scoutspeak

“Be Prepared!” I heard my daughter shriek as I pulled myself out of bed this morning. “WE ARE PREPARED!” her brother shouted. “Be prepared!” “WE ARE PREPARED!!” Each tried to be louder than the other. They repeated this over and over as I got myself ready for the day. Where did they get this bizarre chant? Well, see, their father has been out of town for the last two weeks, and I’ve had to take them all with me to Cub Scouts.

Back in the summer, when I had such a great time teaching a handful of little boys about trees, I didn’t realize it was a job interview. I laid out my tree cuttings on the picnic table, played lightning rounds of Identify Those Leaves, talked about growth rings, and drew a tree, roots and all, on my whiteboard. Then I packed up my things, put on my sunglasses, waved goodbye to my little class, and drove away.

Which brings us to this fall, when I was presented with a square yellow shirt three sizes too big and a room full of 8-year-olds at the end of their day. And I began to discover a strange thing. Pack Meeting. The last meeting of each month is a group meeting with several ages of boys, during which awards are presented and announcements made. My very first pack meeting, I sidled into my folding metal chair and glanced nervously around. No, I wasn’t the only one wearing the bright yellow camp shirt. This gave me only a modicum of reassurance. That there were other women willing to don this interesting fashion creation was dubious comfort.

My head snapped back around as the slight woman leading the meeting suddenly bellowed, “BE PREPARED!” I nearly jumped out of my chair when everyone around me roared, “WE ARE PREPARED!” She did it again. And again. I turned in astonishment to my colleague, the other Wolf Den leader. “Are we prepared?” I mouthed. She nodded solemnly.

“Now it’s time for announcements!” the meeting leader said. “Who’s singing the song for announcements?” Three boys separated themselves from the audience and came forward. “Announcements, announcements, a horrible way to die…,” they sang, more or less together, with squeaky pre-adolescent voices, “…announcements, announcements, a horrible way to be bored to death, a horrible way to die…” Everyone laughed, the boys returned to their seats, and I found no occasion to change my expression of shock, nor the giant question mark that was forming in the air above my head.

“Awww,” the leader said, “Give ‘em a round of applause!” Upon which, every boy and every adult in the room clapped, each set of hands moving around in a circular motion. I glanced again at my den-leader partner. Her face, and all the faces of the adults in the room, were as serious as though they were applauding an opera. I began to feel that I had stepped out of the normal reality that I understood and into a sort of parallel universe. I surreptitiously searched the faces of the adults to find a trace of the reaction I was having, and found nothing to reassure me. These were adults I knew from other facets of life. They had seemed rational enough then. I realized that this had been going on long before I was issued a yellow shirt, and would go on long after it was retired. But…how could I have missed something this…odd?

I felt that this meeting was quickly going in a direction that I could not follow. They were actually speaking English, but the way they put the words together completely baffled me. Soon the awards were being handed out. After every scout received his plastic baggie full of belt loops, beads, and embroidered arrow points, a solemn “round of applause” was given. One boy advanced to the next Cub level. He was accorded a special honor.

“Come on up here, you boys in his den,” the enthusiastic leader said. “Climb up the mountain and give him a yodel.” They were reluctant. “Come on,” she coaxed. Before long, they did, in fact, come up before the group and climb up an imaginary mountain to give their friend a yodel. By now I had thought nothing could surprise me. The yodel thing, though, gave me one final jolt.

So now, when we gather for Pack Meeting, and she shouts “BE PREPARED!” I say in an uncertain voice, (because it is expected) “We are prepared!” Because honestly, what on earth could ever have prepared me for this?

ADD pride

I have Attention Deficit Disorder.

It is who I am. It is what defines me as a person. It is how God created me, and he surely wants me to embrace and love myself, so I embrace and love this part of myself. I am blessed with ADD. ADD is beautiful. Can I change? Why would I want to?

People often ask how those who are blessed with ADD “cope” in society. I admit that it is, at times, difficult, but that’s because the public mindset is against us. People see it as a disorder, something broken about us. Well, that’s all wrong, of course. It’s just the way we happen to see the world, and is as valid as any other viewpoint.

But here’s the problem. We’ve been discriminated against. We comprise roughly 3-5% of the population, and I think it’s time our voice was heard. If we group together, galvanize behind our cause, we can change society, force people to accept, tolerate, appreciate us.

We have to push for change. We have to get some of these oppressive societal rules altered to accommodate our different but perfectly legitimate worldview. Here is what I’d like to see happen:

1) Late fees must be made completely illegal. If I cannot remember to pay my bills on time, or if you choose to live an ADD lifestyle and you choose not to remember, we should not be penalized for it.

2) Legislation must be passed that allows me to start my appointments any time of day I remember to show up. The rescheduling of my dentist’s appointment because I am more than fifteen minutes late is closed-minded and oppressive to my lifestyle choice.

3) The atrocity of drugging people with an ADD lifestyle to “help” them “behave” in schools and at work must be seen for what it is-the oppression of people’s God-given rights. If schools and society value creativity and imagination as much as they say they do, then why are there bells and worksheets and rules that stifle them?

4) Employers must not be allowed to fire people because of “poor performance” related to showing up late, missing meetings, daydreaming or following a great idea instead of following instructions. People with ADD (or ADD lifestyle) should not be required to identify themselves to employers because of potential discrimination issues.

5) The military must be made to accommodate our people. This business of rigid schedules, high expectations, and punishment for aberrations, is cruel and discriminatory. If a soldier chooses to stay up the whole night reading a captivating novel, he should not be forced to attend training the next day. His choices should be respected. Many beautiful, creative things could happen that would seriously help the military out if they would magnify the strengths of their ADD troops instead of trying to train them out of them.

I know we can create a better world for ourselves and our children. But the public attitude toward us must be changed. Terms like “grow up”, “act your age”, “be responsible”, “pay attention”, and “stop fidgeting” are offensive and outdated. We must bring about a new climate of tolerance and respect for all people, regardless of race, color, creed, gender, sexual orientation, or attention level. It has always been our right to live the way we choose. Now society needs to catch up.

I watch with great interest the struggles of those who fight for same-sex marriage rights. I am pulling for them, because their fight is our fight. If they win, if they can push through laws that make society recognize, uphold, and defend their rights, we’re next!

adult bookstore

You know those “adult” bookstores you see advertised all up and down the highways all across the country? I’ve never actually been in one, but I’ve decided that they’re probably an allegory for adulthood itself.

You always pass by them and wonder what’s in there, because they’re all covered with pictures of seductive eyes and pursed lips, and words like “adult toys!” and “naughty fun!” and so on. But when you get inside, I bet it’s really full of books about paying bills on time, and doing household chores, and taking the kids to the doctor, and income taxes. And sure, there’s a little corner bookshelf (dolled up with cheap-looking tinsel and blinking lights) full of all that stuff you thought the place was filled with. But 95% of the store is that other. And you know that you’d go in there and stand there in total disillusionment and at the same time be compelled to say, “Yep. I guess this IS an “adult bookstore.”

That's my insight for today. So if you’re ever driving by one of those places and are tempted to stop by and find out what “adult” is all about…just keep on driving. You already know what’s in there.

keep out of reach

If I were a cartoonist, here’s the cartoon I would draw: I am standing in the middle of my kitchen, holding a small plastic bottle. All the bottom cabinets are empty, their contents around my feet on the floor. On top of the fridge, on top of the cabinets, and on hooks hung way up close to the ceiling is stuffed everything I own in the world. Teetering on the edge of one counter, reaching for the piled-up stuff on the fridge, is a mischievous toddler. But here’s the punch line-in big letters, on the bottle in my hand, is written, “KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN.”

Riiiight.

Oh, wait. I could just take a picture of real life. Is there, on all the earth, such a place as “out of reach of children”? Keys, for instance. I have a three-year-old with a key fetish. The hooks on the wall where I hang my purses are easy pickings for a guy with chair-pushing abilities. So I hung a little row of hooks in my kitchen as high as I could reach. (Any higher, and I’d be pushing a chair.) So he pushes a chair, gets a broom, and fishes with it until he lifts the keys off the hook. Then, of course, he can go unlock the car and play with all the power mirrors and seat adjustments. On a good day, I get in the car after him and find all my settings messed up. On a hot day, I find him in there with his curls dripping with sweat and his cheeks scarlet-pink. So the key hiding goes on. On top of the fridge, no good, on top of the cabinets, mostly good. Except that everything else in the house is also up there.

Like the broom. I came home after an evening of hauling kids to lessons to find that my husband had cleaned the whole kitchen. Except the floor. “Where on earth is the broom?” he asked. I pointed upward. It was right above his head on top of the cabinets. “Oh,” he said, defeated, “I didn’t look up.” We buy a new bottle of baby soap about once a week, because we haven’t found a place where they can’t find it and pour it out all over the bathroom floor. One of these weeks we’ll get smart and buy trial size.

I’m not sure if it’s “just boys” or “just” my kids, or if all parents are actually reeling in disbelief at the disorder their children can create, but I do know that this particular set of kids can climb and/or destroy anything. A particularly nasty item in the “out of reach” joke is the number of “childproofing” products available to help you. So you naively purchase cabinet locks, and diligently install them, and carefully line up your toxic (and expensive) cleaning products in the new safe place you’ve created. Turn your back, satisfied with a job well done, and in five minutes you’ll be on the phone to Poison Control. (I actually considered keeping San Diego Poison Control on speed dial when I moved to Georgia, since they wouldn’t find me when they finally decided I’d called them one too many times and came for my kids.)

Maybe we should just build a shelf about a foot down from the ceiling all the way around every room in the house, and shove it full of everything that should be out of reach. Then we’ll remove all climb-able furniture from anywhere near the walls, remove all long, fishing-type items from the house, take away anything that they can throw to bounce things down…..

So I look at all that stuff up there, and shrug, and hand the Tylenol bottle over to the toddler. It makes a good rattle, and whoever made their childproof lids actually did a pretty decent job. At least now I know he has it. And right there in his chubby little hands, that’s as close as it’ll ever get to being “out of reach of children”.

life is a highway

This statement is truer than I ever believed. Life lessons I’ve learned from our recent 10-day, cross-country odyssey:

-Just because someone is yelling your name in your ear as loudly as he can does not mean you won’t hit a deer.

-Be sure of your driving ability before you go above 9000 feet in early October. Whether or not you can believe it, the temperature is below freezing up there. Pulling off the side of the road to change drivers isn’t very helpful when the sides of the road are slush-ice puddles. Angry words don’t help you get the car out of slush-ice puddles.

-Sometimes it will be a sunny, dry day. You’ll be able to see for miles up the highway, watch the scenery, sing road songs with the family, and feel invincible. More often, it will be nighttime. You’ll be the only one awake, visibility will be limited to the front edge of your headlights’ range, and there will be nothing but the monotonous sound of the tires and the endless oncoming road to keep you company. Sometimes when you’re desperately tired, fighting to keep your eyes open and your tires on the road, you can ask the other driver to trade places with you so you can nap. Sometimes he is exhausted too, and you have to go on alone.

-Some facts are indisputable. You cannot argue with a 5-year-old who needs to use the bathroom 10 minutes after her last stop. Well, I suppose you can, but if you don’t stop, and she’s right, I’m not cleaning up after her.

-Quality family time is like pomegranate juice. Encased in a whole bitter peel and lots of useless seeds’ worth of quantity time is the lovely red juice of joyous family memories. Spend all that time bickering, and you may eventually find yourselves standing in awe together looking out over Yellowstone Lake.

-The sign that says “Dense Fog Ahead” is no guarantee that, once you get into the dense fog, you won’t come across another sign that says, “Bridges May Be Icy”. Nor are both of those guarantees that you won’t come across another sign that says “High Winds Possible.” Keep your eyes on the white lines and hang on. The fog does end eventually. When it does, how much more grateful you’ll feel for simple night driving.

-Some parts of this earth were not meant for women. (Or girls.) On long stretches of Wyoming highway there are endless miles of bathroomlessness, restaurantlessness, and hotellessness. If you wanted to shoot yourself something to eat, sleep on the ground, and use all the open country as your “facilities”, Wyoming would welcome you. Otherwise, hold it, stay awake, eat granola bars and move on.

-There’s a point when all the novelty and fun of being on a road trip has worn off. You’re saddle-sore, worn out from trying to sleep straight up in your chair, weary of fried food and ketchup. Suddenly the place you were trying to get away from becomes the only place you want to be. Lots of lessons can be gathered on the long highway between here and there. But the really great thing about a road trip-and life-is that at the very end of the road is home.

too happy

“I’m too…happy,” a friend told me when I asked her if she’d written anything lately. “It’s hard to write when you have, happy husband, happy children, happy life…” I thought about her and her lack of writing-inducing angst this morning.

As the sun came up over the tall trees that form the rim of my world, I was walking back up the gravel driveway toward the house. It needs a new roof, I thought. The chickens need water, I thought. The kids’ll be up soon, I thought. Many things that need tending. Every day a day’s worth of the kind of work that makes lives run, builds the framework of memories.

Breathe in, breathe out. Wake up, go to sleep. Make meals, clean up. Wash clothes, wear them, wash them again. Nothing new, nothing earth-shattering. I’m with her. What’s to write about?

Only this:

-In my corner of Georgia summer has melted into fall. The air is cold at dawn and dusk, turning to crisp in between. All the outdoor projects that have waited through the blistering, steamy months are suddenly possible. I put lovely new paint on all my shutters one breezy afternoon this week.

-Today I sat on the edge of one of the garden boxes and planted the fall garden. (Don’t do as I have done, I’m very late.) Cabbage, kohlrabi, bok choi, brussels sprouts, turnips, radishes, lettuce. My toddler sang and shoveled soil out of the boxes onto the ground, and it was a lovely garden day. All we had to pay for this beautiful moment was four packs of seeds dumped on the kitchen floor and cabinets painted white with latex paint and a broom.

-I took some of those nasty boards from the dining room floor and sawed, sanded, screwed, painted them up into two picket-fence headboards for Katie’s room. Got them all in there, went to get the bed frames I had in the garage, and found that they’re not the kind of bed frames that have feet. So…now I have two pretty fences sitting against the wall in that room there and the kids are scratching their heads about their crazy mother.

So that’s it. Nothing particular is going on, but life as usual. Which all by itself is a blessing. I promise to let you all know when I have a moment’s worth of angst worth philosophizing over. But for now, it’s good, in its way, to be too happy to write.

baseball

A page torn out of the autumns of my childhood might show a picture something like this:

My mother and father have spread out a blanket on the hill overlooking the Little League field and the playground. All the other parents are sitting in the bleachers behind the field, but mine have nine children to watch, and most of them are swarming over the playground equipment.

We spent many, many evenings there. Most of us didn’t care about the ball game, content rather to swing as high as we could, play on the big rocks, and, when we thought our mother wasn’t looking, wade out into the cold Little Tennessee River. We always kept one eye on the game, though, watching for the two teams to make two lines and pass each other, hitting hands, repeating “good game, good game, good game.” That was our cue to come running from all corners of the park. That was time to go home.

During the rare times I would sit on the blanket and try to pick out one of my brothers on the ball field, I discovered something interesting about the two of them. One played baseball like it was the best, last thing he would ever do. He slid into bases, dove for the ball, lived and died with the score. The other was a dreamer. He’d stand, usually with his back to the game, in the far outfield, swinging his mitt, kicking the dirt, watching the sunset or a butterfly. Balls would roll by him, the game would go on around him, and he was in a world completely apart from all of it. He knew someone would tell him when the game was over.

Time, of course, went on, and Little League was left behind in the scrapbook of childhood. I think I can honestly say that I haven’t thought about those baseball games once in the years that separate me from them now. So it was rather a strange feeling to find myself standing this past Saturday, between the ball field and the playground, watching my own son play. How odd, I thought, to have walked back into this scene so precisely the way I left it. It was in a different town, a different state, but everything had been preserved exactly. The air smelled like honesuckle and sunscreen. The parents had the same expressions of concern when their sons were up to bat, and patience when they weren’t. There was the playground equipment, the children playing, and I turned toward the ball field to pick out my son.

There was his number, far in the outfield. I watched as he put one foot over the other, spun around, and stared away over the fields. I saw him kick the dirt, swing his mitt, start singing himself a song. It would seem that he will be that type of player, I thought.

It all reminded me so exactly of meeting back up with a relative that you realize (uncomfortably) that you hadn’t known was even still alive, but whose life has continued unchanged since you last met. It reminded me of an island I used to know in the river near my home, that never changed although the water always rushed around it.

The game ended, and the players lined up. Two teams of little boys marched past each other, hitting hands, muttering “good game, good game…”, and I knew it was time to go home. I shook my head at the strangeness, at the familiarity of it all. In its own special corner, untouchable by time or change, baseball lives on.

gotta get this off my chest

They say that 85% of women in the US are wearing the wrong size bra. Shocking. The other 15% must either work at or for Victoria’s Secret. So, assuming for just a moment that you are part of the 85% of American women who create this vast underprivileged class, let’s try and figure out, shall we, why this might be so.

You suddenly decide you need a new bra, for whatever reason. (Probably because yours suddenly became, or was always actually, the wrong size.) So in shame at your ignorance and self-neglect, you hang your head, get one of your girlfriends, and go on over to Victoria’s Secret to get yourself into the privileged class who wears the coveted Right Size. But wait! Be careful which of your friends you choose to take with you. The moment you walk into the store, a chipper (correctly-fitted) saleslady will come right over and slap her measuring tape right around both of you. And then, with a “you’ve just won the lottery” tone of voice, she’ll proclaim to each of you your perfect bra size. If you happen to be a relatively flat-in-the-front sister, and your friend happens to be on the buxom side, this pronouncement is sure to produce in both of you a vague sense of embarrassment that will make you both blush and turn away to pretend to be browsing around the merchandise. The merchandise almost always happens to be purple and black lace teddies, being found looking at which is sure to have the effect of increasing your confusion.

So you take the saleslady’s advice. Trying to find the blandest, whitest, most boring bra possible amid the strapless, backless, leopard-print ocean is an adventure all by itself. You finally find one that fits, go back and get another couple, glance at the price tag, and put back all but two. Then you go and collect your friend and the two of you check out, unable to meet each other’s eyes and hoping you won’t see each other for a few weeks.

Then you get your hard-won bras home. And because the punishment you endured simply procuring the bras wasn’t enough, the pink lettering on the bubble-gum pink satin tag reads, passive-aggressively enough, “Hand Wash. Drip Dry.” So sure, you can throw them in the family wash with the kids’ socks, but they won’t be responsible for the consequences.

So you do it anyway, and in a matter of months you’ve got a lumpy mess of a bra, are embarrassed going out in public, and are considering buying bras again. Sigh. You can’t take that friend, you’re just now starting to talk to each other again. So you try to buy bras online. Sure. They’ll come straight to the door in a lovely unmarked box. But you’ll have to go to the website to get them. At a time when your children aren’t standing around, because they will gape and point and you’ll sigh and weigh the cost of a smooth new bra against the psychological damage you’ve done to them, and leave bra shopping for another time. Because although YOU just came for a simple piece of sturdy underwear, all the come-eat-me women on those websites seem to have other ideas for you. (On second thought, those bras really don’t fit those women at all.)

So you’ve picked out the blah bra you want to purchase, but you’ve got to tell the website what size you are. So you take their cryptic instructions and go in the bathroom and try to wiggle yourself into the right position to get the right measurements while holding the door shut and shouting at the children who are banging on the door, “Really, dinner’s in just a few minutes, guys…” And you do not consider asking your husband for help in measuring yourself for a bra because he’s sure to completely miss the point.

Eventually, late at night, you do get all the right sizes in the right slots on the website and you’re sitting there with your credit card out and your husband saunters through and happens to see that you are buying something online. “SIXTY DOLLARS!?!” he shouts, his eyes bugging out, one hand grasping at his hair. “Why do you need a bra that costs SIXTY DOLLARS?”

So you put your credit card back and figure, well, I’m going to Wal-Mart this week for groceries, I’ll just get one while I’m there…

But you have to take all your children with you, and as soon as you’re crowded in that tiny dressing room, they will have forgotten that over the short little wall is another woman dressing, and over the next wall, another, and they can all hear everything you’re saying. You’ll remember the last time you went shopping for bathing suits and as soon as you took off your pants your toddler said, at the top of his lungs, “OH MOMMA, you have a BEAUTIFUL BACKSIDE!” And you’ll hold your breath and hope they hold theirs.

You try one on…it’s the wrong size, and you think you’ll go get another one, when one of them gets that thoughtful look on his face and winds up and shouts, “Momma! If you are a white woman and you wear white bras, do women who are BROWN have to wear BROWN BRAS?!?”

At which point, you throw the wrong-sized bra in your cart and leave the store as quickly as possible, vowing never to buy a bra again no matter what happens as long as you live. So I guess I can understand why you'd go along wearing the wrong size for so long. Because actually, given what a new bra costs, the old one fits just fine.

the reluctant malcontent

I sit on the piano bench early on a gray, drizzly morning, flanked by two not-yet-dressed children. I am playing Gounoud’s “Ave Maria”. It is delicate and beautiful. A prayer. The children beside me bang relentlessly on the high and low keys, until there is no way for my music to be heard. I stop, sigh, and look behind me at the house they’ve already trashed…again.

As a little girl, I was asked what I wanted to be someday. I always gave the response that I had been carefully taught to give, “I want to be a mom”. That satisfied everyone within my circle of acquaintance. As I grew, though, I began to realize that my parents expected me to go to college. I never asked why I needed a degree to be a mom. Suddenly my simple answer was no longer appropriate. You can’t go through high school saying you want to be a mom. So I layered over my childhood response a new one. “I want to be a landscape architect.”

I was the recipient of an odd sort of double injunction we give to little girls. "You can be whatever you want. But it would be best if you were a full-time mom." In this way we satisfy the feminine-rights part of our conscience, assuage the family-first part, and completely confuse a child.

When I did graduate from college, I stood outside the assembly hall in the beautiful spring day with a degree in one hand and a baby in the other. At that moment, there was a choice to make. Or was there, really? I could pursue a career in landscape design, coming home to my family at the end of the day, as millions of women do every day. To my family, and to myself, because I had been taught so from my cradle, that would have been a failure. On the other hand, I could choose to turn my back on the career world and become a full-time mother. Despite the difficulty and privation attendant to such a career choice, this, I was assured, spelled “success”.

Having walked neither of these paths before, I had to take the counsel of those with more experience. I chose to stay home with my child, and future children. Every day I do the work that it takes to raise a family. Every day I wash laundry, make meals, change diapers. And every day I think about the other women who had the same choice to make that I once did. How did it turn out for them? Did some of them choose, in the face of discouragement, to take a career, and discover that it wasn’t the hell everyone had said? Did some of them find another balance, perhaps part-time work, and still find the happiness that I had been promised?

Some days with my children are so difficult that I gaze longingly at the grass over on the other side of the fence. Some days I wish I were leaving the house to face challenges of another sort. My own challenges seem so threadbare sometimes. I don’t know anything about the lives of women before the “women’s lib” movement, but I wonder if having fewer options made them more or less content. Some days the grass seems so green over there I have my hand on the fence ready to jump over.

But I have a little box of treasures, for the trouble taken to be “just a mom”. There are long afternoons spent sitting on the porch doing nothing, petting the cats and discussing life. There are the comical faces of my little boys when they know they’ve been caught doing something they shouldn’t. There are all the hurts kissed, all the arguments settled with a hug, and all the naps taken with a snuggly baby face-down on my chest. Now, with the benefit of a few years’ experience, I choose for myself to be here, at home with my children. I choose these treasures.

So I turn back from the fence, put my fingers back on the piano keys, and begin again to play. I am accompanied by the exuberant poundings of my future virtuosos. We are squeezed together on the bench, our elbows banging, fingers tangling together. And I know, once again, that this is the place for me. The sun breaks through the clouds, filling the room with light, and our prayer ascends to heaven.

fighting hunger

I hide to eat. I actually eat in hiding. Sound like some bizarre eating disorder? Before you come running over to my house for an intervention, let me explain.

Most people’s appetites are (I assume) set to “eat until you are no longer hungry”. My children’s appetites are set to “eat until there is nothing left.” Regardless of the amount of food available, they will consume with unbelievable frenzy until they’re certain that there’s no possibility of any of them getting a larger portion than any other. It’s never a matter of there not being enough to go around. I just don’t think they came with a hunger-stop mechanism.

So they eat all day, every day. They eat their breakfast, and before I can finish putting the dishes in the dishwasher, they’re begging for a snack. And so on until lunch, and then after that until dinner. Dinner comes and goes, and the vacuum cleaners are still set on Turbo Suck. Then they have to have a couple of snacks before bed, and in the morning they wake up starving like they’ve never eaten before.

And my job, faced with this kind of steam-engine fire, is to stand in the dark and speeding belly of the train and shovel coal endlessly into its insatiable flames. But if the woman shoveling coal dies, the whole train stops, so sometimes I do have to eat. So when the food is finally ready, and the children who have been clinging to my legs unlatch and make a dash for the dining room, I load up plates, throw them on the table, and run. Because by the time I get back to the kitchen to make myself a plate, and return to the dining room with it, there will be four expectant faces over four empty plates wondering who gets what I’ve just brought. If I actually put the plate on the table, it’s as good as giving it to whomever can get across the table and to my plate the fastest.

So I don’t even go back. I load up everyone’s plates, including mine, take all theirs to the dining room, go back and get mine, and slip around the corner to hold my dish in the air and inhale my food. That way I can actually eat, without the reproachful looks of all the starving children who can’t actually be starving at all. That way I can have food that is at least halfway hot before I have to go back and dish out a second round.

And so I wonder, as I throw back my bowl of morning oatmeal, standing alone in a corner just out of sight, if they would ever actually eat everything that’s available and leave me to starve completely to death. Surely not. I’m overreacting. I’ll just go in and sit down and act like a civilized parent. So I do. I take my first helping and gingerly set it down among the remnants of their third, and they look up at me and say, “Are you going to eat that?”

ballet

There are two TVs in the waiting room of the local dance studio. This past Tuesday night, one of them showed a room full of advanced-dancer teenagers. They wore cutoff shorts, knee length tights, and one-shoulder T-shirts, and stood slouching around the room looking disinterested. Then their teacher turned on the dance music and they snapped into a precision team, executing a well-oiled routine.

As the small group of mothers watched the TVs, the dance studio owner spun for us the tales of each teenager’s woes. This one’s brother had lied to his parents about her. That one was grounded from driving her parents’ car. And the hormones, she said. The hormones!

On the other TV was a room full of little girls in pink and purple leotards, hair pulled tightly back, nervously watching their teacher in their first ever ballet lesson. My daughter was in that room. The little girls stood in a straight row, and I watched as their teacher taught them first position, then second position, and they all held their hands just so…except one. Katie couldn’t do first position hands, second position hands, because she had to play with her skirt.

She’d been dancing that afternoon ever since I finally said, “Okay. It IS time to go to ballet now.” She danced while she ate, danced as we did her hair, danced her way into and out of the car. She’d been singing, “I haaave a purple leotard and piiiink tights…” But as soon as she put on her brand new purple leotard with silver swirls and a purple skirt attached, her hands had not been off that skirt. Nor, it appeared from the waiting room TV, were they ever during her first ballet lesson.

At least from what I could see on the practice room hidden camera, Katie’s first ballet lesson appeared to be every inch the little girl party she’d been begging for for months. They danced in beautiful, heartbreaking, awkward lines and circles. I glanced at the other TV, knew that only time separated those two rooms full of girls, and felt relieved that Katie was still in the pink and purple room. I felt a little guilty about feeling that way, a little smug in my custodianship of an unspoiled little girl, and grateful for the years between now and then.

The classes ended, the TV screens cleared of dance students, and Katie returned to me, flushed and happy. I asked her how her class was, and she said breathlessly, “I want to go home and sleep and when I wake up, come back and do ballet until I get tired again, and every day I want to do ballet!” And I was walking to the car with her, there in that beautiful little-girl moment, and thinking, how simple and wonderful the world is when a purple leotard will make you completely happy. I think that the purple leotard had almost made me completely happy, when she stopped and turned to me there on the sidewalk, hands on her hips, and laid this one on me.

“Madeline has a princess backpack and mine is only pink. Why do you want me not to have a princess backpack and just to have a pink one?" The accusation in her voice completely shrank me. Popped my purple-leotard bubble. And then I realized maybe I got a little carried away. All that growing up? Maybe it’s not going to take as long as I think.

Garden in a Box

LOTS of people have asked about our garden this year. So here's the skinny on the whole thing, in one brilliant article for you to refer to when you start/continue gardens of your own. A word of warning at this point. This is...sort of...a pet topic of mine, so if you don't want all the nit-picky details, save yourself while you still can. Okay, I warned you.

***A note to anyone not well acquainted with where we live...all my vegetable gardening experience is taking place in zone 8, humid northeast GA***

So this will take more or less a tutorial format, since most of the questions I've received about our garden are prefaced by the word "how". (And no, they're not just addressing me.)

First of all, this garden is in boxes. There are a lot of things you can use for the edges of your beds, such as cinder blocks, railroad ties, stone, tree trunks... we chose untreated 2x12" pine planks from the Home Depot. The height doesn't really matter. With higher sides you can/have to put more soil in there, and you don't have to reach down as far. Higher sides, requiring more material, are usually more expensive. I wouldn't go below about 8", and height is up to you. You could go all the way up to wheelchair accessible height.

The beds/boxes should be narrow enough for you to reach the center from both sides. Since 8' is an extremely common lumber length, we chose to use 4', or 1/2 of an 8' board, for the width. The length is personal preference. We chose to use two 8' boards for the long sides, with a 4' board on each end, and one in the center acting as a brace. We could have used longer boards, but the truck's bed is only so long, and we had to get them home somehow. So the beds end up looking like a long, square 8. They have a length of 4x4 in the corners, and are held together with deck screws.


Once the boxes were made, we filled them with soil and compost. What you need here is structure and fertility. We didn't buy "topsoil", because it's almost certain to be full of weed seeds. For our structure, to add bulk to the boxes, we bought "fill dirt", which usually comes from below the soil surface, and is less likely to contain seeds. Also, it probably doesn't contain much in the way of nutrition. And, as such, is "dirt" cheap. We put about 3/4 cubic yard, or just over a "scoop" of fill dirt in each 16' box. Then we added mushroom compost, about one scoop per 16' box. Explanation of the mysterious term "scoop" and prices and a lot of good garden stuff can be found at Akin Stone.

Now we have our garden structure all ready. Here's what it cost us. 2x12s for each 16'x4' box, $50. 1 scoop fill dirt, $7. 1 scoop mushroom compost, $27.

Last task is to take a garden fork and mix all that soil up. But don't dig any weeds up from the bottom.

If I had these boxes to do over again, I would do all of it the same way, but I would put down some type of weed barrier on the ground inside the boxes before I went to town filling them up with soil. I don't know whether it would have made a difference. The weeds have actually been pretty decent this year, but we still got some of the cursed bermuda grass up in the boxes. Cardboard, lots of layers of newspaper, weed barrier fabric if you're feeling spendy, whatever will slow them down. Maybe useful, I don't know.

The paths between our boxes are still just grass. This probably contributed to the grass-in-the-boxes problem. When we had finished the boxes and all that soil hauling, we had nothing left (in the gumption or money departments) to do paths. Eventually we will, doing weed barrier and mulch.

Okay. All the work's done, now the fun part.

Here's the trick with growing your garden in boxes. (Okay, one of many tricks, but this is a good one.) Vertical real estate. Right down the middle of each of these boxes is an extra strip of ground space, but it goes straight up. That made no sense. I'll explain. When you grow things like winter squash, cucumbers, watermelons, they take up heaps of ground space simply because they have vines. They sprawl everywhere, and fuel the idea that you have to have a ton of ground space to have a decent garden. But, with a little coaxing (and I do mean just a little) they're just as happy to grow straight up.

So down the middle of most of my boxes I have a trellis. You could get fancy, construct something from wood, and so on. What we've done is taken three metal T-posts and driven them in, one right in the middle of each short box end, and one in the middle near the center brace. Then I've taken a 16' cattle panel, hoisted it up there and tied it to each pole. The virtues of cattle panels are these: they're sturdy, you can use them forever, they have nicely-sized squares for reaching through and picking vegetables. They are a little pricey, and, being 16' long, it might be difficult to get them home. (That's another story all by itself...)

There are the cucumbers. You can see the cattle panel, stakes, the whole nine yards. Here's what I have growing up those things this year:

Green Beans and Red Beans

Butternut Squash


Cucumbers
Watermelons
Canteloupes
Tomatoes

How do I have watermelons growing vertically?


Yes, that is a leg of an old pair of stockings. I'm growing a small variety of watermelon anyway, (a behemoth variety is unlikely to take kindly to being hung), and the pantyhose helps the vine take the weight. I did try to do the same thing to the butternut squashes, but their stems are brittle, and when I tried to move them they started to break. So the watermelons and cantaloupes are the only ones that get this treatment.

All of that is to say, that what can go up, should.

So now you're going to plan your garden. And everything depends on how much space you have, i.e. how many boxes you have. Now, if I had just one 8'x4' box, here is how I'd plant it. In a small space, I'd go for variety instead of quantity, aiming for fresh spring, summer and fall vegetables.

First thing in the spring, (which here actually means late January-ish, no kidding), I would plant my one box like this:
*The diagram above looks kinda funny because I forgot that there are TWO square feet in a four-foot strip. (and I fixed it) So just extend the inner squares into the outer ones. See? The diagrams below are still correct because the plants growing on the trellis take up some space, but in the spring you can use the square foot closest to the trellis.

I would grow 72 sugar snap peas down the first foot of the trellis. I can grow this many because they go 1" apart, and I can grow 6 rows out from the trellis and they'll still climb up each other onto it. I grew shell and sugar snap peas this year, and think I'll only grow sugar snaps next year. They both did well, but the sugar snaps are less work to eat, and less waste. I wouldn't grow more peas than just the one foot, because they won't be harvested and pulled up before your summer things need the trellis.

I'd put lettuce mix in the remaining strips on the outside of that square. You'd be amazed how much lettuce just a little patch can put out. You can cut it just above the crown and it'll just grow more.

9 onion sets would go in each of the squares below the peas/lettuce. These can be used at any stage, from "spring onions" on up to full sized. I just leave them in the ground until I need them, and I'm still pulling them now, in July. If you pull out the center onions first, you can plant your summer plants in the same patch and get them started while you're still pulling the onions out around them. (One note for those of us who do live in GA. You probably won't be able to get your hands on what's called "storage onions" in any of the local stores around here, and there's a good reason. They don't form a bulb here because of our daylength. What we can grow is sweet onions, such as Vidalias and Burgundy.)

Below that, I'd put in two square of turnips. Turnips have teeny seeds, so I mix some soil in with them, shake them out as best I can, and thin out the greens for early salads. Then the rest can grow big roots.

16 beets/square (if you like that sort of thing), 144 carrots, and then jut repeat whichever of these things you like best.

Same bed, summer planting:

The 2 tomatoes you'll tie up to the trellis, leaving a little tiny strip near the edge of the bed for a basil and a couple of oreganos. (Or other herbs if you like them better.)

16 pole beans will grow up the trellis just below the tomatoes, and 2 each peppers and eggplants in the squares there in the middle.

4 cucumbers will fit on the trellis next to the beans, and you have an extra foot of trellis to play with, either for more cucumbers or beans.

Leaving you with just enough space for 1 zucchini and 1 squash plant.

In the fall, when all these summer plants are gone, you'll shovel in some more compost, and plant up your spring garden again. Except for the peas, which I don't think do well here in the fall. (I have yet to try it and/or figure out why.)

If I had one double box, one of the 4'x16' boxes, in the spring it would just have more of the same stuff. But in summer, it would look like this:

The main differences being that now I have 8 okra plants, more of everything else, and another 4' of trellis to work with, on which I'd plant 2 watermelons and 2 cantaloupes.

After that, it's simply a matter of scale. Once you've got all the varieties of vegetables/fruits crammed into your space, more boxes only offer more quantity. Consider things you can put away for the winter. I have all my current crops grouped together, for instance, I have a whole double box full of beans-two types of pole beans, soybeans, and lima beans.

As for watering, I went down and got 1/2" pvc pipe and fittings, drilled teensy holes all the way down each one, and laid one pipe down the middle of each bed. Okay, wait, that was just what I planned to do. In reality, I got all the pipes and finished the pipe that went in my tomatoes bed. Tied it to the bottom of the cattle panel in that bed, and it's lovely. I just hook up the hose and turn on the water, and the pipe does the rest. Because I didn't finish that project before the other plants became grown, (please see the completed bookshelves in Life at Breakneck Speed) I ended up taking one finished pipe from bed to bed to water them all. The only problem with this watering plan is that the pipes don't keep even water pressure all the way down. Maybe I should have used 8' lengths of pipe instead of trying to do the whole 16'.

If you have more than one box, consider rotating your plantings. This just means planting some especially disease- or pest-prone plants in a different place each year to try to disrupt the life cycle of the disease or pest. Also, plants use up different nutrients differently, and the same plant in the same place year after year will exhaust the soil for itself, where another plant might have used what was there differently.

A note about corn. We devoted a whole 4'x16' box to corn this year, but next year I don't think I'll plant it in a box at all. For some reason, the stalks on the ends of a row of corn never produce a decent ear of corn. The best corn is at the middle of the row. If you're planting in a narrow box, you end up with a lot of end-of-row corn, and not so much middle corn. Next year I think we'll come up with some type of solution for growing the corn in open ground, and save the box space for something else. Strawberries, maybe.

If all this hasn't given you a headache already, the last thing I need to mention is fertility. The mushroom compost we put in our boxes back at the beginning isn't immortal. Most of the crops we're growing in there are hungry suckers, and we need a plan to put as many nutrients back into the soil as we can. So we have some options. There is always inorganic fertilizer. It's cheap, but it doesn't do anything for the quality of the soil in your boxes. Still, if you have no other choice and your plants need nutrition, you can use that. You can buy more mushroom compost next year, and it will do as excellent a job as it does the first year. But you probably ought to aim to make at least some of your compost, so you can put as much back in your garden as you can.

Another option for fertilizer is manure. If you happen to have a lot of this lying around, great. (Well, at least your garden will think so...) If you (or your children) like animals, you might consider building a simple coop or hutch that fits on top of your garden bed(s). Then, when your beds aren't being used, you can put rabbits or chickens on top and they'll make fertilizer for you. In the summer, when the beds are being used, park the animals over near the garden and feed them your overripe tomatoes and baseball-bat zucchini, and they'll...well...make fertilizer. Oh, and eggs, if they're chickens.

WHEW!!! That's all I have to say about gardening (for now). If you do any, all, part, some of this, do let me know. I'm still trying to figure out what works, what doesn't, and how I can make it all better. What I can say about this year's garden at this point is that we've hauled in, eaten, and frozen tons of delicious vegetables from a garden I thought was really tiny.

And all because yesterday, when I cut the first watermelon, and summer itself ran sweetly down my chin, I thought...I gotta tell folks about this.

hope

I forget things. And I’m assiduous and indiscriminate in the execution of this labor. Nothing is too important or insignificant to merit the random application of my long-standing skill.

But, if you forget things when you’re the coordinator of a family of six, things tend to spiral out of control rather quickly. So last week, tired of the ever-present entropy, I wiped the white board clean and divided it into seven sections. I wrote the name of each day (in a lovely flowing script) at the top of each column, and began to list every tiny item that I have to remember to do every day. Things like “Brush Childrens’ Hair” and “Make Lunch”. I ended up with 163 of them for the entire week.

That done, I thought, all I have to do is follow this list and at the end of each week I’ll have the reward-a smoothly running home. Nice. But something went wrong. The employee I’d hired to do all that work, the one I’d nicely laid out all the tasks in a helpful little list for, was not doing her job. She was cutting her eyes at my list, mumbling threatening things under her breath, and avoiding doing even the easiest items. But why? What was her problem? Following a list ought to be so easy!

Then I began to realize the reasons I didn’t want to follow that interminable, micromanaging list. I was resentful of the demands on my time. I had other, lovelier things to do. I want to sew, paint, read, sing, and do it all on the spur of the moment. Why, that list would take ALL WEEK! And whoever wrote that list was trying to control me. I am my own person! How dare she??

For a while I’ll go with the list, because it seems to be the thing to do. I’ll make it to the end of a day and will have crossed off 90% of the items, and for a moment I’ll feel completely happy about having accomplished something with this day. But then a feeling of total despair follows the happiness, and I wonder, good grief, is THAT all I’ve done today? Laundry. Clean kitchen. Food. No dreaming, no dancing, no creating anything.

And so I’ve struggled with this for a long while. The list, that list of nit-picky small items that keeps your family running, healthy, sane, that is what you’re supposed to be doing. But what about the things you want to be doing? There is no time right now for those, and they sit in a dusty corner of your mind and you look toward them longingly as you scrub toilets again.

But this morning I picked up “Man’s Search for Meaning” before the glaze of sleep had worn off of my eyes and mind, and I read this quote from Nietzche, “He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.” Despite the obvious possibilities for surname pun fun there, something clicked hard. Of course it’s something we know, but apparently not something I always remember.

When Pandora let all the evils out of her terrible jar, including, I assume, 163-item to-do lists, the only thing left inside was a tiny, bright virtue called hope. The only way that mankind could handle the wash of challenge that would flood us every day was left shining alone in the bottom of our souls.

I defy the list to be the master of my life. It is a tool only, to get what I want, what I hope for. Which is what? A clean house? For some folks, that may be enough hope, but that’s too fragile for me. Healthy, happy family? Now we’re getting closer. I think that what gives me hope is the challenges overcome, the victories won, the opportunities to grow that are offered to me through the difficulties of a young family and a life spent facing Pandora’s ills. I hope that my children can see my desire to grow, learn, overcome myself, and that they will have the desire, and hope, to do the same. I hope that they are better at it than I am.

So it seems that the thing to get the boss-lady and the worker-lady on the same page is a shared vision of this hope. We’ll have to get our noses up off the grindstone long enough to look beyond it at what we’re working for here. I am the master of the list, not the other way around.

Now if we could just convince her of that…