Picking Berries

Blackberries
Originally uploaded by Pentax Penny

Today was sweet. We went blackberry picking, inspired by Peps friend Seano, who showed up for a visit with plum fingers and a bucket of sweetness last week. The next morning, the Fox and I had strawberries and blackberries and Greek yogurt for breakfast, and if there is a higher expression of summer lovin’, I don’t know what it is.

So, today we went blackberry picking. It’s funny how I thought I’d go when/if I found a good patch, But when the time was right, all we had to do was head out the door with some buckets. FF had on a long sleeve shirt and pants, a happy accident that resulted from the fact we had spent the nap wake up searching for the missing piece to a broken matchbox fire truck. This thing, this playground find with its 3 pieces, has been a favorite toy. “Can Mama fix it?’ and then I fit the pieces back together. Hand it to him. Joy. It falls apart. More joy, because now I can “fix it” again.

And today we lost the big piece somewhere between the living room and his room – even though the house is really not that messy right now, especially considering the fact that we are in a week before a deadline, which is always the height of disorder.

Anyway, we lost the ting right before the nap, which could have been a nightmare scenario of refusing to sleep until we found it. But we looked for a while and then I said, “Let’s read Max,” (Where the Wild Things Are is once again in favor.) Said, “We’ll look for the big piece after your nap,” and he went for it. And the first words when he woke up were “Can Mama find the big piece of the fire truck?”

Sometimes I look back on FF’s babyhood and see everything I was doing wrong. How I was so uncomfortable being both so in love and so unproductive at the same time. Seems so obvious to me now, that I could have let go and enjoyed a lot more.

But today, I’ll give myself –and M—some credit. We stayed in the moment. We did the right thing for today. It’s such a tiny piece of plastic. It would have been easy to try and blow it off. I said “Yes, we are going to look for it right now because I promised and because I know it’s important to you.” And when I said that his face lit up so big. I think he wasn’t sure I was really going to do it. And we started looking, even though we had wanted to go for a walk.

After an hour, I opened the front door to do something and FF shot outside and we took the chance. M went with him. I grabbed the farmer’s market basket, a bucket, a couple of little Tupperware bowls. Remembered to bring Jack the dog, forgot gloves and shears. Next time. We walked to the nearby road with a patch of blackberry hillside. This is perfect activity for Forest. Outside, physical, together. Reaching and looking and finding. Grabbling and plucking and talking. M and I pick the high ones and plop them into his bowl. Eventually we manage to persuade him to dump his bowl into the big one by promising to give him more right away. And he believes us.

The long canes pluck at the skirt of my cotton dress, tangle in the ankles of FF pants. And once we start looking, we keep finding. A neighbor’s neglected side door, the alley by the house for sale. At every patch I put Jack in a down stay and begin. Once of the nicest things about picking berries is losing track of time: Reaching up on tip toes, seeing another cluster, reaching farther. The smell of blackberry juice and sun. Careful reaching around thorns, not careful enough, the sound and a tug as they catch they my dress again. The soft feel of the ripe berries, the hard feel of the unripe. Did I mention the smell? Sweet, sweet. Forest quiet with focus. A blackberry for Jack as a reward for patient waiting. Happy dog. Happy Forest. Happy us.

We came home with a giant bowl of berries, enough for fridge and freezer. The fire truck is forgotten for now. 

Falling or Flying? Group Camping Part I

It started out so well. I was peaceful. I was having deep, milestone-y thoughts. 

I had illusions of being in charge.

Prologue, written on a bench with a view Friday night, before all the badness:

I'm going to be 40 in three weeks. Today, I'm wearing pigtails and a surfer hoodie. I am looking at Puget Sound. The San Juan Islands rise in the distance, a boat trailer rattles behind me. Michael and the Fox are down there somewhere, but I can't see them. I feel that I should be making some sort of "I'm going to be 40" vow... drawing some kind of line. 

Besides the line of bleach I've drawn in  my hair. 

A man in a blue workshirt and baseball cap walks by with an old lab on a leash. The lab is in charge. That used to be me. I used to be the man. Now I want to be, I think I am, the lab.

Tonight is the first night of our Peps camping trip. Our dogs are at home. The tree below me is dying beautifully; maybe half it’s branches bare. It’s an evergreen, maybe a fir. The bare branches hold out against the blue. That is me, also. Maybe halfway there, maybe less. Somewhere between 80 and 100, I’ll fall into the ocean, not to be heard from again, except in mermaid fairy tales about the night the woman with the white stripe in her hair leapt from her life, falling, to swim the rest of the way home.

But first, she flew.


Isn't that a lovely sentiment? Don't you feel all contemplative and empowered? I did.
And then, it was bedtime.

Burr Oak 1.14.2006

Burr Oak 1.14.2006
Originally uploaded by Notley

The Pit and the Happy Dance

Here's why being a writer goes great with being a mom:

• Flex time
• Crisis inspires creativity
• Starving for words with multiple syllables drives me to my computer. Although, the Fox did repeat "unconditionally" the other day.

Also, one of my favorite writers, Diana Gabaldon, has some advice on this.  (btw: If you haven't checked out "Outlander," Gabaldon's historical romance/adventure, I have one word for you: Sexy Scottish Lord Jamie. Okay that's four words. but just trust me on this.) Anyway, Gabaldon says that when you are a writer, starting out, sometimes you just have to let the housework go for a while.

Hello.

And let me just say: this house is a pit. Yes, it is a pit of love and creativity. All kinds of good things are happening. I am working on a Web site for an amazing documentary about humanity's ancient relationship with trees. (And if that job is not a confirmation of the presence of the Green God in my life, what is, I ask you?) Am working on next column. 

But still, the house is a pit. The clean laundry and the unclean have formed an unholy alliance on our bedroom floor, which M steps over silently every night. But I can hear what he's thinking. (Or, at least Edith can.) And don't get me started on the dog hair.

But the Fox loves to sweep. His little broom, my big broom. Really, though, he's more of a spreader than a sweeper. Can't really track the fact that the piles of dog hair are escaping. 

But legos he can track. And yesterday I had this BRILLIANT idea:

Sweeping legos.

You know, it is so easy to just do stuff, instead of teach it. I want to just clean the pit, get something done with my precious minutes here and there. I have to stop cleaning to teach the Fox, to hold the dustbin and do a happy dance when he pushes the legos into dustbin. But this way lies happiness, my friends. This way lies help.

The Right Tool for the Job

Tweezers on cotton
Originally uploaded by FurLined

It’s all about the right tool for the job. My finger, for instance, when the Fox looks at me with a green cork in his left nostril. This cork isn’t made of the bark of a Spanish tree. It is a booger cork, a hard plug. And I know I shouldn’t. I know because I just had this conversation with my mommy friend. She has her panties all tied in a knot because her daughter is “walking around with her finger in her nose all the time.” She was embarrassed, I was sanguine. (Which is so easy when it’s not my kid.)

“Well, she’s figured out that it fits,” I say into the phone. “It’s kind of a natural thing to do.”

Silence.

“I mean, a handkerchief is just an artificial layer we put on it, right?”

Long silence.

“But Ella,” she finally says, “it’s so gross.”

Yeah, it’s gross. And I know that “Do as I say, not as I do” is a futile strategy with a child. And I’ll probably regret this when it’s my own kid walking around with his finger jammed up his nose. But I can’t help it. My short nail is just the right length and the Fox trusts me, says “Take it OUT, Mommy!” Lifts his chin slightly so that I can slip my nail under the edge and pop the cork out to allow the Fox, like any good vintage, to breathe.

It’s all about the right tool for the job.

A knife for instance. A plastic knife for the Fox and a long slim table knife for me. You see, I have discovered a little task. A perfect little toddler task. A mommy trifecta. Something that a) we can do together, that b) is interesting and satisfying to both of us and c) is really useful.

A task so perfect that I am loathe to give it up, even now, after yesterday’s agony proved what can go wrong.

The task is scraping out the moss and dirt and dog hair that are jammed into the crevices between the boards of our deck. It is morning. I am on my knees, Forest is on his. The sun is shining on our backs. We slide the knives in between the boards and the stuff just lifts right out. It feels good. We are doing it together. This perfection continues until I slide my knife along the board and it gets jammed, there is a wood chip or something stuck in there. I push harder.

Next to me, the Fox is chattering happily. (He has taken to narrating himself in third person. I am thinking of this as a cool language development frontier, rather than the precursor to a third-world dictatorship.) He says, “Forest is PUSHING.” (He also likes to finish his sentences with all caps. See above note.) And I am also pushing. Ahead of me is a long, clean space between the boards where I have already cleared the gnarl. Behind me, it rises like a furry stripe, like our deck is a sleeping hyena. My knife is stuck, but I am going to get this sucker out. And then I give a really hard push and the hyena bites, it drives a long splinter a half-inch under my thumbnail.

And breaks off underneath it.

“OW!”

The Fox looks at me.

“Mommy has an owie,” I say. I can’t believe how calm my voice sounds. I grip my throbbing, numb, throbbing, oh, there it is, searing-slice of-pain-thumb. I stand and walk in the house, leaving Forest on the deck with his little plastic knife. I go to the medicine cabinet and get the sharp nail clippers. I cut the nail off, all the way to the pink. I walk out to the kitchen sink. I glance at Forest, who is now happily trotting back and forth between the deck and me as I lean over the sink with my peroxide and needle-nosed tweezers and ice. I am getting nauseated now, but he must know what I need, because he goes into the living room and plays in his pillow pile while I take the right tool for the job and stick the tweezers in there. Just in a little way at first. I squeeze and pull. Nothing. I can’t feel it, I can’t feel the splinter. It is all pain. It feels like there is a knife all the way down to my first knuckle. I force the tweezers in more. Squeeze and pull. Nothing. I glance at Forest. He is okay. And then I commit. I force them in hard, pushing them between the nail and the flesh on both sides of the splinter, forcing them all the way under, forcing them all the way down, carving a furrow in the healthy pink. I press them down into the flesh and then I squeeze and pull. I feel something. My knees wobble a little as I pull out most of the splinter. It has broken into pieces of hyena gnarl that are still in there and it’s bleeding now, but I grit my teeth and I go back for the little pieces, over and over, until I get them all.

This is a minor miracle, by the way. See, I am a fainter. I have fainted in restaurants, clinics, kitchens, and bathrooms just for talking about pain and blood and gore. I have to avoid violent movies and I will walk out of the room if you start telling me about the time you got stitches in your schma-schma.

I mean, I fainted during a book report once.

And yesterday, as I rose off my knees on the sunny deck, my mind did what it usually does when I am about to faint. It narrowed my vision to a field the size of a quarter, brightly lit, the size of my thumbnail. It started closing the curtains of red and black on stage left and stage right. But then it did something new. It expanded to the size of my son. Rose above me like a mommy periscope and watched him, knowing where he was. Rose above me and held me up while I smiled at him, hid my fear, calmly walked into the house and practiced ancient torture techniques on my own hand. It held me up, saying “You do not want to go to urgent care and have a stranger hold him while he cries and you faint. You have to do this. Get it out NOW.”

Two years ago, I would have been on the floor. This is another way that motherhood has tested me and then made me stronger and maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. But after so many years of being a fainter, I didn’t expect the mommy periscope. I didn’t expect that I could get bigger, and yet, it just keeps happening. Motherhood keeps calling these things out of me: gadgets and goofiness, tolerance for boogers and capacity to carve new spaces into myself. I see him. I spend every day watching the Fox, the ways he grows and changes and speaks in all caps. But every now and then I see me and I am reminded: This is a two-way street. I am reminded that, just as I helped make him, he helps make me.  And I am right tool for the job.