Why Don't I Just Make Myself Scarce For Awhile

Four days until we abandon our home to go live in a van down by the river.

Perhaps we will become river people, with tambourines and seitan. Perhaps we will braid our hair and dance barefoot.

It was 106 degrees here today and we don't have air conditioning. It's 9:30 pm and I'm just now coming back to life after collapsing, lifeless, around four. Just when I thought I couldn't live another minute, Mr. V made me cold shrimp po'boys with mango-kiwi salad and I was like new for at least ten minutes.

Time for packing. Time for vodka slush puppies. Time for Firefly on Netflix.

Bear with me while I'm scarce for awhile. I might not have wi-fi again until mid July. If I go four days without tweeting about alcohol, Indy, or Supernatural, call the police. No wait, call Jensen Ackles.

That is of dire import.

xoxo
-V

(tell him river people live by a sacred code, and that these margaritas aren't going to mix themselves.)

Home Is Wherever I'm With Me

When it became clear that we were going to have nowhere to live for the month of July, the obvious choice was to take a vacation. Mr. V had been offered the use of his mother's camper to stay in, but what is left the daughters? Nothing but the darning, as usual.

When it became clear I was going to take a vacation, the natural thing to do was to name it Rainbow Tour. I planned to drive through Idaho all the way up to Portland to visit my sister-in-law, Mercy, who lives there in typical Portland fashion with her musician husband, both of them working at an organic bakery to make ends meet, maintain street cred, and eat croissants. The dream of the 90's, y'all. After a week there, I was going to travel south down the coast to visit Blood Sister A in Sacramento, where she works at the Capitol building for the Speaker of the Something and the Representative of the Other-what, dealing with a lot of you-know-what-shit while trying to improve people's lives. She watches C-Span all day and cares about it, it's hard to believe we're related. (What do you mean, "we're not"?)

Immediately I did what any self-respecting artist does to prepare for a tour--I started soliciting donations and letting my leg hair grow out. I began the process of choosing a tour t-shirt, and selected Rainbow Tour's official album. (It's magnificent). Excitement grew as I planned trips to the zoo, and Mt. Hood National Forest, and A's friend's houseboat in the Bay area (see how I talk just like a local, now?). Meanwhile Mr. V sent encouraging texts about how much he loves my spontaneous side, things like "This is awesome, I get to work all day and live in a trailer down by the river while you take off on a magical bus tour"*. It's a sacrifice, I know, but I'm willing to take vacations whenever necessary and it's what he admires most about me.

(Mr. V keeps saying we need to become less impulsive, and I agree, only it might be working very well but backwards because I just left to take my husband to pick up a trailer and returned with an antique victrola and a pair of antlers.)

In this frenzy of preparation, Blood Sister A wisely pointed out that the more excited I got about Rainbow Tour, the more likely we were to find a place to live.

And that's what happened.

Yay?

I'm just kidding. I knew this was a win-win situation all along. Either I take Rainbow Tour, or I get a home to live in, and we found a cute rental. It has hard wood floors, which is good, because I have sworn a blood oath against carpet and am honor bound to burn any the moment I lay eyes on it. I got to pick the bedroom paint colors, and it has a massive hulking lawn that I'm going to get to mow all by my lonesome, because guess what? The girls and I are moving out on July 12th, and Mr. V cannot join us until October. I told him I hoped he was feeling nice and sorry for me now, and that's when he said we could hire people to mow the  football field-sized lawn for me.

So you see, he's not heartless after all.

Right now Mr. V is out working in the hot sun--it's supposed to hit 102 degrees here today--moving things into storage, so I'd better get off my whimsical rainbow blog, which smells like tulips and rain and tastes like Bordeaux (or will, once technology catches up) and pack a couple boxes for the girls to add to their throne.

xoxo
-V


*actual text from Mr. V. You might have to be him or me to understand how jokingly he meant this and how hard we laughed over it. Or you might just have to be a sociopathic narcissist like I am.

Rain Dance

Friday night in May, but it smells like June, like caramel corn and cotton candy and everything good in the world.

I still don't know what the sweet scent comes from but I die a little death every time I catch it.

My husband and I have mixed drinks and taken them out to the patio. The girls are in bed, or supposed to be. I catch their silhouettes, their brambled hair, in sheets of black against a yellow light through my bedroom window. The evening is nearly over and a wind is gathering in the west. I pull my wrap tight around me, tuck it underneath my toes. I sip my drink that tastes of last summer, the sweet tequila that's been untouched since August.

He gets a phone call.

I hear tiny feet bounding up and down the hall. Inside, the children are making mischief, like survivors in a house without adults. Above me the great old tree is hushing in the wind. My husband's voice is a background murmur as I tip my head to the violet sky and watch the bats, watch the leaves, watch the wind.

Far in the southwest cracks one spectacular bolt of lighting.

Earlier that day I'd realized that the stories I tell myself about everything going right one day are as hurtful as the stories I tell myself about everything going wrong. This epiphany settles friendly in my chest, beneath the burn of tequila and the chill of the summer storm. Nothing goes my way is a thought I've learned to stop, but its companion lie is, when I achieve this, everything will be circus and peonies and now, I realize that isn't true.

I am happy now.

I will fall asleep, a little drunk, in clean sheets next to my husband and I will know, or maybe remember, that everything my happiness needs is contained right here and now.

Every last thing.

After the bolt I watch the same spot in the sky for five minutes, ten, but nothing comes. Then we see it, a flickering light in the north, its answering thunder. Through the screen I tell Ayla to sleep in my bed, where she can burrow and hear the storm and her father's voice.

My husband and I sit on the patio as the storm approaches and settles in above our heads. There are bone-clean fingers of white lightning in the west and echoing fairy lights in clouds to the north. The wind rushes and I close my eyes and with every part of me, feel it in my hair. I know it's a little dangerous but maybe that is why it feels so good, why I feel so alive, why these storms seem to enter into my body and tingle in my veins, in my marrow where lately I have come to picture combs of clean new honey.

It is a beautiful storm. The moment it becomes full dark, it begins to rain. I stand in the garage door for just another moment and close my eyes, breathe in the scent. The atmosphere is full, a charged presence like spirit or heart and it fills me up, and I am full.

Change is coming, like a quickening storm.

I am happiest in in-betweens and this is why I want to see the world.

It makes me feel more alive.

This Is Not My Beautiful Life

In the summer of 2001, I met the man I didn't marry. I was just barely twenty and away from home with a friend, a city girl transplanted from the arid plains of Colorado and dropped in the sweltering humidity of rural Michigan in August. It was Amish country. When we could muster the energy, between lemonades and naps in the drowsy heat, to go for the mail or shout down the road to the neighboring farm, we'd see them rolling by in their carriages—sad, scrawny broke down horses, heads hung, leather reins clutched in the hands of men wearing round black hats from another time. They never looked at us.

We'd flown in for an O-Town concert. Too old to be chasing boy bands around the country and on top of that, we'd picked the lamest one. We'd missed Backstreet and N*Sync and I suppose we wanted to catch the tail-end of a fad when we still could. We were products of our Lutheran High School, held apart from the world, told we were above it. As a result, we were a little behind on everything. We'd worn shapeless Old Navy t-shirts and clunky white shoes all through high school. We'd take pints of ice cream to the magazine aisle and sit by the racks, browsing Teen Beat and eating Cherry Garcia, spitting out the cherries. We drove by our friend's house, honking the horn. We watched American Pie and cried when it showed us that boys were everything we'd always feared they could be.

Leila's family was from this strange, forgotten part of the country, like nothing I'd ever seen. Green rolling farmland stretching for miles, creaky old farmhouses, thick, impenetrable abandoned forests.  We were staying with Leila's grandmother, Leila's cousins lived in the nearest farmhouse, about fifty yards down on the other side of the dirt road. Her grandmother had given us the attic bedroom, up a stretch of stairs so narrow and steep I never once climbed them without clutching the rails. There were cobwebs around the drain in the sink, dried little gnat bodies suspended in old dust. The pipes creaked. For the first few seconds, the water always ran brown.

 I don't remember exactly when I met him. I think really it started the night we asked him to build us a bonfire next to the trampoline. We'd spent the day floating down the lazy river in black inner tubes. We thought it was a common enough recreation, but as the stream had meandered through back yards, people watching us perplexed from their back patios, we'd wondered. In the late afternoon we arrived, wet and dripping, back at the old farm house. We'd tied bandanas in our hair. Now the picture makes me laugh. I think we look like Friends of Ellen. For the life of me, I cannot remember how we thought we looked, except cool and hard and everything we weren't. There were fireflies in the red soaking light and goosebumps on my pale skin. We asked him to build us a bonfire, and he agreed.

We stood around the fire in the starry Michigan dark. He had to rise early for work the next morning but he stayed up with us. He still lived with his parents, it wasn't uncommon in farm country. He earned money and on the weekends he helped with the farm. He told us about castrating pigs. Our city indignance baffled him. How cruel, we cried, how sad, and he looked at us in honest confusion. Farm pigs must be castrated. So it had always been. As soon as the sun went down, the humidity on our skin left us chilled and shivering. Leila and I fell asleep, damp, on the trampoline. When we woke in the misty dawn, the sun pink through all that moisture banked over the cornfields, there was a blanket over us. We snuck back down the road to Leila's grandmother's house, bleary-eyed and possibly barefoot. He was gone.

That weekend he agreed to take us out on his boat. Most of the boys I'd met until this point hadn't been nice to me. I don't know why. In high school, boys ignored me, at best.(I count myself lucky for this now but at the time, it was devastating). The college guys I'd fallen in with were partiers and treated me as a circus rarity they'd developed a strange affection for. They'd cajole me light-heartedly to drink, to smoke, to do things I swore I wouldn't do. I was still under the spell of my upbringing, still equated normal college-aged behavior with the evils of the world. I still thought I was better than some people for the things I wouldn't do.

But he was different. He was relaxed and kind. He didn't speak much, he took our teasing with a slow, warm smile. I don't remember much about that day on the lake, only that it happened, and it was good. I have a picture he took of the two of us, me and Leila. I've got one arm over the wheel and one around Leila's shoulders. In pictures with other women, I always ended up looking like their boyfriends. There are still some feminine nuances I don't understand.

On our last night there, we piled into his Jeep. I rode in the back with him. By this point we were holding each other's gazes too long and I was looking up from beneath my lashes. You know the look. Leila and I fell into the role, adopted the personas of country girls, the highlight of our week a trip down dirt roads in the back of a Jeep, a hot summer evening, the wind in our hair, into town for French fries at the Hot & Now. I remember he was wearing a black baseball cap. His skin was tanned and rough with stubble. He touched my hip as I lit from the Jeep. I kissed him on the cheek.

The trip ended, I returned home to Colorado. He and I stayed up late, holding bashful conversations over the phone. Plans were made for him to visit me. I have a mind that spins wild fantasies quickly, before I can stop them. I saw myself back in the white farm house, overlooking the green fields, the buggy air and the evenings on the gators, by the fire. I ignored the insistent doubts in my heart and imagined a life for myself that involved tractors and pig castration and Amish people.

The day he was booked to fly in to see me was September 12, 2001.

I can't remember if classes were in session that day. I think they were. I do remember that campus was far quieter than usual. I remember walking across the green to the building where many of my English classes were held, my Jansport sweaty on my back. I was on my new cell phone with him. He was sitting at the Sturgis airport, just in case flights started going out. They didn't. He went back to the airport the next day. No flights went out the 13^th, either.

In the days that followed, we got to know each other better over the phone. What can I say? I was a feminist, a budding liberal, a college girl writing papers on bell hooks and Claudia Card. I was too young yet to understand my own nature: a lone-wolf who needed emotional wide open spaces, a dreamy heart and precious little pragmatism. He was a Midwestern farm boy, salt of the earth, hard-working and family-oriented, a builder of bonfires, castrator of pigs. I know clearly the moment things between us fell apart. For some reason, it was important to him that a wife would sit and watch the basketball game with him, not because she loved basketball, but because she loved him. I told him I would do no such thing, all my sensibilities piqued. We bid each other a terse goodbye. We never spoke again.

Just two or three weeks later, I would meet a boy who had a J.R.R. Tolkein tattoo and feminist leanings of his own. Who kept a picture of his three fierce-looking sisters in his wallet. Who would call our house and leave silly messages for my roommate's dog and who would, unbelievably, be attracted to my rougher edges. Just under one year later, I would marry him.

When things first ended with Leila's cousin, I was devastated. I'd never had a serious boyfriend, I thought something was terribly flawed in me and that I would never be loved. At nineteen, it seemed the world brought good things to everyone, but not to me.

What I feel now is lucky. To have come so close. To have danced with, and then escaped, a fate that wasn't mine.

Things That End in August

Yesterday they said it would hit one hundred degrees.

Today I wake to clouds and thank the stars. I've got a nasty cold and the end of summer weighing me down. In the living room the goblins fight until they put on Michael Jackson videos and go slack-jawed and silent. I'm reminded of my young self, watching Kids Incorporated. I think how I still watch Kids Incorporated, only now it's called The Glee Project.

I've been waiting for Colorado peaches, but they haven't come.

The neighborhood kids walk up the block to school in the mornings. We've got until next Wednesday. I'm awake to see them because I'm headed to work at Borders. I jumped back on the sinking ship, thinking how Ayla wants an American Girl Doll for Christmas.

I tell myself this isn't going backwards.

It's noon. I hear it's Friday. Octoyeah is going down on twitter, otherwise I wouldn't know. I have spent the last week shopping for back-to-school shoes and jeans and fretting over finances. Indy is starting Kindergarten. I'm not worried the way I worried over Ayla, because by now we've been there and done that. But Indy is my baby. My last one. And her starting Kindergarten only means that I don't have babies anymore.

Ayla's Fairy Godmother sent her an ipod with Harajuku girl headphones. The word for how Ayla felt upon receiving the gift: honored.

She knows I'm a big girl, Ayla said with a tried-on solemnity. I'm going to call her and tell her how I feel like a big girl.

It took a Fairy Godmother to honor something Ayla felt within herself. Her mommy, my job is to keep her young. But I also want to honor her, when she shows me who she feels she is.

You are a big girl, Little Bird. In full bloom.



So it goes.

Certain Slant

Central Park in October 2008


Yesterday I came both home and within two inches of smacking my husband's noggin with a cast iron skillet in the same exact moment.

Our house faces east and is full of the sun. It's two billion degrees outside, exactly. The flies keep getting in and I'd spent the night before being harassed by a nasty black rickety cricket. Then I walk in the house and what is the man doing? He's boiling potatoes. On the stove. In the house. The sun is shining, the blinds are melting, and the man is boiling potatoes. It gets worse.

He's boiling the potatoes in order to mash them.

And on the counter is a jar of gravy.

Excuse me while I run to the bathroom and puke. Why don't we just eat a really greasy quesadilla, put on a Fair Isle, and go to the county fair to ride the Spyder at one in the afternoon? I explain to him that this is how his actions make me feel. What's the point? We've had this conversation a hundred times. We'd have it again this afternoon when I got back from the movies and could smell it the second I stepped out of the car.

Beef stew.

Don't be too hard on him. It's not his fault that he's a Californian. When we were newlyweds, I told him gently at first, and then with ever-increasing consternation, that Russian Pork Chops and baked acorn squash are not things we make in July. Stuffed peppers are an autumn food and chili is only for months with an r--and even then, we're getting liberal. We don't buy blueberries in January, and we don't break out the dutch oven until well after Labor Day.

The issue we have here comes down to seasons. I go on insisting that foods are seasonal, Mr. V goes on priding himself on "not being a slave to the rules". I calmly tell him that they are not rules, just firm preferences colliding with common sense. You'd think he'd get less of a kick rebelling against those, but no.

Some things are just in our nature.

***

In May, I had a hag's toothache that summer would be a quiet season for me. A behind the scenes sort of time. I declared myself on blogging hiatus only to post almost every day that week. But then my posts tapered off. My tides receded. I needed to be inward, and so I have. I've been busy. I've gotten a lot done. For whatever reason, my spirit asked me for a bit of solitude and I gave it that.

Call me crazy, but the light felt different today. The clouds broke open in the late afternoon, the after-storm breeze was chilled. The light hit the trees at a certain slant and I heard the promise of fall.

Things come and go. My husband is out of his damn mind.

I believe in staying true to the seasons.


"hag's toothache" means a nagging feeling or a gnawing intuition, and I made it up just now.

Fiddlesticks You, July July!

(audio only)



Suck it July!

It's bleeding hot and all I can think about is Christmas.

I blame you, July. You bring the pinnacle of summer too soon and it's all downhill from there. And you know it.

You make me sick and listless with your temperatures, leaving me vulnerable for anxiety attacks over how I'm going to manage Christmas. I know you get the bitter irony in this, July.

And I know you're laughing at me.

Your mosquitoes are nothing short of torture.

I haven't been outside since June, July, and you know what?

You make me dream. Of other places. Places where it's not in the nineties for seven weeks straight. You and February make an extremely strong case for coastal lives.

See, now I'm worried about winter again.

And I blame you, July.

For everything.

I blame you for the fact that it's noon and I've not showered or dressed.

I blame you for all those nights when I put my kids to bed at ten pm, cleaned until eleven, showered sometime just before one.

For making me go bad on the promise I made in May to never complain about the heat again.

For the heat sickness I got at the pool and for every penny spent on Frappucinos. (You know I can't survive you without them, you bastard.)

But you're done! You're finished! You're through!

So you know what?

Suck it, July!

Roughing It And Other Things First World People Do For Fun

I really love Starbucks Via and the pleasant suggestions they print on the sides. For instance, just now I opened my coffee cupboard and there on the Via carton it said "For your hotel stay." That made me think happily of the trip we're going to take to California--where, come to think of it, we won't actually be staying in a hotel--and I saw myself, in a tasteful yet economical hotel room, waking up next to my husband and puttering, happy and relaxed, to the, um, hot pot or stove which I'm sure, now, they will have, skipping the hotel coffee, and fixing up a Via.

I am a marketers dream. I am open to all manner of suggestion of pleasant times. You don't even have to try. All you have to do is write in a book what a character is eating and I will crave it. Reading "The Crimson Petal and the White", I craved tea and cinnamon scones. "Snow Flower and the Secret Fan" had me eating potstickers and green tea ice cream for weeks. I don't remember a thing about the Narnia books, which I didn't love, except that in one of them they ate sausages as fat as your fingers (I quote loosely) and drank frothy hot chocolate. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo posed a bit of a problem, as the characters were prone to eating things like sandwiches of egg and sardine, or tomato and cheese and raw garlic, but I solved that by making tuna melts, always with coffee on the side, just like Mikael Blomkvist.

So on Sunday night when Noah said, "Let's go camping", I thought two things. One, yay Via, and two, yay Campfire Marshmallows. Campfire Marshmallows are what all the ladies on the Mormon blogs are packing for their families. One marshmallow is about four times the size of one measly Jet Puff. Seriously, these marshmallows make Jet Puffs look like guppy chow. I'd bought a pack in advance and had it sitting in my cupboard, driving my girls crazy with longing in happy anticipation of our camping trip.

We forgot the marshmallows.

I would like to blame the fact that I was a little carsick, but instead I'll tell the truth which is that, as Mr. V put it, "S'mores are the whole reason mommy goes camping". Which isn't entirely true, I also go camping to sip coffee in the woods in the (late) morning. It improves my self-image; allows me to view myself as 'outdoorsy' and 'contemplative', as woodsy and and earthy but low-maintenance, sitting there quietly with a hot mug and beatific smile and ignoring Mr. V's curses as he struggles with the fire and the bacon and the fact that we didn't bring any garbage bags and the kids have soiled all seven of their spare outfits.

I go camping solely to eat the s'mores, and that is my only excuse for the fact that I, a thirty-year-old mother of two, started to cry when I realized we'd forgotten the Marshmallow's From the Land That Time Forgot.

Mr. V set up camp while I told my kids to look sad and pathetic and dragged them across the campsite to bum marshmallows from some fellow campers. I am enormously brave in certain situations, mostly when I am drunk, but also when my access to s'mores and/or sugar and alcohol is threatened. The ladies kindly gave me twelve of their inferior Jet-Puffs and refused to let me pay them. Later I would suspect these self-same ladies of conspiring with a nearby retired couple to murder us in our sleep. But that wouldn't come until much later, when the sun went down and the fires went out and I found myself awake in the deep deep dark, and look we thought we had seen a bear and even though it only turned out to be a stupid bear-cow, forcing Ayla to turn to art therapy to sketch out her frustration at being gipped out of the sight of a real bear, I had bears on the brain and the kindly ladies had walked around the site and then STOPPED to TALK with the RETIRED COUPLE WITH AN AGING YELLOW LABRADOR which can only mean that they intended to murder us with axes in our sleep and make off with our Hershey Bars and Via.

Tent camping is one of those things only first-world people do for fun, along with slaving in the hot sun to pick our own berries, making our own cheese and yogurt, canning preserves, and wearing high heels. Everywhere else in the world they call these activities what they are, which is "hard work" and "things I would never, ever do if I didn't have to".

This is why I think I might be what you'd call "over" tent-camping. This and the fact that I can liken the experience only to pine-scented torture. Like the Viet Kong decided to mop the floors before laying into me with the bamboo shoots. We didn't have cots, or air mattresses, or even thick blankets, and so I spent the night cold and in pain that reached about five or six on the pain scale, I'm not ashamed to say I could have used nothing more than a Valium-Ambien cocktail, kept up by visions of my own death by Golden Age pass members and really, I don't see why I'd want to do that again.

But I will. I'll do it again, because it's fun for the kids. Because there's nothing kids enjoy more than repeating "we're bored!" and "noooow can I have a marshmallow??" while Mom and Dad sweat it over the rain clouds, and the Amazonian volume of mosquitoes, and the bear-cows, and the tent, and the rain fly, and the axe murderers, and the forgotten hammer and trash bags and the eighth outfit they didn't know they were going to need because they had underestimated how difficult it is to make a number two in the woods when you're four-years-old. I'll do it again in spite of, or maybe because of, the bear-cow; for the time-honoring of the tradition, complaining the whole way about the ride, complaining about how long it's taking to pack in and pack out while mom and dad slave like suckers, complaining about the smoke that blows always in your eyes, and the marshmallow you burnt to a crisp before losing in the fire, while Mom and Dad shuffle exhausted from the picnic table to the fire to the car, like Zombies without a will to keep on un-living, wondering why they do it, why they bother. Because for five minutes the clouds break and you can see millions of stars. Because, in spite of all this, you drive, ripe and weary and wondering if it's too early for a hip replacement, back into the hot and shiny city, balking at the noise, squinting at the glare, you remember the cool of the river and the quiet in the trees, and you wish you could do it all again.

What Could Be Better Than This?

Ayla rides the firetruck

I was feeling really brave on Friday night and took the girls to Longmont's Downtown Artwalk.

There really are no words for how proud I was of myself or how absolutely smug I was about it. I guess there is a tragic phenomena out there of dads who won't take care of their own damn kids by their lonesome for more than thirty minutes. Their wives go months without a coffee date or a good long six hour internet browsing sesh. Truly, no one should be deprived of these things. No woman should be forced to go more than a week without relaxing into a good old fashioned "Jensen Ackles" google image search. I judge these men harshly even though I shouldn't because I am one of them. In our house, it's the mister who takes the kids on all the outings--to Elitch's, to the pool, to see Tangled or Rio or whatever, and down to the Fidelity Fiduciary to visit Mr. Banks. (Feed the birds, baby.)

So on Friday night, when Mr. V had to go to work, I nearly called it off in favor of my go-to parenting strategy, which is called "Mommies need wine and children need Rugrats or whatever the hell else they click on on Netflix and no that isn't for kids,honey, most of manga is animated porn."

But I didn't.

And boy, was I glad I didn't, once I got there. We headed for gelato first because in this house we have our priorities straight. I handed Ayla the camera and told her to take pictures of whatever she liked. She was thrilled. She snapped some pictures of the gelato that were rather good, and also a picture of me eating the gelato which will never see the light of day. The camera adds a second head growing out of your belly, right?


picture by Ayla


picture by Ayla

There was a booth for god knows what, a chiropractor or mad scientist, or something, and they had a model of bones out on display. Predictably, Ayla wanted to see the bones. The mad scientists were tickled by the skinny mini photog all enamored of anatomy, and delightedly--and then bemusedly--and then with forced and terse politeness--held the model up while Ayla took twenty minutes to set up her shot.

I couldn't take any pictures of Ayla taking the pictures, but I wish I could have because she looked so great. A skinny-shouldered, long-legged six year old with dirt under her nails and smudged across her pale cheek. On her back is the blue backpack she insisted bringing, slung around her neck is the red canvas Trader Joe's bag that I swore ten times I wouldn't carry for her and ended up carrying the rest of the night. Later I would find in it: a long length of twine, a ziploc baggy full of bottlecaps, a pair of scissors, a Mead notebook and one of my pens, a model horse, a woven bracelet, a stuffed teddy bear, a bag of chips, and a framed picture of her cousin Eisley.She is slight and maybe awkward but has forgotten herself in her fierce concentration. Her green eyes are focused, she cocks one stork leg, she carries her tension around her mouth like her mother.





She's amazing.

After the bones booth we hit the art booths for the kids, and Ayla entered a state of bliss. She lost herself stamping and inking, pasting and painting. Indy played along for a while but we were only about one booth in when she started demanding balloon animals. Other kids had been spotted with them. Ayla had gone nearly ecstatic and could not be lured away from creating, even from the booth where they gave the kids a bunch of mark-down dollar store stickers and told them to put them on paper and call it a book mark. Ayla shredded the stickers and played with patterns.

Indy began to yell, "Now can get get my STUPIT balloon!" (That's how she pronounces it.)

"Ayla wants to see the art galleries."

"I want to get a STUPIT balloon!"

"Hey, Indy, let's take a ride on the firetruck!"

"I SAID, I want my STUPIT--ok."




We rode a firetruck. We waited in line for forty minutes for a balloon that I was calling a lot worse than "stupid" in my head. Indy asked for a flower. Ayla requested the alien. It had a funny alien face and came with a clear balloon for a space helmet. The girls were joyous. Giddy. "Are you glad we got your stupit balloon?" I asked Indy.

"Mom," she scolded. "It's not stupit!"


Not five minutes later, Ayla, who will by then be in the state known as 'bouncing off the walls' and not listening to me, will brush the alien's space helmet against the brick exterior of the library, pop the helmet, and burst into bitter tears. In her grief, she will excoriate both the day and the balloon as 'the dumbest ever'. She will ask the age old questions: why, why now, why her balloon and not Indy's. She will feel the terrible regret of 'if only'.


But for those four minutes, after art and gelato, after firetrucks and balloon aliens, before the bursting--man, was I one smug mother.

And don't worry, Ayla recovered. We put on Narnia and she climbed across the couch to reach me. She kissed me on the lips. "That was really fun," she said quietly.

"Funner than watching me browse the internet?"

"No."



Ayla makes her alien face


Indy makes her alien face. Just kidding, Indy.

Around These Parts

This was outside my window an hour ago. I love the prairie. Here is one of the worst pictures anyone ever took of it.



This is across the street from where the girls take karate. If I can't see lots of sky, I start to panic. My people were pioneers, homesteaders and rough riders, and maybe this stuff runs in the blood.

The girls staged a rebellion against karate today and I let them quit. Ayla quit without bothering to see if she's earned her yellow-belt. (She had. She didn't care). Indy hung in long enough to earn the yellow belt and quit immediately afterwards. It was fun for a week, showing off karate-chops at the park, and then I suspect they tired of all the posturing.

We have dreamy personalities around these parts. Ayla told me she wants to do theater instead. "Like practice to do a show," she said. "Like onstage. Like Michael Jackson."




I can't say I was surprised. Then I nearly fainted over dead when I saw the price of any kind of theater camp for kids.

For her birthday, she wants a cake that is a brain. With zombies dancing around it.

She is awesome.

After my flunkies failed out of the karate summer camp that's designed to have a 0% fail rate, we went to Dairy Queen. What else are you gonna do?



Are they not the luckiest children on earth? Here they are at 31 flavors the day before.



We fail at some things, here. Cleanliness, godliness, dojo-ness.

We do not fail at ice cream.

Lost At Sea

I don't know what day it is.

To prove this to you, I would ask you to please go back and look through the archives--yes, all of them, you want to make the greatest fan show someday, don't you?--and count the number of times I have blogged on a Sunday.

See?

Totally don't know what day this is.

Summer was awesome! Amazing! We read books, went to the pool, had a picnic at the park, slept late, and ate a ton of popsicles. Blessing bless bless blessedy blessed blessings! So, now that we've established how blessed I am and all, I ask you: My kids can go back to school now, right?

I mean, if I woke up tomorrow, drove them to school, ushered them into the building and acted all natural about it, do you think anyone would notice?

I am trapped here somewhere between "Mr.V has left for work" and "Mr. V is still working", throw in a "Mr. V is not home yet."

I feel like I've been home alone with the kids for weeks, months, like we are lost at sea here, solitary sojourners, swooping up into libraries and down into 9 pm bedtimes. Which leave me up until 12 am, watching Supernatural and Downton Abbey and not reading as much as I like to. Asking my brain to do anything lately is like asking me to solve algebra after drinking margaritas and then going to the dentist. And the dentist is Jensen Ackles. But at least we know I haven't lost my knack for drama, because I think I may have been out all day Friday, without the kids, doing my thing. And Friday was approximately two days ago, not forty-seven?

I honestly don't remember.

What I know for sure is that I found Campfire Marshmallows at the War-mart, and if I'm ever in my life going to use the word jazzed, it's about that. BUT I AM USING IT IRONICALLY.

What I know for sure is that I slept until 10 am today and I hate myself.

I think we're going to venture out of the boat to our one safe harbor and see if we can't find us some iced Amanda Palmers.

Look, that joke made a lot of sense. To Amanda Palmer.

I am Vesuvius and where am I? Who are you? Somebody call Marcus with the hovercraft. Marcus will bring the hovercraft. He always did.

PS: Please don't ask me why I'm blogging on my hiatus, or be all like, "I told you so!" (MOM.) I already have enough issues as it is, can't you see? Why else would I be rebelling against myself in this grotesque and unseemly manner? I am basically telling myself to screw myself, and we're not going to wonder why I do that. Why not? Because the computer says it's Sunday, although I HAVE MY DOUBTS.

Under the Radar

Memorial day weekend passed in a blur.

The girls were sick and missed their last days of school. Mr. V, birthday boy, was sick as well. On Saturday night I went to bed at nine pm and slept for thirteen hours.

I woke up and I knew a few things for sure.

One was that, god willing and the kids don't get pink eye, I spend most of my days doing what I love. And oh, how I love this thing I love. And that is a true happiness.

Indy bursts through the door and dumps out handfuls of flowers and rocks. That she has collected for me. Because she loves me.

Happiness.


I knew that in ten days--or eleven days--look, I don't really know how to count days--I am going to turn thirty. It's true. And I knew that I want to spend these next ten or eleven days celebrating. I am going to fete myself with little treasures.

Today we had Mexican food with guacamole, and ice cream. Holy cow! Sakes alive.

Tomorrow maybe I'll spend some of my early-arriving birthday money on a book and a song.

Bit by bit, moment by moment, is how these things are done.

What I know for sure is that my future holds Frappucinos and some really good pizza.

What I know is that I will never buy margarita mix labeled "Skinny Girl". Life is short. Life is hard.

Life is sweet.

I woke up from my ten year nap, and I knew that it was time to lay low for a little while.

Things need to kick around.

Grains of sand must be turned over and coaxed into pearls.

Soft places must be nurtured for new things to grow.

I'm going under ground. Under the radar. Incognito, if I will. (I will).

I don't know how often I'm going to come around these parts, for a time.

I just wanted you to know, in case you come looking.

When I was in college, there was a serial rapist in our college town.

I was driving in the car with a friend, who was on the phone, trying to explain to someone how uptight we all were because of it.

In her bouncy, lovely way, she raised her eyebrows and exclaimed, "We are all on hi--"--she searched for the word-- "--atus."

I wish you summer treasures. Good books, good beer, crickets in the evenings and languid afternoons.

I wish you peppers on your pizza and cinnamon in your coffee.

I wish you Mary Oliver poems.

I wish you tv shows on dvd to devour, five or six at a time.

I wish you all things coconut and good, vanilla bean and spicy. Whatever is honey-dripped, garlic roasted, and wonderful to you, I wish you those things.

Wherever it is you wish to go, I wish you a piece of it wherever you are.

I wish you many star-filled nights at the cabana of Le Happy.

We are on hiatus, here.

I am Vesuvius and here comes the Mary Oliver poem:

Don't worry, sooner or later I'll be home.
Red-cheeked from the roused wind.

I'll stand in the doorway
Stamping my boots and slapping my hands,
my shoulders
covered with stars.


(from 'Walking Home from Oak-Head. By Mary Oliver.)


My favorite poem by Mary Oliver
is called "The Journey"
and you can find it online.

Brave New Girls

Nine months ago, Ayla couldn't write her name, or read. She didn't have any friends. She didn't know about cup-stacking, or Pavlovas, or Australia or flesh-eating sloths.

And now she does.

And Indy, well. I'm pretty sure nine months ago, Indy thought she was living in a land of princesses and sparkly play-dough, of dress up and face paint and pink-haired pirates. A world in which the greatest attainable pleasure involved a well-timed combination of a hot bath, a warm towel, and fresh cookies. A world of mama and daddy and Ayla and family, and a few assorted librarians and baristas dropped on the peripheries like flowers painted on a theater set.

Now she knows there are other wonderful things. All that and more. There is dress-up with Maya and kickball with Chase. There is the pride of it being your snack day, the flushed accomplishment of line leader. There is her teacher, who apparently on Tuesday afternoon took Indy to China. There is the joy of handing mama a painting she made all by herself. The thrill of standing in spring grass with your friends, putting out your arms, and spinning, spinning, until you crash, a beautiful mass of pale and coffee skin, blonde and black hair, holding each other on the damp warming earth.

The girls are lying on the couch, slurping popsicles. Beside them are their glossy new stacks of summer reading. Later there will be hot dogs and watermelon, coconut sunscreen, cool respite at the library and long days at the pool.

School's out for summer.

Peaches

The girls after swimming, August 2009


We went to the pool today to catch the end of summer.

It ends next week when the girls start school. I hate the way they schedule school. It should go two weeks into June when it's still not hot here anyway. Then the kids wouldn't have to to back until September.

September is the proper month for school starting. No one should be putting on their backpack and walking to class until that chill is in the air. Until the light has changed.

But any day now, it will start to.

I read an article in which a man said "Summer for me is all about the search for the perfect peach. You find it, you eat it, it's gone."

It's enough to make you melancholy until you remember: Peaches come back every August.

I remember the last time I ate a perfect peach. It was August and we were living with Mr.V's mom (for the first time) at the old farm house in Windsor. Ayla was on her way to turning one and not yet walking. She'd scoot around those hard wood floors in the onesies I didn't like and saved for days at home. She still had curly hair and I loved it so. I was reading "Angry Housewives Eating BonBons" and "The Bergdorf Blondes". You know it's a time of stress for me when my reading material goes light. We were eating a lot of spicy dumplings from Hunan Taste back then. Noah was doing some kind of labor (it wasn't clear to me exactly what even then) building a massive house for the Barr's of Spradley-Barr Ford, where I had been working when I met him, at 20. When he got home--around three or four back then, but it always felt like he'd been gone for ages--we'd put Ayla on the trampoline and bounce her around. I'd tell him what I did all day. (Chased after Ayla, read chick lit, watched the marriage of Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson slowly dissolve on their reality show.)

I bought the Palisade peach at Safeway and ate it in that little room with the Murphy bed and the dust bunnies and the big view of the sky. I went back that night and bought more.

There's a good chance I've eaten other perfect peaches since then, but that's the one I remember.

Hunan Taste is called something else now and no one lives in that little farm house off the country road. That was the house where Mr. V fell out of a tree and bruised his own perfect peaches all black and blue. The house where we'd sit on the back steps eating Mercy's fried pepperocinis. We saw clouds that looked like jellyfish. The house where Ayla fell head first out of the deep bathtub. The house by the road that I drove down to get Noah and Josh the black lab jumped out the car window when I was going 55 and I thought I'd killed the family dog and it would have been the second one to die that summer. The attic was full of bats and the upstairs bathroom smelled of guano but we could watch them in the evenings when the sky went violet and the grass grew cool. We would lie on our backs staring at the sky.

I don't miss that house. The man getting maudlin about the peaches just made me remember.

I put down the article and looked around. There in front of me Ayla was splashing in the pool. Her hair is stick straight now, her limbs have lost their plump and gone gangly. She wanted me to watch her first real attempts at swimming. I held up her back and she smiled, eyes squinted, at the sky. Every few seconds she'd kick and sink, but I always caught her. She doesn't trust the water yet. She still trusts me.

Indy asked if I wanted to see her "super cool show". The show was her slapping the water and twirling with her arms in the air. But oh, how she smiles. Back at the farm house there was no Indy, and I remember: what a miracle, to have this little person in front of me. Fragrant and soft, like all late harvests. I don't remember who I was before them. I don't know how to live without them. Ayla lifted herself out of the water and curled up on the pavement in the sun. She burrowed into my thighs and belly like she used to as a baby. The hair on her back was thick and downy, like a peach.