la femme follette

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.

 

virgin queen

Lie down with strawberries, wake up with peaches.  Or something like that.  Raspberries and blueberries have come to ripen in our absence also, and picking at the farm will commence any day.  As soon as I recover from a week slathered in DEET.

When two people from the state of IL travel to a place with honest-to-god natural features, they can't stop gazing around, mouths open.  When we first got to the top of the range, we were through the windshield transfixed.  Then we got out at a scenic view to pose the children in front of it, because who am I, Ansel Adams now? 

It feels like we have been gone forever, but it was just the tick-infested portion with a few days of predictable touring on either end.

I have over years shot a gallery's worth of photographs of my family walking away from me, or maybe it is me skulking behind.  Surely a strict Jungian would have quite a lot to say about this.

The children learned to paddle, pilot, and steer a canoe, which is just to me !!!!!  (I have no words.)

While happy to be home, we are not quite getting with it, since camp starts next week and there is some kind of suspended animation of anticipation. The week should be borne aloft by gardening, unpacking, and reading magazines delivered in our absence. Also, picking berries for the freezing and the jams.  Vacation tends to leave the children as companionable as ever, but also sweet and woozy with one another, and it is so much easier in the days that follow.

F train, F word

Thirteen years ago, I was in Brooklyn, living in sin.  Not even regular sin.  Like sin in the Netherlands.  I was not chastened by the fact that  it looks exactly like Sesame Street.  In fact, thinking back, it was something of an incentive; I am irrepressible and perverse in exactly that way.  I left some months later in something like despair, ran right into the arms of Kowalski, then once perfectly-salved I happened to run into my future husband at a party while I was telling a wry story featuring my irrepressible perversity and then the whirlwind rest and here we are, surprised to find ourselves on a weekend jaunt in Brooklyn. 

I had not exactly resolved to never return, but I had certainly no intention.  Saturday, I had to so that I could meet up with the beautiful entourage accompanying Jen to Renegade Craft Fair.  There were good times and bad, a little sunburn, a distressed (and distressing) late-night email, and some really happy children.  I never saw the children, because I stayed at the fair for most of the afternoon, then when I got the call to meet Mari and the children, there were madcap subway hijinks. 

Mari and Mr Jen were with all of our kids on the Brooklyn shores of the East River, to which they had ostensibly gotten on the subway.  I had read the service change notices and thought I knew (knew I knew) that one could not get to where they purported to be in that way.  I chose to have faith in their obvious location and go.  Except that the A train was indeed running on the F track and so then I spent the next hour underneath Chinatown not giving a fuck and being very, very tired.  In the end, aboveground at Smith in the pouring rain, surely contracting Legionnaire's disease, I found out from Mari that Mr Jen had driven them all in a car.  Of course.  That is always the way with me:  when I decide to have faith, I should have questioned.  When I question, I should have just kept it quiet, etc.   

Algren, who was with me at the fair while I was taking this call and complaining about trains and opaque instructions, said he understood exactly how I felt, but I do not know.  While this was all going on, I just never felt as shouty as he gets.  I did, while underground, compose an email full of bad language to The Israeli's wife, with whom I had tentative plans for Sunday.  However, I admit that all this train-riding is a little underground crazymaking.  I do resolve to be sweeter to him or maybe split the difference and meet in Bowling Green, where there must be one restaurant. 

Speaking of Bowling Green:  The 5 was running on 7th Ave this weekend and the 2 up Lex.  I whispered to Mari, with my eyes wide, sitting on the 5 (the 5 train!) at 14th St,This is anathema.  I did not regale him with the whole situation with the East Side & Their Subway Situation, because it would bore him, surely.  It only affects me when I am getting a haircut, anyhow.  The thing was not only that we had to board a 5 and believe it was going to take us along the 2's route, but that we had to do so by getting off of a perfectly good 2 train (which was on its way to run all along the East Side, wtf) to get onto a Brooklyn-bound 5 and further believe it was going uptown. 

This is different from Garçon's very age-related & horrible resistance to this train or that one, which in the heat of Saturday made me certain I would slap him.  "Whaaa-at?"  he said to me, literally digging his heels into the platform before a Brooklyn-bound F train.  "This train says it is going to Coney Island??!?!"  I remanded him to the detail of his father and commandeered my usually angelic-child, who could not make it last this weekend, so turning on us this morning.  With Algren all last night at dinner lavishing her with his favorite & best attention, too.  She is naughty sometimes.

She is never this sulky in Manhattan.  Not when she can count the steps from The Israeli's house to the red-bean bun bakery to the Good Playground with the Library and All the Pigeons, wriggling along, dodging the septugenarians with his children while he and I make a taller-than-everyone, shiny-hair-and-good-shoes, raucous scene.    

I was feeling a little sulky about the whole borough, too.  Bleh. We made up at the fountain, she and I.  She was elated and cute and I tried not to look while she was getting all wet because I do not want her to hate it here just because terrible things happened.

   

make it there

When this box gets opened, one can hear a collective, vegetative SHWEW! from these guys.  Yesterday, our little road-weary seedlings were tended by Fillette while I was away on a day's jaunt.  She did a fine job, according to Mari:  watering, petting, moving them around between shade and indirect sun as the day wore on.     

I went to NYC to get my hair cut, eyebrows done, etc, etc, Day in the Beauty Mines.  I might be the only person I know who goes to the city to enjoy the peace & quiet, but it is who I am.  One thing I always like about the run up there is that it reminds me that: a. I am only 36 and b. it is ok to be hot.  I know in my mind, logically, that it is ok to be hot, that I am not some old, shriveled-up, mother-of-two prune, even if I do not get a lot of sleep all the time, but the counter-influence is so so strong.

Nearly everywhere I go, in everything I do, there are women there who are my age, and maybe some are younger, who are all wearing the pernicious Mom Drag.  Dorothy Hamill slash teevee-anchorwoman haircuts and mom-jeans up to their sternums with ill-fitting knit shirts and frequently some kind of fleece.  Bad shoes and bad glasses.  I try to fit in but it does not work.  Mostly because I have chardonnay tastes and a champagne budget.  Also, I really, really love sooty eye makeup. 

But, for an example, there is a fashion subsection in the country of mom-with-young-children who will semi-apologetically go to preschool pickup or playdate dropoffs in pajama bottoms, and I have been in that category, but lately it has been manifested with low-rise jeans pulled on beneath a silk nightie with a cashmere hoodie.  In Manhattan, this is surely no big deal, but here?  Mon Dieu! 

My desire to be contextually fashionable pretty much outweighs my desire to be dressed as if I just finished ravaging the pool boy (not by much, judging from the real contents of my closet), but I am not going out like that, no way.  And I feel so ... unnecessarily transgressive.  Transgressive because of the cultural de-sexing of women over 35 and/or mothers that seems to be so widely revered, but the fact is that I do not play by those rules.  I am not going out like that.  Unnecessary because how did this train jump the track?  How have all these women found themselves in a demographic of the old + frumpy when we are so young & hot?  Forty is the New Thirty but that's because it is the Old Thirty as well. 

It feels (sometimes) a little lonely, but I have in the past 2 years built up a good base of similarly-hot girlfriends and we hang out at the playground and the museums + the library dressed like Naughty Vegan Schoolmarms, but I still feel a tremendous pressure to be frumpy and no amount of reading Cookie ever helps. 

Then I go to NYC for a day and see how Kimora Lee Simmons hangs on to it.  For god's sake!  Undo that hairdo! Unbutton that button!  Stop all that idling about cheap & ugly accessorizing! Wear it tighter! Black is not just for funerals! Mess it up, push it up, smear it!  Jiggle it!!  It is all such a relief.   

I was in the ladies' room after dinner last night, rolling my eyes at the escapist hijinks of breasts that always want to push toward the sky, like seedlings or the drowned.  The very well-preserved Park Avenue dowager touching up her makeup at the vanity next to me counseled me to leave them.  "Show it off!"  she said, the doyenne of cleavage.  I nodded, but rolled my eyes again at their endless buoyancy, carefully arranging them inside my neckline while I gave her an extemporaneous softshoe on the distracting nature of the runaway rack.  "Honey," she said, a little exasperated, "it is all a gift from God, you should share it."  I asked her if I was supposed to share it all and all in one day.  She laughed, she told me that we were always running out of days and I should use all the ones I have.  I remembered I was 1. only 36 and 2. it is ok to be hot.  I knew that, logically, but it is nice to have validation.  I wonder if she was an angel.  I guess if angels wear Gaultier (mais oui), but god, what a relief.       

bling

For us, daffodils mean that Fillette's birthday is just days away.  My birthday flower is a peony, just as ephemeral and glorious as the spring-bulb lineup's bloom.   I always feel a little happier whenever I have peonies near.  Between the heralding of spring plus birthday, Fillette is just! over! the! top!! to see daffodils each year, and it was under her direction that I was lying on the pavement in front of our house, photographing our first two blooms.

Spring in our neighborhood also means that everyone comes out to the playground to be seen-scene.  The children are all taller than we remember and they have different teeth or can run instead of toddle or talk instead of point or have shiny, 2-wheeled bikes out for the first time or are -- in a change from last year -- sitting the tiniest bit sulkily at the edge of the playground wall, wanting to feel too old for all this until it seems there is a Game and it needs Organization from a Girl or Boy who is Obviously Mature Enough to Explain the Rules and Referee so then they forget about how cool they wanted to be before.  All the adults take our seats around the perimeter and ask one another, How was your winter?, and so today, finally, it feels like a new year. 

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.          

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.         

belle epoque

Since our return from Maine, I have been wandering around in complete control of my faculties.  Thinking about it right now, it may be the assertion of my competent self from the first leg of the drive there.  Previously, I suspected it was the sketchy connection to Our Digital Age while away, the breaking of the pavlovian response to the chirp/whirr/whistle of electronica, but whichever -- since we have returned, I am awash in calm productivity and a lot of easygoing agreement with the children.  When they are not irritating the shit out of me, anyhow.

I have avoided nearly every external contact with the world, blaming reëntry, but it is not at all true.  I am just avoidant and even more selective than usual.  I was worried, a couple of days ago, that maybe I was depressed -- this withdrawal seems depressive -- while I was talking to Kowalski.  All I do is clean the basement and not return any of the Playground Mom's calls and catch up on a very large stack of soft-news sections and organize my BlackBerry's functions and play Uno!  What is wrong with me?  Kowalksi reminded me of a time several weeks ago where I reported that I had gone to the steam room in the gym and "wiped myself out," falling asleep for 90 minutes in the lounge chair by the whirlpool and vowing to never steam myself again for it was too harsh, clearly, for my delicate constitution.

Had it occurred to you, he wanted to know, that you just might be relaxed?  I refused his insight -- No, never, of course not, ridiculous, I must be teetering on the edge of some precipice -- but I was sheepish when I said those things and had to admit he might be right.  Not that I would know what relaxation looks like, really, but maybe I can see it now.  Because everything that I want to do, that is necessary, even icky things I do not like to do -- for example: finding then returning 32 errant library books and paying the fine that costs as much as something exciting -- when it comes up on the list, I just take care of it.  And it does not ruin the rest of my life with retrospective anxiety, which is extra atypical for me.

Since we have been back, I have not really been back to the gym on my usual schedule, which is ironic because most of the vacation involved climbing mountains, so it is not as if I went soft on the trip.  Not corporeally, anyhow.  I went the first week we were back and breezed right through the Sadist's class, wincing only while isolating the small muscles of my upper arm.  I just ... there is something dreary about returning to the gym after exercising in Acadia National Park, which I knew to expect, for this happened to me once long ago after a vacation in Shenandoah National Park.  I just cannot bring myself to run and run or climb and climb or bike and bike to, uh, stay in the same place.

I was hoping that maybe when the weather changed -- "changed" -- I would get homesick, knowing that temperatures are in the teens back home and the resistance of that nostalgia would send me back into the punishment of the gym.  I find it is so disruptive to be all feelingy, so whatever it takes to push it back and manage it -- alcohol, endorphins, oxytocin, oxycontin -- whatever.  Bring it. 

But, an unexpected thing happened:  Maine was somehow an inoculation against the homesickness that overtakes me every year at this time.  Down East Maine was cold and wintry-sporty and bleak and blue and gorgeous.  Portland?  So sweet and impossible, like a pirate hewed it from the rock as a wedding present for his fairy bride -- boutique shopping and fishermen -- so much like my hometown on a great lake with its juxtapositions of Gothic and Deco skyscrapers in profusion, all of it built of cowshit and blood and rivers of steel. 

The children did not complain about the weather, for which Mari and I were endlessly grateful and it eroded some of that resentment that we have toward them for being of where we have raised them.  Fillette learned eagerly about the default baselayer.  Jen's same-age pair of children are our children's newest and sweetest friends, according to Garçon a lot like us, but allergy-free.  We four all came home so suffused with this ... contentment and I dare not exhale, let alone answer the phone for some neighborhood loudmouth.

It is not all some perfect idyll.  Mari has misunderstood clear input of mine too many times in a row  for it to be accidental, there are shark teeth, Garçon is still 8 (which is a horrible age, horrible!!), and I am still going to have to figure out some normal, non-compulsive way to motivate myself into the gym.  But, for now I am free from this terrible wistfulness for everything -- a kind of longing to know now what I will miss most later -- that I harbor so often.  It gets dark at 5, and I do not even care.  My oldest child has expressed a desire to relocate to Maine (it's so pretty there, Mom), but I just like knowing that it is there.  Maine:  just like you thought it would look; nice to know it's there.  I am so getting a job in tourism!  Wait, no, I hate working.  Hahaha, I am not that relaxed.               

parachute silk

I spent some time on the phone this afternoon working an excellent post-party wrap-up with my lovely friend Jen, who in so many ways was the woman responsible for our excellent Maine trip. One of the things we got to do in the great state of Maine -- besides being treated to a very precious sliver of time with her and her sweet, sweet, sweet children & her foxy vacuum-wielding husband -- was see a lot of art. Some of it was hers hanging in a hometown handmade gallery space; while I was there, I could not help photographing my favorites.  Some of them are so wee and they are all so suffused with her.  Everything Mari and I admired was sold (we were so drawn to the one called overgrowth), so, next time I will have to get there sooner! Never try to out-shop me!

Mari, the children, and I also spent some time at the Maine College of Art's ICA, mostly because our ICA here costs money and whatever, but except for a Yoshitomo Nara show in 2004 we have not been, because my son does not appreciate looking at art but my daughter does, and who needs the conflict, I do not. But the point is that we stumbled into their annual Art Auction, which is their major fundraiser, and we were stupefied with delight. Everything was so risky and delicious.

My favorite was a mixed-media piece by Danielle Weeks called in mountain folds, your beauty.  It was a frame & mat crammed with fiber -- cashmere, silk, alpaca, and a few others all wedged in there -- and it makes a pretty design. ( make this clicky.) I was walking around the gallery with Fillette by the hand and all I could think when I saw it was ... something in there is alive.  Oh, fun. I was explaining to Fillette all day about how with modern art (with which she is not extra-familiar) people will say, "I could make that," and the only answer is of course, "But, you did not, no, you, shhh."

Still in a kernel in the back of my mind is that Jen has a really gorgeous home with her v recognizable aesthetic, which is decorated in a fashion directly opposing my own home, which is to say that it does not resemble an insane asylum, which mine does, in my very sterile & ascetic design. Our houses are similar in structure, and I am considering doing something wild. Maybe I will paint a wall a color besides white or commit to surface decorations of some kind. Well, I will see how that grows. I have some free time and am primed for it by vacation.

Our vacations this year have followed the routine of Complete Big Project, Get the Hell out of Town, Leave it All Behind. It works, I guess, but it makes the concurrence of Big Project Engagement and Preparation to Leave a little harried. Hallowe'en was so high-pressure in its preparation, what with the strap-on fart machine and the goth haircoloring that didn't take. I have a rule that only one child can have a high-maintenance costume, can need a pre-party makeup job besides the costuming. I have never had to tell them that I have this rule, it has just fallen out this way, luckily. The rest of Hallowe'en is pretty low-key: I always buy their costumes, or the portions thereof, and I never really get too prop-master. Anyhow, there was a lot of pressure on this year's event, for some reason. I think it was because this was the first year that they had a lot to say about the event. I do not know.

But, it was so enervating for whatever reason, this year's Hallowe'en process (because it was mid-week?), that Mari and I decided that instead of leaving on Saturday all together, I should drive up to Boston with the children Friday and he should take the train and meet us. This would work because we would have a 3-hour advance start on him and he would be able to work while on the train and so could leave in plenty of time.

This was a great idea! We would wake up on Saturday morning already on vacation! (In a hurricane, but later.) But for me, it was a little intense. I had to: pack all four of us; clean the house to something like a close-her-down standard; place timers; hold mail, newspapers, etc; get our son's haircut, for the love of god; hook-up with our cat-sitting neighbor, plus all the rest, all by myself. Then I had to pack the car in a clandestine fashion, not forget anything, and be off. All by myself.

This all went better than I expected. I did notice that the whole effort lacked my usual attention to infinitesimal detail, which to me was very interesting. So, for example, Mari had clothes to wear, and they were all weather-appropriate, but I did not pack his flannel-lined khakis. We had plenty of food to eat in the vacation cottage, but I forgot my stick blender. Things like that. I realized about  myself that I get to tend to these details because I have the luxury of a lot of time and a lot of pitch-in assistance from Mari. He would have been packing the car & taking over some of the to-do list while I dithered around and left him a post-it that said "Don't forget to pack yr flannel-lined khakis" and one to myself that said "Def stick blender!"

What is interesting to me is that given all the time in the world, the flannel-lined-khaki-packing delegation post-it would have taken on a monumental significance -- a make-or-break vacation joy perfectionist's standard, naturally -- however, the fact is that no one froze or starved to death or even really missed the extra details, and that includes me. So, why do I spend all this time on massaging the tiny details & pressing my attention into so much service? I do not even know. So, that. Also that I did take care of everything without standing around wasting a bunch of time thinking about it and bouncing ideas off of my spouse.

We got out of the house more or less at the time I planned, less the time I spent looking for my cell phone with the unfortunately on-its-last-bar battery and the anxiety of thinking I might never find it ever, plus also the time Garçon had to spend looking for his shoe. I try to be understanding when the children lose pairs of shoes, but how a child loses ONE SHOE is beyond me. Once everyone was strapped in, I spent an enjoyable hour or so on the New Jersey Turnpike talking to Algren, who had me twisted around his finger with the history of the supermarket tomato.

The run up to NYC is pretty standard travel for us, so I was not feeling too road-trippy until after I hung up, when I got on the Cross-Bronx Expressway and realized that I was spending all the rest of the day's light hours driving across 3 states, to none of which I had ever been, to get into a city to which I had also never been, to meet my husband at a train station the location of which only made sense on paper, in a town where all anyone talks about is a. the bad driving and b. the sadistic layout of the roads. All of this, plus I was a woman who knows nothing about how to change a tire traveling alone with 2 children. Hm.

Then, right about the time this was starting to weigh on me, I learned from the newsradio there had that morning been a big! huge! traffic accident in Eastern Connecticut that would close down I-95 for a few miles in each direction. Oh, no. I dithered a little and wrung my hands, and then because Mari was not there to a. weigh in or even b. take over, I took care of it. Which I am sure does not seem like a big deal to anyone who has a large family or sometimes leaves the house or maybe works for ooky people, but I really have a routine from which I don't much deviate. I am a woman who will not change light bulbs because my husband stands six-foot-three & so why should I? I am pathologically delicate, plus schema-driven -- I do not want to worry my pretty little head about that, I say -- and miraculously, most everyone goes along with the idea and suits up for the protection & defense & big rescue. I guess I am just lucky. 

The point is, I drove into Westport, Conn. at the junction of I-95 and Route 1 while starting to feel a lot anxious and a little scared for the success of this trip.  It was going to be dark before I ever got out of Connecticut. I had to either find a new route right away or risk being stuck in an interminable & arbitrary detour somewhere along the way in a place where I knew nothing about the roads.  Mari was waiting for me in a town he knew nothing about, except that the train went there.  All of our worldly possessions were in the car and I was not just the only driver, but had two passengers who are, frankly, exhausting. 

I hustled the rowdy children into a diner on old Post Rd for dinner. While there, totally bamboozled & letting them order everything off the menu at once, I opened up my big, giant road atlas, right in view of any old roadside predator/strangler/rapist and flipped it around between Massachussets and Connecticut, decided that I-95 from NYC to Boston was a sucker's game anyhow. Clearly the only way is to take 91 to 84 to the Mass Turnpike and any other choice is just falling for marketing.

Then, I had a bracing cup of tea and we left the diner. I had behind me already the small & fortifying victory of having been clear & articulate with strangers in a strange place, plus I managed to get myself oriented and re-routed in a smart & efficient (also, due to road closure, necessary) fashion and did not even attract the attention of any kidnapping serial killer rapists! No! (Westport, Conn is the location of old Martha's Turkey Hill mansion, so as if, anyhow) In the end, despite the harrowing, dark, trucky, and high-speed drive along 91, 84, and 90, I made it!  I can do it! I did it!

The trip was full of I can do it. I get so busy with the children and our routine and I keep my head down and feel so kept by my husband that I sometimes forget I used to be capable. I used to do things. I used to be mentally sharp & agile and ready for things to happen. I balanced my own checkbook and found my own apartments and went on job interviews and was known to bar brawl in the defense of my own honor.  Me, yes, me!

When we were finally reunited with Mari -- who had chosen to take a cab to the hotel because of our delays -- I kept bouncing around the hotel corridors, so excited & regaling him with tales of my improvisational competence.  He told me some sober paraphrasing from the denouement of Wizard of Oz about having had it in me all along.  Well, that is just how I feel! Like I could do it all along! Amazing and useful and interesting! About new stuff, not just the same old stuff! It was great!

The next day (in the hurricane), I was happy to let him drive the six hours to finish off Mass and continue up the coast in the constant rain & wind.  Three of those hours were in the pitch-black backroads' darkness, while I sat quietly murmuring encouragements from the passenger seat, as if I  have been trained in docility & defenselessness all along. I do not know what the hell is wrong with me sometimes. Do I just have too much time on my hands? I am like a caricature of a housewife. I could use this energy on wild & risk-taking home decorating. In fact, the problem is surely a lack of home decorating.  Nothing at all to do with poetry.  Nope!  Egads.

the way life should be

Maine:  it amazingly looks just as I expected, but how could I believe any place imagined as such would be real?   

The Maine Turnpike has a sign along its shoulder that says, "Watch for moose in the roadway."  Sometimes a simple midwestern girl is not entirely ready.  Moose?

We spent a lot of time hiking and seeing and doing and it was triple-plus relaxing and fun, plus wonderfully cold and clean.  Reëntry is now.  It is good to be home, even if the house is not quite as clean as I thought I left it and the cat will not stop following me around, scolding me for the abandonment.