la femme follette

nucleus. numeration. nutriment.

The children just finished a summertime science workshop on genetics.  Fillette was the most confused, having worked out some traits in her class.  Mama, can I see you roll your tongue?  I told her I could not.  She very haltingly blurted out a contradiction to this.  (She and Mari are always doing things like making faces and showing tongues; I presume she was already certain he could not.)  I assured her I could not.  She was stymied by this and did not know what to say.  Also, manufacturing quite a hostile countenance.  I was still trying to read the thing I was reading when she came along with her interruptions, so was slow to figure out that her instructor probably generalized for the class.  "No, no, honey," I assured her.  "You are recessive.  So is your brother."  He is left-handed.  She knew not how to respond to this.  Join the club, love. 

Mari is not always exactly joking when he suggests they cannot be his children, except for that they so, so clearly are.  Honestly, if they had not grown in my belly, I would be suspicious sometimes myself.  She is in the next room right now, declaiming García Lorca poems.  Who else's child would she be?  Plus, thing is, when one has the 10-pound babies, there is very little risk of switching at birth.

Speaking of our jocular disregard for the cultural primacy put upon one's spouse, Kowalski called today.  I was caught a little by surprise, since a. felting, b. midday he is usually otherwise occupied, c. only calls my cell phone when we are having a row, which we are not.  It was a nice surprise, and everything was fine until he reported his re-committing to a project and asked for my assistance.  I had a hazy, stream-of-consciousness narration of having once actually put together a list in service to him, per his request ... but then he said he was all done with the project and then I lost it somewhere ... maybe I threw it away ... 

He reminded me (as if I had forgotten) that he is fickle and distractable, whereupon I exaggerated a throwaway comment in service to humor, and then there we were, arm-wrestling over which of us exactly was the Responsible Party for the ultimate demise of us, in the final analysis.  It was a halfhearted re-match, like Rocky XIX or so, -- I because of the Charo Affliction; he because of the original reason for his call.  In pretty short order I let it go out loud and his last gambit was a taunting, though good-natured, complete rendition of "Maybelline,"  an exponential improvement over what I usually get, which is a yodeling, growling kind of performance of "So Wrong," which slays me every time and I will never let on.  (though I just have, o, internet) I am not knitting any more socks, I swear.  I have repented enough.  Him! 

Then I went to pick up the CSA box. 

Plus, it came with a whole, not-live chicken, and six ears of corn.  I am up to my ears in peaches.  Also, when loading the car's CD magazine this morning, I spaced and grabbed Pete Seeger when I wanted Bob Seger and I was a. wildly disoriented and then b. a little sad. 

weeds and seeds

Thomas Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, in his own bed at Monticello.  Anyone can say what they like about Jefferson -- I mean, sure thing he could string a few words together, but so could Thomas Paine and with none of the associated and unforgivable controversy -- but would have to admit that old Jefferson knew an awful lot about having some nice things, and it is nice to look at them. 

Jefferson is like Martha Stewart.  I do not think much of Martha, really, but I sure would never turn down a chance to look at her stuff.  Also, really, the same in the way of needing to make controversy as compromise:  Martha, she had to have that whole unfortunate cheating scandal; Jefferson, he had his despicable slaving ways.  All that super-deluxe living costs a lot of money, people have to steal & cheat!    Also, keep humans in bondage!  There is just no other way!     

We took ourselves on a stop along the way to old Monticello, for I would not live if we only sped past Charlottesville without a tour.  We took the "Children & Family" tour, which is way less boring than the Regular House Tour, on which we had already been many years ago.  The house is ok, I mean, if you like old stuff arranged in a real fetishy way to which you cannot even get close, sure.  When we last went, it was January.  I just do not think enough of the guy to really get into his house, plus this was 8 years ago and they were really glossing over the whole Jefferson was all of these things plus-plus:  A Slaver! issue.  I found it really disingenuous and (again) fetishy, but this time when we went, they seem to have a new paradigm in the tours and collaterals.  Which is at the very least realistic. 

Anyhow, the tour is not even the whole house, because of the Fire Marshal's tyranny, and then in January there was nothing to see but cole crops and covers, and I was sad to see the amazing space allotted the gardens with nothing actually growing and I vowed to someday get back to see those gardens!  The gardens!!  The minute we decided to go to Virginia for vacation, I knew.  I was so excited!  I mean, fuck a homeschool history lesson, we were going to work on our horticulture!  Yes!  

It is really pretty there.  The children appear to be having some discussion about corn.  To their left are potatoes, to their right, a cover crop of clover.

Besides the 2-acre vegetable garden (in which the children are walking again, here), there are 8 acres of fruit growing at Monticello (including vineyards and orchards), and the whole endeavor serves as a preservation seed bank for 19thc vegetables, flowers, and fruits.  As a gardener, I love to see stuff in the ground, growing, and there is an awful lot of it there. 

I thought the most interesting part of the garden scheme was the retaining wall he had constructed to keep the garden where he wanted it.  It is just so fancy!  Over the little rail fence there is kind of a steep drop to the fruit garden (the vineyards behind Fifille).    At the opposite end of the wall from where we are standing (in about the middle, we are), all the way down on Garçon's left, there are about 27 fig trees, thriving in the reflected heat from the wall.

 

We ate cherries in the orchard.  I saw the smart trellising of beans.  I showed Mari the big bed of woolly ferns as tall as he is and said, "That is why we don't grow asparagus, ok?"  I mean, what would I do with all those fronds?  I now know what growing habit to expect from my sweet potatoes and what my potatoes are going to look like when I finally get them in the ground.   The flower gardens have been restored with all manner of period flowers and how nice to see them in real life!  I am v suspicious of anything in seed catalogs. 

I fell in love with the pincushion flower with the bees all over it, so bought some seed I found in the Monticello garden store.  Yes.  But there were so many more plants.  More than I could ever remember to name or with which I could retain my personal reception.  So many.  But I have pincushion flower seeds and I am excited.    

Here is our garden today.  

The first eggplant is on its way. 

Against the back fence, in the middle, there is a Brandywine tomato as tall as I am.  Eeek.   

A very happy birthday wish to the most loveliest Santos.  Here is a food photo for you.

 

spectral evidence

Yesterday morning Garçon accidentally (really) hit Fillette with a Maglite.  I was sitting on the edge of the tub, reading the New Yorker, thinking about flossing, and the two of them started making a ruckus upstairs from their bedroom.  They had been listening companionably to an audiobook, but there was a short scream from Fillette, then recriminations and repentances and then they were making their way to me, talking the whole time.

When Fillette entered the room, I actually put my hand up to cross myself .  There were drops of blood on her cheek, a splash of blood on her clavicle, the blood was bright and so much of it and coming from so near her eye. 

Garçon (very good in a crisis, my son, I learned), immediately outlined his multi-step plan involving shoes and tea towels to go to the basement chest freezer and secure a bag of frozen peas for her ice pack.  I was weakened by his efficiency, and just pulled Fillette into my lap to calm her down before we started to confront the injury.  She is our daredevil and has been in enough accidents that I know that the blood has to be cleaned off before one can take stock. 

Shortly, we did, whereupon I was thrown for a loop all over again by the fact that the bleeding had been stopped by the bruise swelling behind it.  But ... it was exactly as an accidental injury I sustained one night with old Kowalski; mine had been just below the eye, nearer to the cheek, and hers above the eye and near the eyebrow.  OK.  Fortified by the realization that this kind of wound was in some way familiar, I cleaned her up, painted storebought arnica gel around the cut, put on a bandaid, put on the frozen peas, took off the frozen peas, checked to see if she had concussion symptoms, put the frozen peas back on, then put her to bed and told her to rest. 

Later, when the whole thing became less vascular and I was convinced of the stability of the wound, I got some comfrey leaves from the garden, ran them through the blender, then smacked a wad of it over the cut and taped the whole thing down with a bandaid.  I repeated this painting-then-poultice procedure until late afternoon. By bedtime it was a relief to behold, this morning there was the tiniest trace of a bruise on the lid, no black eye.  Tonight it looks as this.

 

Ugly, but not a disaster and is closed, anyhow.  Great.  Except that if someone were to come to our home and ask Fillette, "So, do your mommy & daddy take you to the doctor?"  She would likely say, "Welllll ... no, I don't really get sick."  They could say, "Well, do you ever get hurt?"  And she would be able to say, "Oh, well, one time my brother accidentally hit me with a flashlight by my eye and there was blood everywhere and it really hurt a lot." 

Then, the questioners might perk up and say, "And did you go to the doctor?"  She would say, "No.  My mom cleaned it up and put some stuff on it and an ice pack and then went outside to get some plant powers from the yard and she put it on and put me to bed.  Oh, also, I was sick once.  She gave me and Garçon the chicken pox on purpose." 

That would be fucking beautiful.  There Fillette would be, telling the unremarkable truth about our life and our former-scouting-life, DIY parenting, and some idiot, middle-manager douchebag would go apoplectic with the inability to just check the right box on the form and decide we were suspect and make a report.  Then what would happen, I know now, would be that I would find myself wrapped up in some bullshit family-court imbroglio with the Child Welfare Services alleging that Mari and I are unfit to make decisions about our children's care because we did not rush our child to the ER -- never mind that we are both fine, smart, laudable people and all's well that ends well -- and so therefore the Child Welfare Morons should be the noncustodial guardians of our children.  

That means that your children live with you, sucking up your food and heat, but the state tells you what you can and cannot do.   

I know this because for the past two months I have been wrapped up in a bullshit family court imbroglio with the Child Welfare Services alleging that Mari and I are unfit to make decisions about our children's care because we are, in their verbiage, "educationally and medically neglectful."  Or, as Kowalski paraphrased back to me after my first, long & tearful phone call to him, "So, wait:  they want to take your kid because you homeschool and don't give yr kid shots his doctor doesn't think he should have?"  It all sounded so ridiculous when he put it that way!  Honestly!  As if Cotton Mather had signed off on it! 

Finally, today we emerged victorious (which was plain all along, this stuff is not the tax code.  what was not plain was how long would this inquiry persist and in how many New Directions.), with the banging of the gavel and everything.  Since that moment, I have been amazingly sleepy, and surprised at how much relief there is.

The real story behind the shoes:  When we had our first court date, in April, I wore a pair of flat, shiny, foxy, knee-high boots.  I do not think of myself as tall, but that is mostly because I am married to a man who is way past six feet tall, and I have a 9yo boy who is but a head shorter than I.  The plain fact is that I am five-eight, and while not tall in my house, I guess I am tall in the world.  Tall for a woman, that is.  When we were in court in April, I realized that every woman who had to come to me and address me in a stand-up conference after the hearing was shorter than I.  I realized this because they were looking up to talk to me. I talked about it to Mari later that week, Hm, I guess I am tall.  Hm, weird!

I knew that I would need shoes to wear for the summer continuance, so had my eyes open.  I saw the ones I bought in the Boden catalog and loved the way they looked, but started to take a pass on the 3.25-inch heel.  Then I remembered how small all those women were and I wanted to have to stretch even farther to make any sort of communicative contact with me.  I highly recommend to any woman trying to push back without saying a word:  wear shoes that make you almost six feet tall.  Even if they do make all the world's flooring a very slippery endeavor, it will be worth it.     

transition

Garçon's new guitar came late this afternoon.  His first guitar was a silly little thing I picked up on a whim, a kid-sized piece, something nicer than a toy, perfect to see if he would take an interest.  So it seems that in the last six months, he has spent quite a lot of time being interested.  His instructor told me we should grade him up to something in a 3/4 size.  Sure thing.  I ordered Fender's Squier MC-1 Classical.

It is so pretty.  I can barely breathe around it.  The rosette kills me.  Never fly on a small aircraft, my baby. 

rail

Another month, another trip to Lancaster. I am convinced that last month's trip with its grueling-for-the-driver day-trip round-trip aspect is the reason I went so horribly, deaf-making ill.  This time, we took the train.  By train, it is for us 2 trains, but I sat and knitted and Fillette and Garçon read Ramona the Pest and looked out the window, respectively.  I let the two of them go all the way to the café car by themselves.

There has been recently a lot of practice, a lot of tentative step-making with regards to a lot of practical independence.  We let them sit apart from us in open-seating restaurants or cafés lately, they are allowed to sit in the waiting room and read books while I get my teeth cleaned.  I will finish my conversation with an acquaintance in a cute boutique and send Garçon ahead, up the same side of the street by himself, to retrieve his sister when her ballet class is done.  There are not a lot of opportunities for children to practice being by themselves in our hysterical new world, but we try to let them flutter along a bit when we can.

I love the Lancaster train station so much in this kind of swooning way that, looking at this photo, doesn't really make any sense.  Great symmetry, parallel lines, sure, but I grew up in Chicago.  Mies van der Rohe isn't really anywhere in this functional little corridor.  Part of it is that I was charmed the first time by its compact utility.  This is pretty much the whole station.  The other thing I realize is that train stations are such busy places that one never gets to see if they are lovely or what behind the announcements and the thrall and the bodies everywhere. 

Also, it occurs to me that being from a place with its own culture, such as I am, that I am satisfied when sites synchronize with the culture where they are located.  Here this train station is in Lancaster, PA:  it is plain, gets the job done, and quite still.  It just feels really tidy and fulfilling to me.  Those trash receptacles, however, are freaking hideous.          

mt 26, 41

Lazy day, made a big pan of granola.  Just like me:  lazy, granola.  Soccer league tonight, the second-to-last night of this up-all-night sporting. 

Otherwise, everything is quiet.  Pretty literally, since I am easing back into the routine after a prolonged and inexplicable, undiagnosable something that has left me with a total loss of conductive hearing in my right ear.  The ENT seems concerned, so that job is hired out.

This did not excuse me from having to listen to Fillette's out-loud recitation of her latest theological research.  The children are trying to satisfy the wager of sorts that Mari and I put out: if you are so interested in Easter, tell us by the end of this week why it is and then we will have it.  Ecumenically, their first try was:  Esther saved her people?  I told them, no, that is Purim.  Fillette was upset the most by this:  I didn't know that!  And we have Purim!  Yeah, because Mari and I like Purim.  What's not to like?

She spent the day, sitting next to me while I turned the heel on a sock, reading the Passion narrative from the abridgement in Tomie dePaola's Book of Bible Stories.  For reasons that are obvious, she loves hearing about Jesus & his gang of 12 + the ladies.  Oh, that reminds me -- before I get too lost in how she cornered me about Why Is It We Do Not Go to Church on Sundays like Other People, which I demurred by pointing out quite reasoanbly that when she was adamant as a wee gal, we indeed took her.  I will not be brought up by my children for standing in the way of religion, not I, no, no. -- Fillette wrote a letter to Tomie dePaola a couple of weeks ago and he wrote her back!  I stuck a Post-It note in there with my $.02 and there was a little something worked in there for me, too! 

I had expected that he would return the correspondence (Fillette addressed the letter to him in his hometown, not via his publisher; she's got a sly mother, that one), because he is 70+ years old and was raised properly.  On the other hand, he is 70+ years old, has been doing this a long time, and might be tired of fan letters already.  I was not surprised to see the letter in the mail, she was thrilled and we just love everything about him extra-plus-plus now.    

blood, poison, physics, war

Last year, I read everything from the library's juvenile collection about America's Revolutionary War to the children, because Garçon was into it and Fillette was not opposed to it.  I had a problem with the fact that Garçon was into the Revolutionary War and the biography of every person connected to it, but out of sequence.  So that just one day we start talking about the Revolutionary War.  It bothered me, the unruliness of it, but I just went with it.  A month or so ago, he came to me and said, "So, why was France so mad at England, anyhow?"  O, FINALLY!   This child-led stuff really works!   

The French & Indian Wars seem a little more complicated for him, he is frustrated, I think, more than I remember being over the same topic.  A lot of it is about homeland geography.  The children are growing up in one of the 13 colonies.  I grew up smack in the middle of the Great Lakes region.  What is meaningful, tangible to us is different. 

I managed to get the French and Indian Wars going at the same time that I brought us snuggled up to some more specifics about the French involvement on the American Revolutionary War.  Then last week, we had to go to Valley Forge.

What we learned on the trip is that all that yap about the starving and the freezing is not true!  Lies our history teachers told us!  Garçon read a book the day before our trip that was all about Valley Forge, and while the National Park Ranger was telling us about how it was a military encampment and the recordkeeping is there, and there was not starving nor freezing, I said to Garçon, "What did your book tell you?"  He said, with a giggle, "Mom, it said that they starved and had rags on their feet."  I shrugged apologetically at the ranger and gestured for him to set us all straight.

I am not big into field trips, but this Valley Forge trip last week changed my mind.  Park Ranger Tells Family -- You've Got it All Wrong! Ordinarily, I do not go in for all this experiential-type learning stuff (although, it has its place, see above: homeland geography).  This sometimes raises eyebrows with the Other Homeschoolers, who like to spend their time ... doing stuff I would never call educational.  ("Doing laundry teaches about physics!"  yeah, ok)  I like rigor and nonfiction texts; Dates & Timelines, Major Players; Nuts and Bolts, Black and White.  A few months ago, when I started working with Garçon on the 50 states and their capitals, Mari came to me and said, "Um, why is it important?  That he memorize the states and their capitals?"  I gave him a look. 

Mari and I had very different K-12 educations and I give him a certain lips-zipped look quite often.  He gives a different look to me, like when the children come with a crackpot question like, Who was the 14th President?  or What happened to Babylon?  and I immediately reply, Franklin Pierce or Baghdad.  There was a time that Garçon wanted a map of the U.S., a while back, years, something to do with the Postcards from Buster teevee show, and all Mari could find on the internet was a blank one.  I took it and filled it out in about 2 minutes flat and that was another time I got the look.  I always feel a little freaked out by the look.  Like, what, just because I do not have a job and do not like to calculate my own metric conversions, I cannot just know some stuff? 

One time, Mari and I were talking about time travel.  I was making some not-fully-realized joke about being on the train and the babies would be in the front and then turn old toward the back, or something -- it made sense in my head.  Mari took it upon himself to try to explain to me why time travel is impossible.  It started with him trying to explain to me again the theory of relativity, which is hopeless; the greatest minds of a generation have tried extensively and failed.  Then, he said, "Well, the speed of light is ..."  and he was groping for an adjective, maybe?  To explain to me why time travel was impossible? 

Maybe he was just searching for a way to convey it to my feeble mind, because when I interrupted and said, "299,792.458 kilometers per second," his mouth stopped working, while he gave me a look, which plainly said, "Who are you and what did you do with my left-brained wife who makes pretty things?"  And I was angry!  I went to high school!  I dissected a fetal pig!  I took an organic chemistry class and got an A!  I took a university physics class and got another A, even if I never did understand the theory of relativity!  I just last fall read that Galileo text footnoted or appended or whatever by Stephen Hawking, all by myself.  Just because I am not always fucking talking about it does not mean I do not know it!      

That is not a fair anecdote, because it kind of paints this portrait of my husband thinking I am not very smart.  I am sure that is not the case, I know it is not the case, but still ... that look he gives me.  I do not know why! 

Yesterday, Garçon sat down where Mari and I were reading and knitting, respectively.  He said, "Mom, the capital of South Dakota is French."  I said, "No, the capital of South Dakota is American."  He said, with a giggle, this goofy pre-pubescent giggle he giggles, "No, Mom, the name of it is French.  It's Pierre."  I made an agreeable mouth noise.  "Mom, I think that is because it used to be a part of New France."  It was my turn to give Mari a different kind of look, the patented look that says, Look!  What a good wife!  Not gloating!   But on the inside, I felt like the George Peppard character on The A-Team.  Our boy!  Thinks about things!  Because he knows some stuff!

Which is good and bad.  A while back I accidentally borrowed the audiobook of Sadako and the Paper Cranes from the library.  I never read the book as a child, and I thought it was about origami.  Ahahahahaha.  So, unsuspecting, I just popped it right into the CD player while we piled on the bed and I knitted.  I knew the girl died, sure, but had not anticipated having to answer 1,000,000 questions about nuclear weapons and leukemia.  Not at bedtime! 

I am a person who was concerned about the Revolutionary War being out of order!  I should just skip ahead to the Manhattan Project and the Truman administration?  They have been full of questions ever since they made me pause the audiobook during Chapter 3, "Oh, oh, wait, wait!  Stop it for a minute," they said in tandem.  I can tell that Fillette in particular is working up to a doozie that is going to make me say, "Um, can I explain this to you on a different day?  I want to make sure I get this right."  She is totally going to wait until I am reading the Sunday newspaper, I just know it! 

bang-bang

This week we have been supremely, gorgeously, unthinkably, sublimely & superlatively ill.  I had not been this sick for over 15 years, and all I can do is be happy the children were in the deathbed with me, for otherwise there would have been a lot of sore-throat hollering, a lot of making dinner while asleep standing up, and so much naughty behavior of the kind that only happens when Mommy is sick, which is why mommies do not get sick days.  I am really, really glad the kids were down, too.

They did not even know people could be this sick, with the coughing until sneezing leads to vomiting and then dizziness and, as Fillette very helpfully volunteered, "the headache and the sore throat!"  Monday, I thrashed around all night long, waking up every hour from a confounding dream in which I was guest-starring in an episode of Chico & the Man -- a show of which I have the barest sliver of a recollection -- during which the major plot device was that I had somehow been in some kind of a cabrito accident which left me with 400 tiny pieces of paper stuck to my body. 

So, every hour I would wake up, in something of a lather, get up, be sick on two feet, go back to sleep, and have the same dream all over again in the same way -- me, Freddie Prinze, Scatman Crothers, coming back from the cabrito accident, me with the pieces of paper (400!) stuck to me, little pieces of confetti, Della Reese very very angry with us for being careless, and a guy named Chanco.  Was there a guy named Chanco on Chico & the Man?  Also, Ed was just nowhere in the dream.  So, every time, we would stop in the middle of the garage, sort of by the lift, Chico would talk to Chanco, Della Reese was looming as a threatening mother figure, and then I would wake up.  And do it all over again. 

Finally, I just forced myself to stay up, certain I had mercury poisoning.  I have not slept well since, afraid of the torture of the repeat-dreaming.  This was not even sponsored by a cold-relief medication.  Just me and my sick mind.  With the children ill, I am reluctant to avail myself of my usual inventory of sleeping pills since what if I have to deal?  No good to be all bogged down in the tangled grove of diphenhydramine citrate.      

Wednesday, I sent Mari off to his office as usual, like a good midwestern wife, "No, no, you go ahead.  We'll manage!"  By the time he was two states away (which is not far at all), I was on the phone to him crying -- crying real tears! -- because I could not find the kleenex anywhere.  He said, "They were in the bed with you!"  I said, "I know!  I still can't find them!  How am I going to get through the day??" 

By giving the children Nyquil at 9am, is how.  But we are on the upswing now and I feel hopeful for our full recovery by Monday.

Before we all went down, we went to a Lunar New Year Celebration.  We were already feeling under the weather --Fillette had the sniffles, plus the aforementioned headache and sore throat; I was queasy and jangly -- and the weather was not feeling so good to us anyway, so while we usually go up to NYC for their raucous celebration, this time we crossed the river to visit the other Chinatown -- which has firecrackers ... 

So Mari and I stood on the corner with our children stamping box after box of party snaps and whooping it up with the drum-bangy thingers, for about a half an hour, while proprietors strung up enough fireworks to take out a city block in front of every store, and we discussed whether or not they were decorative or functional.  It was the typical sort of fascinating discourse people who have been married for over a decade have:

Me:  Jesus.  Are they really going to light that?

Mari:  Yeah.

Me:  No-ooo-ooo!!

Mari:  Yeah.

Me:  Whaaa-at?

Mari:  Yeah.  Totally.

[long pause]

Me:  Do all those people clustered around it have any idea how noisy that is going to be when it goes?

Mari:  Nope.

I cannot decide which I want less of next year -- traffic in the Holland Tunnel, or fireworks.  It was noisy and unbelievable, somehow more and less chaotic at once.  Honestly, the dancing of the dance is comparatively more excellent than in NYC.  It only took a short while before our ears were ringing, so we crossed the river again and came home. 

Chilled, exhausted, and ready for some family hangout teevee time, we learned that our son broke the DVD player by sticking a hairpin in it to see what would happen.  I did not even have the strength to invoke Terrible Mothering Protocols.  No matter, in 24 hours, 3 of us would be at death's door, suffering from something like cholera crossed with some kind of 1970s superflu.  Gee, it would have been nice to try to spend some of this week's sick time zoned out in front of The Simpsons.  Instead, there is Nyquil.  Which, really?  Is just teevee in a bottle.         

slipstream

Last week, Filette and Garçon were with me in the grocery, which almost never happens, so the result was that they were loitering around produce, fascinated by the inventory as if Soviet defectors, and did not hear me when I said, "I'm moving on." 

The result of that was them rushing up to me (finally!) while I was on line for the register, "Mommy!  We couldn't find you!"  I had another errand to run in the store next door to the grocery, and as old as they are, I was certainly going to abandon them into the grocery and come back for them later. 

Whatever.  They knew where the car was parked.  I was in a hurry.  The knitting mines have been the least of it, but just because of that, calls have not been returned, all communication has been shorthanded, emails have been totally ignored.  I have been trying to get it on when I can; watch the mails.   

Legwarmers for a little ballerina.  From the Hoverson Last-Minute Knitted Gifts book using Araucania Nature Wool and Madil Kid Seta, both from stash.  The book is way the fuck wrong about how long they take.  I almost did not make the deadline.  Cheers. 

endowed

I have three projects on the needles right now.  I do not usually spread myself so thin on knitting, but they are so different from each other, they each have their own production space.  At the top is a capelet for me, knitted in the round with Manos, for which I took direction from Mari on the color changes and am now having regret.  On the left, a sock -- from the Interweave Favorite Sock [or whatever] book -- knitted in a really soft worsted merino from Malabrigo, but which I have recently begun disparaging as my "miniature project," because it is so small and fiddly and I also keep misplacing the 4th needle, plus also have trouble keeping all 56 stitches on the needles when it is in storage.  I know, I know, those stopper thingies.

On the right is a tea cozy, for a stranger who gallantly rescued Fillette and me from a terrible NYC story.  It is knit in Debbie Bliss Baby Cashmerino, from a pattern in Joelle Hoverson's Last-Minute Knitted Gifts.  I think my gauge is off, but ask me if I care.  It is hard to go back and forth with it because its knit stitches are through the back loop and so anyhow.  I should buckle down and finish it this weekend, if I have time.

I start school tomorrow.  I have been trying to stay quiet about it because it is a little weird, but finally, Mommy gets to go to art school.  It is a joke in our house whenever I get a little fixed on a craft or a costume or a party.  We say that the themes to all of the children's last four parties have been: Mommy never got to go to art school.  It is just the sheer number of exciting!, over-the-top!, fussy, little appointments that are featured.  Like the up-all-night cupcakes from last year's Hallowe'en party or the time that for the birthday party goody bags, I folded 200 origami paper stars and 30 tiny cranes, plus made a raft of little cut-paper flowers.  There is something about me that is not -- how to say? -- properly-exercised.  Maybe exorcised is the better word.

There are a number of reasons I wanted to take a visual arts class.  1. Garçon / Fillette are asking me how to do technical things beyond my scope; 2. I have not been in a creative environment for months and months.  Consequently, that part of my brain has been turned off and I am finding it not only difficult to remember how to write poetry, but am somewhat confused by the fact that I ever have;  3.  The next step -- were I to remember how it worked -- in the writing of poetry would be to forget the workshops and go for the residency, but I can't get 3 to 6 weeks away from the children at this moment, consequently, see nos. 2 and 4.  I have to get out of here, sometimes, god. 

Anyhow over the summer I cast around and decided on a little beginning drawing class that would be challenging but not demoralizing.  I received a classical secondary education that was a little heavy on the arts and so left high school knowing the techniques of basic draftmanship, lines, composition, chiaroscuro & the color wheel, plus my way around a photographic darkroom.  The rest is art history, which I thought was so dull & dry I might have died circa 1988, but ever since, I have been glad to have learned it.  Last month, I settled on a little offering from a nearby school of which everyone has heard, that deals with ink, charcoal and graphite, the figure and still-life. 

I felt silly about it, like Carmela Soprano looking for something to do, but whatever.  Then the packet came from the school and I was a little surprised plus uneasy to realize that I wasn't just taking a little class, but that I had unwittingly matriculated at a post-secondary institution of the visual arts.  I feel too old & boring for this.  Also, not old enough.  One of the things that happens when I go out into the world to receive instruction -- whether it is recreational or academic -- is that I am the only woman my age there.  The other women are usually younger, unmarried & childless.  The rest of the women are much older than me, their eldest children my age, everyone out of the house, the husbands either capable of heating his own meals after 40 years of marriage or dead.   The men in the group will span all the ages, but at my age, they admit to having 3 or 4 children in the house (with their wife), and everyone -- when they find out I have two children and how young they are -- gasps aloud and asks where the little tykes have been stowed.  I say, "With my husband, you know, their father."  And everyone acts as if this is some novel idea, some trailblazing solution. 

It makes me tired and a little bit sad, plus I never fail to feel like a big, spoiled baby, who just can't suck it up and love being with her children, her man, and her house ALL THE GODDAMN TIME like everyone else.  Anyhow, that whole internal affair starts afresh this week and this time I will be wielding a charcoal vine, too.