointed surroundings. Okay, the term he uses is "less cluttered." Or sometimes "less crammed with useless stuff." But the solution always involves a purchase and several weekends of deep cleaning. So I tend to be a little...skeptical...when he proposes that the cure for a family member's problems is a trip to World Market or American Furniture or, now that the big blue-and-yellow box store has opened, IKEA.

However, I'll be damned if Helen wasn't stuffed up and whiny and feverish and snuffly for WEEKS (at least two) and then the evening we brought home the new American Furniture bed she started to improve and by the time we bought and installed the new desk, the shelves, and the (admittedly to-die-for adorable) leaf canopy thingie she got completely over whatever it is and is back to her usual cheerful self. So there. Apparently money can buy happiness, at least of the first grade sort.

Her room has ever been a design conundrum. It's the smallest room in the house except perhaps for the bathroom, and it has an unfortunate tunnel shape accentuated by the fact that the only practical place to locate the bed is along one wall. Add a bureau or a desk, and you have a cramped hallway to nowhere. Plus--how shall we put this--Helen has the property-amassing instinct of a monopoly addict. Or a found-object artist. Stuff accumulates. Clothes and dolls and furniture and books, as you might expect, plus art projects and other projects and boxes of which projects may someday be made; drawings by friends; drawings for friends; drawings by stuffed animals for the friends of stuffed animals. Bags with things. Boxes with things. Old forgotten backpacks of things once packed for a trip to the mountains or a trip to the zoo or a trip to nowhere. Stuff.

Which is why I was (and still am, some) skeptical that a few hundred dollars applied at the proper furniture retailers would really make a long-term difference.

Nevertheless, her room looks 100% less tunnellike and 80% more calming and it is a pleasure to poke my head in and watch her sleeping under her leaf canopy with her turtle star nightlight lamp lighting the ceiling.

Not that it wasn't one of my favorite ways to calm down before, looking in on her and her galumphing older brother (although he's such a late-to-bed-er that it's more of a thing to calm me in the morning, except most mornings it isn't calming at all--GET UP!!! The bus leaves in fifteen minutes!!!) as they sleep. Now it's that much more calming, in that it doesn't involve icky notes to self about reMINDing her to CLEAN HER ROOM tomorrow.

In other retail news, I finally took my laundry to the drycleaning and if that doesn't sound like news to you that's because you haven't moved that damn bag of three (3) drycleaning items from House 2 to House 3 through Construction Project 1 to Construction Project 2 to Asbestos Nightmare to Garage-in-Kitchen to Construction Project 3 and back again. And after all that, it cost $30 which is more than I'd pay for two of the three items new, so after this it will be tumble dry low until they attain shapelessness.

Next time: tunnel before and after.

Drinking the Spanish

You know what's so funny? When you're browsing for airline tickets on the web and you've got five different browser windows open and so when you think you're buying the one that departs your airport at 5:00 pm on the day you want to leave, which would be perfect, it actually turns out you bought the one that leaves your airport at 1:00. In the a.m. Hahahahahahahahahahaha kill me.

It's been that kind of a week so far.

What I was going to write about, before I got distracted by Horribly Bad Decisions, was learning, and learning styles, and subject matter, and how as doggedly and lovingly you may lead the horse to the fountain of, say, Spanish, you can't make it drink. Not even if you promise it 100 carrots for every semester it earns at least a B average in the class.

Once upon a time, Silas said, "WHY do I NEED to learn to ski?"

Which is another way of saying we got the middle school registration material last week and Silas has broken my heart by refusing to take a single semester of language, let alone the rigorous two-semester course that I have been holding in my head as the last best chance for him to learn Spanish. This has been been my dream since before he was born, that he (and my other as-yet unimagined children) would be given the gift of fluency in another language.

 I knew it would be tricky, since I am not fluent in another language myself, but I was optimistic in the way it's possible to be when you're pregnant and your child-to-be can be absolutely anything. And we began well: Silas had the great good luck (in the opinion of his parents) to go to kindergarten and first grade at a bilingual immersion school, and by the time we had to move (WEEPING), he had a pretty good understanding of spoken Spanish and an awesome accent. And, unfortunately, a lifelong distaste for the language itself and anything associated with it (even restaurants. For REAL. Oh my heart, you break again.)

Now he says, "What's the snow like?"

Nevertheless, I persisted in halfheartedly trying to Keep the Spanish Alive in his head, if not his heart. And I tried not to be too much of a pushy parent about it: he hated it. I got that. Nevertheless, you don't let a kid not learn to read just because it's hard and he doesn't like it, right? You keep at it. So I kept at it.

And here we are: his first chance since first grade to take a real Spanish class,  in which he might actually learn something, and LO. The forces of darkness have won out and he is opting for art/PE instead.

Unless the 100 carrots a semester move him (and they might. That's a pretty good deal for a kid who earns $5 for mowing the lawn).

Meanwhile, I have been forced to do a little parental soul searching. Back when Si was prekindergarten and we were on tenterhooks about the school lottery chances, I asked myself where I wanted him to go with this. I knew that teaching him a foreign language could easily have the consequence of raising a child who moves to Chile the first chance he gets and never comes back. Ouch. But I could live with that, I told myself, if he was fluent.

I also asked myself a harder question: if he, knock on wood, god forbid, nononono, did not live to be an adult, would I regret him not learning Spanish? And the answer to that was no. Not in the way I'd regret it if he never went camping or never read The Hobbit or never saw the Midwestern woods in spring. Spanish is a skill I want him to have as an adult--and now that I'm out of the fanaticism of pregnancy, I am able to admit that there are many ways to become fluent. Yeah, it's great if you learn it as a child. But I know plenty of fluent adults who did not learn the language(s) of their fluency until they were young adults (or even not-so-young adults). 

Which brings us to deeper parental soul searching. such as: what do we decide to teach our kids, anyway, and how important is it that they Follow the Plan?

For example, we teach kids to swim (even if they haaaate the water) so they don't drown. We teach them to read and do math so that they can earn a living. We teach them how to make baklava because it is delicious (if you like honey, that is. And nuts.). Learning Spanish falls somewhere between learning to read and learning to make baklava. And, I guess, it's like learning to swim, on the odd chance that you get kidnapped by Catalinian pirates and your only hope of survival is to overhear their whispered conversations about where the escape hatch is.

Yes, learning another language is an Important Part of a Good Education. Essential, even. And so often neglected. But...there is an element of personal taste (honey and nuts? what if you prefer lemon?), not to mention the ever so tiny issue that it's actually impossible to be really fluent without sufficient motivation to open your mouth and communicate with somebody else. (That was the beauty of the immersion school. The motivation was built in.)

So, for the unmotivated student (which we most certainly have)...what, really, is the best way to ensure he learns to speak?

I'm not sure--I'm thinking something along the lines of extensive travel/ living in another country, preferably by himself-- probably it isn't sitting in a class for 38 minutes a day learning hablo hablas habla.

Sigh. That's really hard for me to admit, especially since the chances of him going off to live in another country by himself anytime soon are slim to negative 15. And I still think that the chances of him becoming fluent in another language are greatly increased if he takes some actual Spanish classes. But--oh, ow, sadness--if he decides to not to, it is not the end of the world.

Science project. Involves projectiles, naturally. Too bad they don't offer Spanish PE.

The evening I came to this realization, with a heavy, heavy heart, I was reminded about how Silas does learn. It's not by memorizing verb endings--routine rote memorization, the backbone of my own educative process, is not really in his repertoire. No. He and M. were putting together our new IKEA shelves and he was talking through the process, noticing when where there needed to be screws or reinforcements, figuring out what each little piece did, and describing it all (and noticing immediately when something wasn't working or there was some minute piece missing or mis-set). He learns by doing, and he learns by solving problems to which he wants to know the answer. If learning Spanish were to enable him to solve a problem to which he wanted to know the answer, he'd learn it. He'd curl up on the couch moaning every 45 minutes or so, but he'd learn it.

So my mission, if I choose to accept it, is to devise a problem to which the answer is: learn Spanish.

Perhaps I can arrange for him to be kidnapped by Catalinian pirates.

Helen's latest photo series: the Rockies fans among us.

At the very least, I can try to cultivate in him a sense of his own adventurousness, so that when I casually say, his junior year in high school or so, that eh, he really probably wouldn't want to do a year in Costa Rica or anything, he can break in with an indignant, "Of COURSE I want to spend a year in Costa Rica! I'm adventurous!"

Adventurous like taking the overnight plane through Charlotte just because. It's an adventurrrrr.

The long-awaited TBR post

I'm fully aware that the only one who has long awaited this post is me, but too bad. It's my blog, I'll bore when I want to.

So! My personal TBR Pile Challenge! (The real TBR Pile Challenge from roofbeamreader can be found here.) A quick rundown of the rules:

1. The book must have been in my house at least one full year.

2. The book must be previously unread by me.

3. All books must be completed by December 31, 2012.

The real TBR Challenge involves 12 books, but requiring myself to read so many books at home crimps my library-borrowing style, and library borrowing is one of my few certain pleasures in life that doesn't cost money and doesn't involve the consumption of butter and flour -- so, six books.

So, without further ado, my TBR Pile Challenge Books for 2012 are:

1. The Journals of Lewis and Clark, edited by Bernard DeVoto
2. Undaunted Courage, Stephen Ambrose
3. The Ohio Frontier, R. Douglas Hurt
4. Democracy in America, Alexis de Toqueville, abridged and with an introduction by Thomas Bender
5. The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen
6. Drosscape, Alan Berger

You may note a certain theme. A certain level of... chewiness. A possible, er, reason these all were abandoned not long after being started, or bought, or picked up off the departmental free table back when I was part of a department. Nevertheless: six. I can do six books squeezed in between reads that require less effort.

It actually helps that we have a theme going. I'm a themey kind of reader. I will forge my way through the falling-off cover and creatively abysmal spelling and maddening uncertainty about daily location of The Journals of Lewis and Clark, and invigorated and refreshed, I will stretch and hop to the next book, Undaunted Courage, which will feel like a candy-covered romp in comparison, plus I have faith it will have maps for dummies. Then I'll reach backward a little, explore the Ohio frontier, all the time wishing I could hop in the car and go search some of these places on foot (in lieu of that, there will be lists). Then I'll be fired up for de Toqueville (and chances are I'll read two and a half chapters and founder on the desire to read something with an actual plot and neglect the whole project until fall--still, I'll be halfway through at that point, so who cares?)

Anyhow. Happy reading. I love a good reading project.

Someone is seven

In all the hoopla over holidays and the New Year, someone's milestone got lost in the scrunchled up wrapping paper and discarded boxes.

I asked her not to look mad, for once. See, it's possible.

  Bloggily speaking, anyhow. In real life, the preparations for and recovery from the celebrations of sevenhood can be directly tied to several balls dropped this holiday season, including a) half the Christmas cards not leaving the house until too late to actually arrive before Christmas; b) several ungifted or subgifted members of the extended family; c) the singing Christmas decorations never managing to get paired with batteries (this one wasn't so bad, actually); d) probably something else that I am forgetting. Like baking. I meant to bake this year. It didn't happen.

We had 14 girls under the age of 8 in the house. Miraculously nothing got broken. Note: the soundtrack for this picture is all girls shouting in unison "Tramp-o-leen! Tramp-o-leen! Tramp-o-leen!" while they jump up and down. In unison.

A girl and her doll, united at last.

So. Seven. It's an amazing age, or at least the seven-year-old we have constantly amazes me. M. and I joke that what she really needs is a production studio. And a workshop. And a warehouse. And...a trained staff. At least once a week Helen comes to me and in between bouncing up and down on the couch or petting her favorite stuffed animal or brushing her hair with her exciting new brush she describes in great and casual detail how she's going to build a car for her American Girl Doll, or a bed, or a teepee, or a desk. Then she wants to get started right away, and when I stutter-- "Um, but, I'm actually making dinner right now," she bursts into angry tears. At any one time she is busy making sets for the stop-animation movie she's making, or a book about a girl in the city, or a box full of Kings Cibul (King's kibble) for her Pick-a-Pet store. Her half-done projects are all over the house. I may come back from a run and be commandeered to help sand teepee poles, or wield the hot glue gun, or listen to her new project, which is to get "my very own puppy," which, sadly for both us, turned out not to be My Very Own PuppyTM but an actual live puppy, "either a fox terrier or a chihuahua but not from a pet breeder place because those cost like $400."

"Ack! No! We are not getting a puppy!" I said, a veritable portrait of parental understanding and graciousness.

Tears, and a refusal to eat dinner until a puppy was promised and/or bought. After I'd gotten my shoes off and peed, and discussed the matter with M., I softened my tone a little (although just to be clear: we are *totally not* getting a puppy, for the love of god). Helen was not distracted and insisted we set a timeline. I refused, gently but firmly, to set a timeline. Tears.

It's unavoidable that many of her projects end in disappointment and despair, especially since we have neither a workshop nor a full-time trained staff. However, what is an amazement to equal her idea-generating brain is the fact that, actually, a lot of her projects do get completed. There's the Squirrel Stop game, sitting in its box under the counter. The book describing our trip to Yellowstone, which languished for months before finally being finished up in an afternoon. The doll bed. The doll desk. The million and one movies and stills featuring her stuffed animals in our digital camera's memory card. Most of these are just what you'd expect from a seven-year-old: cardboard and flimsy, with spidery writing and odd-shaped cutouts. She doesn't waste a lot of time laboring over the final product, in other words. But a few are actually really good, good enough that I find myself wishing that if I could grant her one fairy godmother wish it would be this: follow-through. (Actually, if I could grant myself one fairy godmother wish it would be follow-through.) Because when this girl harnesses her persistence to start a project to completing her vision of how the project ought to turn out, she's going to be a force of nature.

This photo kind of says it all.