A Sheep and Other Blood Moon Wishes

I wish I had a sheep.

My pal Luckey and I are drinking coffee on my front porch on Saturday morning and she points to a bare circle of dirt bordered by stones. It’s about 8 feet wide, the only bare dirt in my very green, fern and pond bedecked frog garden yard. (I have this idea that we could have a city life with frogs and the sound of them at night andand also nightclubs and great coffee and shoe stores and high-rises.)

“What’s going to go there?” My friend Lucky says, pointing to the dirt.

”That’s where Forest and I make mud pies.” I say. “It’s a free zone. Maybe someday I’ll put in gravel.”

”Or grass,” says Luckey. “You could lay on the grass… look up at the sky.”

”Then I have to mow it,” I say. 

I don’t want to mow it… but I do like to lay on the grass. I turn to her. “What I want is a sheep who will crop it for me. Actually, I don’t want a sheep. I want to rent someone else’s sheep. I want there to be a sheep lawn service. Just show up, set up a little circular fence my front yard every week or so. I look over the fence at my neighbors’ lawns. “Maybe we could go in on it together?” This would be better for frogs than the puree experience of a lawnmower. 

Plus,  there’s the shepherd…  For some reason, right off the bat I picture great pecs and suspenders. Don’t you?

But, maybe a sheep is a silly thing to waste a full moon wish on. It’s a blood moon tonight, a special kind of full moon eclipse that makes the moon look red. Everybody’s talking about it. The guy at the grocery store – 20’s, blonde curly hair…he’d make a striking shepherd come to think of it – said this is the first of four blood moons, one every six months starting now. He also said that it's auspicious that this one comes the same day that Passover starts and that that hasn't happened since the first Passover. “I mean, the very first one,” he says, inclining his head. So, I ask him if he follows astrology. “Oh yeah,” he says. “Like lots of Jews, I’m a secular humanist I follow all kinds of traditions” He tells me “they say that that first blood moon was a bad omen…but this one, I think it’s the beginning of a new era,” he says. The time to let go of old, oh, I don’t know… resentments,” he says, then looks at me.  “Did I mention I’m a Jew?”

He says all this as his deft hands pass butter lettuce, strawberries, snap peas, and chocolate over the scanner and the boy with down syndrome bags it for me.

The shepherd_ – I believe I’ll just go ahead and call him that – has blonde hair on his knuckles.

I sort of like hairy knuckles.

(Is it weird to entertain lustful thoughts about a Jew I’m calling the shepherd while he tells me an astrological story about Jesus?)

Maybe. I think the world could use a little more weird. I think a new beginning on a whole lotta fronts is a good idea. I think it's time to dream big. Not just sheep lawnmowers and articulate blond shepherds, but new beginnings where we dare to believe that a better world, a big change is possible. So, I don't know, maybe a sheep isn't really a small wish. Maybe it’s the beginning of believing in a new weirder, more beautiful (and musical) world.

The boy and the bushtits

Kiwi got the bushtits.

No, that's not a porn title. It's the latest casualty in my front yard experiment.

This has been a banner year for wildlife. This spring, sucky though it has been, thanks to that rainy goddess La Nina, has seen a lot of traffic through our yard. Bird traffic, that is. (I feel like I am singing the Beverly Hillbillies theme song. "Oil, that is. Black gold. Texas tea...")

Before Kiwi

But ma and pa bushtit didn't make a mansion, they made a purse. I watched them and it was so cool. You know how I love accessories. They wove a dangling bag out of lichen and moss and it was so pretty. Here. Take a look.

They put it in the coastal silk tassel bush, one of my native plants that is finally getting burly enough for a nest. Or so they thought. But they built the thing pretty close to the ground, only 4 feet up and right by the sidewalk. I guess available property must be a little scarce around here. But I watched them doing their frantic race, sneaking up to the nest and then the whole thing shaking like Santa's belly when they got inside to the babies, jostling for their bit of jelly.

After Kiwi

Then Kiwi the cat found it. I threw water on him when I saw him stalking it. I even woke up in the middle of the night and thought maybe I should put a cookie sheet of water under the nest to keep him away... but the next day it was torn in two. Bye-bye baby bushtits.

I am a little more sanguine about this than I was a couple years ago when I annihilated the nest full of chickadees with my bbq plume. Helps that it wasn't my fault, plus the Fox just turned 3. He is burlier too.

You see, it's a numbers game. The older they get, the higher their survival chances are. At least with baby animals. And also, the more of them there are, the better the chance that enough will make it to keep things going. It's a numbers game. Like dating, like democracy, like craps. (Even though I've never played craps, I'm pretty sure I'm right about that.)  Funny, its easy to be philosophical about other species as populations instead of individuals. I know that human procreation is a numbers game too, though so far we are holding at one. He just turned three.

In the days leading up to his birthday, he kept saying "And everybody will sing 'Happy Birthday' to me!" I loved that it was about music, not stuff. I shouldn't make everything into a moral crossroads, but sometimes I can't help myself. Though I think we might have blown that with the complete craziness. New room (bunk bed up high, his own nest), new play structure, couch full of presents from family and friends. He is sleeping in his new nest as I write this, saving up some rest for the party later today. We'll burn some sausages and garden burgers on the barbie, and all his 3 year old friends will sing "Happy Birthday" to him. Spring. Joy and loss. Hope and realization and disappointment. He is growing so fast, like the sunflower seeds I had time to start in pots for the first time since he was born. Some of them will get to be 12, 16 feet tall.
A Forest of flowers that will give seeds to the birds in the fall. And there will be enough seeds to save some, I hope. For next spring, when he'll be four.  The silk tassel bush will be taller  and so will he and the experiment with new life will begin again.

Mea Culpa

Spring at last, a good time for apologies. I’ve got two. Please don’t be offended if I say the that first and less important one is to you, for leaving you on a bummer note for the dark months since December.

More importantly, for Forest, “Sweetheart, I am so sorry.”

Know what? He’s not “A Pusher.”

No. It’s true. And I am not Mrs. Dursely here. I know that because of the wonderfulness of last night’s visit from Katy, who pointed out that when Maggie dumped dirt on Forest in my front yeard, he did not take her down, as once might have been, but walked over to Katy and asked for help with his situation.

I know this, because he is now at a  full-time day care with Miss Angie and is kicking it. Or, should I say, not kicking it.  When I enrolled him, I did a full disclosure thing. (You know I can’t help myself. I am an over-sharer.) She said she’d meet him, but she had a really sweet group and she had to be picky…

He has now been there for four months. Within a week and a half of being there, the pushing was over and he was potty-trained. Seriously.  I attribute it to three things. One, Miss Angie actually loves kids. And they can tell. Two: She is totally drama free. Three, she’s had most of the mixed age group since they were babies and  --since she has mad skills -- her herd is awesome. She’s got some gentle three and four year old boys in there who are awesome heroes for the Fox. Don’t underestimate the power of a good herd.

So, to sum up: He just needed a loving teacher with skills. (And the herd that maketh.)

I know that sounds mean. But when I look back on the warning signs that I ignored – that the previous gals showed no affection for him, that they had no ideas how to help him, that they didn’t tell me he needed some help --

Well, I have to say it again. “I’m very sorry, Sweetheart.”

He’s blooming now, though. Rambunctious and kind. Generous and rowdy. Plus, a good dancer.. .Me and him and Maggie and Christina did the octopus dance together last night and he stayed right there with the girls without a white man’s overbite in sight.  My kind of guy.

Special thanks going out to his babysitter, who said to me, in the midst of the badness, “Don’t you believe them. Forest doesn’t have a mean bone in his body. They just want easy kids who will sit still and color all the time.” She’s worked in day cares, now is a full-time nanny when she isn’t whisking the Fox off for some adventure. “I’ve seen it happen too many times,” she said. “The day care convinces you that your kid is the problem and the real problem is they aren’t doing their job.”

Amen, sister. And a shout out to any mom who is hearing this bullshit. It’s not that your kid is bad. Or that there isn’t something to do. Its just that you and his teachers need a plan, together. And some skills. 

I Don't Want to Say It

My kid is the pusher.

When I write it down, it doesn’t look like it has sharp edges and pokey places, but it does. I feel ashamed and scared and disloyal, just for saying it about the boy I love. It’s been roiling around in me for a week, since the owner of the preschool told me I couldn’t add Tuesdays and Thursdays because she has too many parent complaints about the Fox.

What????

I mean, I knew something was off when I asked about adding days for the third time and she said, “Let’s have coffee.” But the really sucky part is that I knew about this a couple months ago, we had the conference, we made a plan, and every day since then when I picked up the Fox and I asked, “How did it go?” I heard “Better. It’s getting much better.”

Clearly there is a communication problem. Is it my hearing? I don’t think so. But when does the person who isn’t listening ever think it’s them? Is it their lack of talking? I think “Yes!” But again…

But this is my beautiful, amazing, happy boy... I hear in myself every bully's mother. I could be Petunia Dursely, the mother of Harry Potter's muggle nemesis Dudley, and I wouldn't know it.

So, am trying to focus on fixing this. Because, above pseudo self-awareness aside, I know with the a ROAR of love that the Fox is confused, not cruel. And believe this is what they call a teachable moment, rather than a character flaw. And I am helped by the fact that the full moon is tomorrow night, and the longest night of the year is also tomorrow night, which both remind me that, as my friend Steve said to me a couple weeks ago at toddler time, “It will change.”

He said that to me because I was, at the time, in a really sweet swing of things with the Fox. We were have tons of cooperation and laughing and singing and “I love you’s.” I even got one “I love you very much, Mommy!” as he ran down the hall, arms full of stuffed animals, ready to make a pillow pile. Steve said “It will change,” after I told him about that, because he was in a hellish phase with his girl, he was on the dark side of the moon. This was a good thing, for him to remind me to cherish the goodness and for me to say to him on the phone, as I hear shrieking and screaming and crashing in the background, “Just remember, it will change.”

So after I spent a week roiling around in shame (“Bad mothers create kids who push,”) and anger (“They are supposed to teach him!”) and generally being a pain in the ass to M, I remembered:

This too will change.

Though, we have to help it. I don’t know exactly how, since we have done a lot already. At home, he has gone from a dog-pusher to a (mostly) dog-petter. Took a LOT of repetition and it’s always worse when he is hungry, angry, lonely or tired.

I had a good talk with Teacher Amy* this morning. I said “What time does this go down, usually?” “Hmm. On Friday, it was right before playtime,” she said. “11:30.”

That’s what time the Fox starts to lose it at home, too. Because it’s nap time.

Teacher Amy is going to write down when it happens and with who, etc. So we can make another plan. And also, I told her  that I understand that if they are shadowing him and he won’t listen, he needs to be separated from the other kids. Yuck.

And now I'm saying to myself, Self, it's the day before Solstice, before the light starts to come back. Dark nights are here, but the bright moon lights them up. Love works and teaching does too. Things will change.

Because there are two things here: I really believe this is “developmentally appropriate.” (You know, that great phrase that experts use to describe behavior that is difficult and embarrassing and normal.) And I also believe in firm but calm boundaries, though sometimes they seem as elusive as Santa Claus.  I told the teacher that the boundary should not be shaming, and she agreed. We looked each other in the eye and at that moment, I felt like she got it, like we were in it together.

And I told her what I have learned from every job, every relationship and every bad week with the Fox: Love has to come first. No one wants to hear what they are doing wrong from someone who doesn’t give the love first. Not me, not M, not the person I’m supervising, and not the Fox. I told the her the one thing that I wish I could remember every second with my son, my marraige, my work as a person. I said, “Give him as much love as you can before it happens. He listens better if he gets love first.”

*Exciting moment. First pseudonym, since I try extra hard to be open about my stuff and fair about the stuff of people who know what they are getting into by having a relationship with me. Or should. Anyway...

Why Sarah Palin is Popular

I like certainty.

I actually like it a lot. I’m not alone, we’ve got a certainty-loving culture here. Ever been at a party when someone says “What do you do?” and the other person says “I’m between things…” Awkward silence.  Or ever been the single person in a room full of couples, all settled in their certainty and couple-ness. Yeah, certainty is pretty seductive.

So, the other day, I was pretty certain I was on the trail of a bad mom. Okay, I know I’ve gone out on a limb and said (with only a slightly self-righteous tone) that I am against labeling other mothers, ‘cause who knows what is really going on? Right? Right.

But this little guy, whose missing-in-action mom was the suspect in question, well, he was the terror of toddler time. He was Jesse James and a touch of Charles Manson all rolled into one. Okay, the Manson thing is a little harsh, but he was taking toys and pushing and steamrolling little ones and generally looking for trouble. I tracked this kid for ten minutes, fancying myself a defender of the innocent, working up a righteous indignation as I waited for the mom to appear. I even gossiped to my friend Steve. “Where is that kid’s mother?” I hissed, before detailing his crimes. “Unbelievable,” he agreed.

Then I saw her. Sitting in the corner. Trying to get her newborn to latch back on and looking mighty hollow-eyed at that.

I should listen to myself more often.

But certainty is so much more seductive than knowing the facts. (For proof of that, look no further than the popularity of Sarah Palin.)

So then, after I got over feeling shame-i-fied on the inside, and after I told Edith to shut the f#*k up, and after I recovered from the once-more-with-feeling relief that I have one kid, because I don’t know how the multiple moms do it, after I was done with all that, I realized that there is a reason that we have toddler time. At the community center. So that we can help each other out. I mean, I know that can go too far and all, but then again, I tend to get all caught up in doing it alone perfectly. (Which makes me really pleasant to be around at about 5:30 at night, let me tell you. Or M could…) 

So then I just found the kiddo with my eyes and kept an eye on him. I felt like a sort of giving auntie, a wise mama type who can help and give and be plentiful.

The next day, the kiddo and the Fox were both at the playground. They got into a pushing match over a toy and I will tell you two things: First, the mama was dealing with the newborn at the time, again. I caught her eye and said “I’ve got it” in an if it’s okay with you sort of tone.  And second, the Fox was giving as well as getting.

Just in case I had any more temptations to cast that stone. Other than at Sarah Palin.

The Purff and the Wurff

I used to carry small purses. Not little bitty sweater dog purses, but no bigger than a breadbox. You see, I had this theory that I’ll call the Law of Universal Purff (Purse + Stuff = Purff) Expansion: that the stuff that you put into a purse will expand to take up the whole purse, no matter how big the purse.

So why get a big purse? Just a backache waiting to happen, eh? (As they say in Canada.)

And now I’m starting to wonder if there isn’t a similar law in effect with worry. Have you noticed? It’s almost like I have an invisible worry purse. It hangs somewhere between my throat and my sternum… and when it gets full it starts to choke me. But even if I try to empty it, if I take care of one, another rises immediately. This seems to be true, even if Worry A is a whopper, and Worry B is sort of pathetic. Which makes me wonder: Am I just filling my worry purse? Is there a Law of Wurff Expansion?

Cause Motherhood already blew my small purse plan. Now I’ve got these hunks that I haul around with tupperwares and wipeomatics. And now the worries have gotten so much bigger too, now that there’s so much more to care about.

But maybe they’ll both go back to normal with time? Maybe, just about the time that I can stop carrying the wipeomatics because there isn’t a constant explosion coming out of one Fox hole or another, maybe then I’ll be able to go back to my cute little tangerine orange bag with the ivory leaf top-stitching and stop worrying so much?

But then I remember the moment with my mom. The one when she leaned over my bed and saw the Fox for the first time, and then looked into my eyes and saw that the bottom had fallen out of my world, and I could see that was there in her eyes too, there for me, and I had never seen it before. And I said, “Mom, does it always feel like this?” and she sobbed just a little bit and smiled and said “Yes.” And I thought about all those years, not even the toddler years, but the later ones, and all the worry I put her through, not knowing that there was this hole inside her. This worry purse with absolutely no Wurff limit. And I said, “Oh, Mom. I’m so sorry.”

(She loves telling that story.)

Anyway, if that’s any indication, my Wurff is going nowhere good.

Losing Track Of Time

"What do you lose track of time doing?"

This is the question my friend Candace asked, one of those launching questions that we are given from time to time, the ones that are to the mind as the sawzall was to the pumpkins at that power-tool pumpkin-carving party I went to.

ZZZZZZt! Open up.

I was thinking about this yesterday as I watched M carry the Fox up the stairs from the basement, kicking and screaming bloody murder because he didn’t want to leave the shop for lunch and nap. I have two-year-old who loves tools. He gets lost in the moment of drilling, screwdrivering and sanding. This is M’s gift to the Fox, maybe the most precious gift a parent can give past the love: the experience of losing track of time.

I can see it when it happens to him; I recognize the look on his face like it was a mirror. His little jaw is loose, his lips are slightly pursed, like he was about to give the clamp and sandpaper a big wet kiss and then forgot halfway there. I know that feeling. That is how I feel when I draw, when I garden, and when the writing is good.

So today, when the Fox wakes up, we are going to go pick up some sassy new art supplies. His preschool teacher said he is one of the kids who wants to do art as long as possible. I felt a little bad when I heard this, partly because I felt like I should already know this and also because… Well, not to get too pointy about this, but I have been avoiding messes a little too much. It’s easy to do this, to get so overwhelmed by the exploding spaghetti nature of toddlerhood that I opt for the low-mess activities. C’mon. Let’s do one more puzzle. Let’s read one more book…

When what we really need to do is lose track of time together. Not him losing track of time and me checking my watch every two minutes (how long until nap time?) Not me losing track of time cleaning the cabinets, while he finds matches and knives in order to draw my attention back to him. Together. That, my friend, is today’s quest.

Power Tools, Pumpkins and the Dark

Went to the annual power-tool-pumpkin-carving party this weekend. Host Steve is a tool wizard; Host Linda’s board groaned with burrito fixin’s. This year, there was a new twist: The Jack O’ Lantern totem pole. Picture a backyard littered with innocent pumpkins, waiting for their fate in the dark grass. Towers of floodlights show the carving table: a narrow, ten-foot stretch on chest-high saw horses. Imagine the gleaming blades of sawzalls, the glitter of drill bits and dremels, the humble tooth of the paring knife. Yellow and orange extension cords coil everywhere, like the serpents of the underworld writhing to life in fall’s colors. The bright lights make the shadows under the pines pitch-black and the grapevines contort weirdly out of the corner of your eye. Everywhere, beer and children flow.

Yes, children.

The Fox had a blast, scampering among adults’ legs as they wielded loud and sharp implements. I did good, too, finely walking the line between helicopter mom and not letting him learn a lesson by losing an eye.

The power-tool pumpkin carving party: your toddler (or your inner two-year-old) outta try it.

The pumpkins migrated from the sawzall slice of the lid to the manual scooping station. No power tool for that, alas, but the Fox loved getting his hands in there. Then, the power toos in hand as pumpkin guts flew, along with the gnarly smell of raw pumpkin. One hip Jack O’ Lantern sported a pair of headphones made out of pumpkin circles and a curving branch.

Snatches of overheard pumpkin-carving chatter ranged from “You’re drawing your design with a pen first? That’s like using a net!” To my favorite of the night: As Steve wielded the dremel on Linda’s careful and intricately drawn picture of an arching black cat (okay, it’s an orange cat on the pumpkin. But the blackness of all cats is clearly implied on Halloween…) As he worked her design, someone said, “Hey, you’re doing it for her!” And Steve replied, head bent to the task “Well, it’s like that old saying. If you give someone a fish, they eat for a day. And if you teach them to fish… they leave you.” Laughter all around. Linda’s laugh sounded like she blushed at the compliment, but it was impossible to see in that strange world of floodlight and shadow. Darkness and light. Danger and art and, did I mention? Darkness. It is the beginning of the dead time of year, which is how I think of this space between Halloween, and Winter Solstice’s new start.

Fires are good now, not just to stay warm, but to burn away what is dead and dying within us. The tribe is going into the cave for winter. If we didn’t have grocery stores and if the harvest was poor, we’d be looking at our supplies and wondering if the little ones would have enough to live until spring. This is our seasonal legacy and there is power in this impulse. Pare down. Go within. Decide what is important enough to live.

Outside the cave, the totem pole of Jack O’ Lanterns stands guard. We gather ‘round and tell stories of darkness, not just to scare ourselves but to release our fear, which can only happen if first you hold it in your hand. Halloween. Say welcome to the beloved dead, welcome to night’s reign, welcome to the time of rest before we begin again.

Happy Halloween.

Seven Year Itch-Free

one dragonfly, two dragonfly, three dragonfly
Originally uploaded by annabel rose

We just celebrated our 7th anniversary.
What itch? 
Last week, my wonderful friend called and said "I have a night at the Freestone Inn in Mazama that is paid for and I can't use. And I would love to give it to you." I misted up. Our plan for our anniversary was pizza and a half carafe of wine. Now, granted: pizza at the place where we used to go when we were dating and where the owner comes by our table and gets nostalgic with us, but still. Not the FreeStone Inn. Not the Methow. And what my wonderful friend didn't know is that we toured the place, longingly, several summers ago, after spending a week in a cabin with my folks down the road. What she didn't know is that in the spectrum of YES! yes, no, NO!, the Methow is a YES! for both M and I, and now is for Forest too.

We stopped on the way up and FF played on the restored train at Newhalem. We filled our eyes and our hearts with mountain vistas and tree scenes, while I read my book and Forest slept and occasionally, we talked of life. We arrived. FF went straight into the lake, then ran shrieking with happiness in circles on the grass. We found out what the squirrels were so excited about: that pine tree by the lake was a real pine nut pine, and I showed him how to find them in the cones, and peel them and FF fed them to M and I. Appetizers.

We had dinner. The first nice dinner out with FF for at least a year and he did GREAT! He ate a whole basket of bread by himself and then tried the basket on for a hat, but did not throw it on the floor. They had mac and cheese on the menu for him, amazing pasta for me, sausages for M. We felt rested and cosseted and comforted. We strategized for one more thing to keep FF from jumping out of his high chair. We clicked my glass of red wine against M’s glass of scotch against FF’s sippy. Surrounded by wood and families and butterscotch light, we smiled and said “Happy Anniversary.”

We woke and ate amazing granola and chased more red squirrels. We took a short hike. We walked and smelled the vanilla scent of ponderosa pines. And, can you believe it? I haven’t gotten to the best part yet. The best part is this: after the hike, we went down to the lake. Gave FF his shovel and two, I say two buckets. Oh sweet abundance. And he crouched in the warm sand, for it was a sunny blue day, and he played in blissful focus for forty-five minutes. M and I rested on our elbows in the grass and watched the Jurassic dragonflies zoom and smiled at how beautiful our son is and shared our dreams. Unhurried, unfrazzled, happy.

 Some say that the seven-year itch is unavoidable. But I like what Caroline Casey says about it: every seven years, it’s a good time to evaluate the containers of your life. Make sure that you, as the plant growing inside the containers, aren’t getting root bound.  As I look around this life we’ve made, I might say stretched, challenged. I might say extremely alive. I might say reaching. Yes, that feels right.

But root-bound? Nope. I smashed the pot that was too small for me when I was 35. Which, to give Casey her due, was right on point for the seven-year-cycle.  I am now a convert, an unabashed pot smasher.  I cannot recommend it highly enough. And through all the laughter and tears and smiles and shouting too,  M has been with me. And now this beautiful boy we call Fox.

Happy Seventh Anniversary, Sweetheart.

What itch?

Treestory Seattle

Now the love of trees has a name, a home, and an amazing event coming up.

Yesterday was the launch of Treestory Seattle, the Web site I've been working on with amazing filmmaker Ward Serrill. He is making a film called TreeStory about humanity's relationship with trees, and we are starting right here in my home town. TreeStory Seattle is collecting stories of Seattle's favorite trees, and the best ones will be told at An Evening of TreeStories on December 1. (Details on the site)

Already we are making a splash. KIRO FM caught on to it yesterday. The story reflects what the reporter told Ward: when they talked about covering this in their editorial meeting, one by one people started to say "I have a story about a tree..."

This is the start of something.

This is the best of the new and the best of the old. Ancient tree spirits meet the modern Web site. Twitter mania leads to old-fashioned, live storytelling. All of it weaving together a love of trees and place and connecting -- on line and in person. Check it out!!

Green Witch Column: I Worship Worms

(This column appeared in Issue 78 of Sagewoman Magazine. Issue 79, with my new column on making peace with predators, is coming to your local Borders soon, or is also available at the Web site!)

I worship worms.

My love affair with them started years ago, when I lived in San Francisco. By night I was bartending at Hamburger Mary’s, the tattoo and fetish headquarters of the tattoo and fetish Folsom Street neighborhood. Lots of red lipstick, cleavage, double-knit lime green polyester. I was a species in my right habitat.

By day, I prowled the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood and I gardened. Our six-bedroom Victorian house was painted hot pink and had a tiny patch of earth in the back. I learned to garden there, in my own Eden with my appropriately named housemate, Eve. Neither of us believed in original sin, so when we began to come across worms in the places where the soil was richest, the ferns finest, we didn’t think of them as pests, or poets of temptation. And it came to us one day, in a dirt-under-our-nails-ecstasy, that the worms were the keepers of the earth, were powerful forces for good. We understood that the worms were, in fact, priestesses of the soil and since we were both reading The Mists of Avalon at the time, we named the worms, all worms, for Marion Zimmer Bradley’s head priestess. We named them “Viviane.”

Now, fifteen years later, I live in little cottage in West Seattle with my husband and new baby boy, who we call the Fox.  My garden thrives. I keep worms. Mulching is a religion here and worm compost is the absolute finest mulch there is. But that’s not the best part. The best part is that the worms eat our vegetable trimmings. All of them. Coffee grounds, stale bread, beet tops, slimy forgotten lettuce in the bottom of the bin (I think that was lettuce…)

         All of this works for me. I love keeping the veggies out of the garbage. I love having free, high-quality mulch for my garden. But, most of all, I love scooping the crumbly, dark, worm compost out of the bin on the equinoxes and solstices and feeling like a priestess of earth, like Viviane’s acolyte.

We made our first worm bin out of some old, wooden closet doors.  When I say we, I mean my husband. He downloaded the plans from Seattle Tilth’s web site and spent a fall weekend building a giant box with hinges made out of bicycle tires, a stick to prop it open, sturdy legs to keep it off the ground. It was beautiful. It lasted three years; Seattle’s constant rain is hard on anything but cedar. Next time we went looking for something cheap and easy but durable. I liked the idea of finding something at our local salvage store, which I think of as a thrift store for houses; instead of great ‘40’s dresses or knock-off bags, it has everything from original glass doorknobs to perfect clawfoot bathtubs. I tooled around – so to speak – for a while, looking for the right new home for Viviane. Seattle’s climate is temperate, if wet. Not wood. Metal, I decided. Then I saw it, an old metal filing cabinet, six feet tall, four wide doors stacked one above the other. The kinds that open on a hinge at the top and then slide back. Turn that on it’s side and you’ve got four bins with hinged lids.  We drilled holes in the back for drainage and in between the bays for worm transit.

I keep a stainless steel stockpot on the kitchen counter for scraps. When the stockpot is full, I take it down to Viviane’s box, open the lid, pull up the layer of cardboard or leaves on top. I make a hole in the bedding, put in the scraps, mix it up a little. When each bay is full, I stop adding scraps to that one and move to the one next to it. Viviane migrates.

When all is going well, the first bay will be a bin full of worm compost in eight to twelve weeks. When all goes well, my worm bin is like the one at Seattle Tilth’s beautiful demonstration garden. Their worm bin is the death in balance. It’s the old growth log, softly covered with moss and ferns, the wood decayed to a dry, reddish-brown velvet. That’s what worms are capable of. Tilth even put their worm bin inside a garden bench, and your nose never knows it’s there. The bench top has a hinge at the back and you lift it up to see the scatter of leaves, not a worm in sight. They are busy. They are at home.

That’s when it goes well.  That’s how it would be if I always followed directions, which is not really my strong suit.

When it goes badly, it’s pretty gross. It’s slimy and smells bad. This is, after all, about death, people. The worm bin that is too wet, the worm bin with inadequate bedding is the death you don’t want to have, lingering and toxic and stinky, with worms crawling out, trying to escape in every direction. Earth gives life, yes, but She makes it from this. What we leave behind. What we are.

So that’s what happened this winter. Our worm bin got pretty wet and slimy. Not enough bedding, not enough drainage holes. It’s huge and it’s totally at capacity because cold, wet worms are not good workers. What can I say? I got busy. For me, it was a new baby. For you, it might be late nights at work. Regardless, neither of us was tending the worm bin, were we?

City Farmer, Canada’s awesome worm composting Web site, says, "Picture yourself after dinner. It has been a hard demanding day in the City. But now you can descend into the dark...touching the rich, dark vermicompost, releasing the memory-filled odor of damp earth – taking you into forests and the prehistoric past." City farmer also says “Taking worms out of their natural environment and placing them in containers creates a human responsibility. They are living creatures with their own unique needs, so it is important to create and maintain a healthy habitat for them to do their work.” I think about my soggy winter bin. My bad. But not like “I don’t want to worm bin” bad. Like “Honey, I’m sorry and I’ll try to do better” bad.

So I get to work. I get to work because when the worm bin is good, it’s good. I get to work because I want to have a good relationship with death and because this is a spell, a make-your-own-dirt project that gets me closer to the earth goddesses of winter than anything else but laying on the ground, and it’s too damn cold for that. I get to work because the worms take what we don’t need anymore and turn it into life.

On a sunny day toward the end of winter, I tear up paper grocery bags. I find all the pieces of cardboard lying around the house and tear them up too. I put on my gloves. I stand in the sun, the Fox strapped on my back. I use the big shovel, drive it in deep and pull out heaping shovelfuls of too-dense worm mud. The rocking back and forth of my body and the winter sun on the Fox’s body work like a charm. He is asleep by the time I get halfway through the first bay. Then I move the stuff back in. It’s like a mud layer cake that wants a cardboard and dry leaf filling. It’s  like knitting with earth yarn. I tell Viviane about the regrets, the mistakes, the failures of the year: all that I want to release. I crumble with my gloves, breaking up clumps. I feel the earth energy traveling up my arms, up my legs, pulling my body down. I feel my feet on the ground. I wipe the hair off my face and feel a blessing. Not a worm on my forehead; a priestesses’ crescent moon.

With a lightened heart, I remember spring.  At the end of winter, this is no small thing. The sun warms the back of my neck and I remember last year, when the compost was ready at spring equinox and I spread it under the fruit trees, mixed with lettuce seeds. I was seven months pregnant at the time and either I was exuding some sort of fertility force field or worm compost is the best seeding mix ever. My soil was rich. I grew new life, within and without.

That was the year my son was born, and that was the year my salads became legend. Ask anybody. Baby lettuce leaves, mint, pea-vine shoots, purple and yellow viola petals.  I brought one to friend Michele, five days after her son was born and she was coming out of the tunnel of worry and fatigue and desperation that the early birth brought her. She said of that salad, grown in spring, grown in the leavings of all that sacred death, she said, “It was like eating life.”

I worship worms. Evelyn Underhill, that writer and mystic, said that worship is "The adoring acknowledgment of all that lies beyond us—the glory that fills heaven and earth. " If worms don’t fill heaven, they at least fill earth.  I adore and acknowledge them. They take my vegetables and they take my regrets. They take my coffee grounds and my failures and when spring comes, if I have priestessed well, they give me new life.

Ritual Resources

You, too, can have your own Avalon. Build a worm bin. In early winter, give it what is dying. As you put in the coffee grounds, name your regrets.  Release them. Say, “I give you my mistakes;” name them too. All of it feeds Viviane. If you follow directions (instead of my example,) your worm bin will be clean and sweet. In 2-3 months, you’ll have a bin full of planting material, just in time for a powerful spring spell.  You can easily buy a worm bin for indoors or outdoors, there are plenty of them for sale online. I haven’t ordered one, but some of them look amazing.

If you want to make one for yourself that will be easy and cheap, here’s a plan.  Credit for this set-up goes to the Washington State University Whatcom County Extension web site, check it out for some great visuals to accompany this how-to. http://whatcom.wsu.edu/ag/compost/Easywormbin.htm

You’ll need:

·      Two 8-10 gallon plastic storage boxes with lids. They should be dark, not transparent.

·      A drill with ¼ and 1/16 inch drill bits

·      Newspaper, cardboard or (my favorite) fall leaves

·      About one pound of redworms per ½ lb of food waste, per week. In other words, you need a 2 to 1 ration of worms to food scraps. If you want, weigh your veggie scraps for a week, then procure your worms, see below.

Here’s how:

1.     Drill about twenty evenly spaced ¼ inch drainage/worm transit holes in the bottom of each bin.

2.     Drill ventilation holes about 1-11/2 inches apart on each side of the bin near the top edge using the 1/16 inch bit. Also drill about 30 small holes in the top of one of the lids.

3.     Fill one of the bins with bedding. (this is where I went wrong by adding equal amounts of bedding, layered with the scraps as I went, instead of filling with bedding first. Oops.) Use newspaper or cardboard torn into 1 inch scraps, fall leaves, sawdust, compost, aged manure. Tearing up your paper grocery bags or newspaper or cardboard is a great meditative, fireside, winter night activity. Keep a bag or box by the fire like knitting and stare at the flames while you do it. Puts a little heat into the spell. Whatever you use, it needs to be moistened before you put it into the bin. Add a couple handfuls of soil or sand to the bedding to provide digestive grit for Viviane.

4.     Add your worms. According to Cityfarmer Web site, “The two types of earthworm best suited to worm composting are the redworms: Eisenia foetida (commonly known as red wiggler, brandling, or manure worm) and Lumbricus rubellus. They are often found in aged manure and compost heaps. Please do not use dew-worms (large size worms found in soil and compost) as they are not likely to survive. “ Worm sources: if you have an agricultural extension office near you, they may be able to help. Otherwise, you can recruit your own by putting a large piece of wet cardboard on your lawn or garden at night, they’ll come up to eat the cardboard and you can scoop them up in the morning.

5.     Cut a piece of cardboard to fit over the bedding and get it wet, too, then lay it on top of the bedding.

6.     Put your bin in a cool, well-ventilated area. Laundry rooms, garage, balcony, under the kitchen sink all work great. Just make sure the temperature doesn’t fall below 40 degrees Farenheit.  Put it on blocks or upside down plastic cups over the lid of the second bin, to catch any moisture. That stuff is awesome liquid fertilizer. (If you need more guidance, the photos at the web site above are really helpful.)

7.     Start adding your scraps. Go slow at first. Lift the cardboard layer, make a hole in the bedding, bury the scraps. Bury them in a different place each time, increasing the amount of scraps as the worm population grow.  Worms eat anything vegetable in nature: breads and grains, coffee and filter, teabags, fruits and vegetables. They hate meat, dairy, eggs, oils. No feces either.

8.     Rotate the bins. When the first bin is full of compost and the food scraps are gone, fill the second bin with new, moist bedding. Then let the worm migration begin: you nest the new bin in the old one, with the bottom of the new bin touching the compost in the old one. Start burying your scraps in the new, top bin. The worms will migrate up to the new food and then you can use your compost for a spring planting spell. If it’s warm enough, some of the worms can go out with the compost, they are great for the garden. Just don’t keep them cooped up without access to food.

The Website above, as well as the resources below, has excellent troubleshooting advice if you run into trouble. May your worm bin be a winter Avalon for you, for Viviane and for the Goddess and the God.

Blessed be!

For directions on making an indoor bin, scrap to bedding management and more, check out http://www.cityfarmer.org/wormcomp61.html.

For plans to make a big, beautiful outdoor bin, search “worm bin” at http://www.seattletilth.org/

For a child friendly, easy Q&A format, check out http://urbanext.illinois.edu/worms/neighborhood/index.html

For more on worm composting, check out Mary Applehof's short book, Worms Eat My Garbage.

I Would Give Anything to Be Here. Now.

I was just watching Mad Men. (Couple seasons ago – we rent.) And something about the way Betty was talking to her daughter about the first kiss…

The moment went from “I don’t want you running around just kissing boys,” to “the first kiss is very special… it’s where you go from being a stranger to knowing someone. And every kiss with them after that is a shadow of that kiss.” And they are looking at each other, seeing each other, this mother and this little girl.

And I thought of my first kiss with M, which was at midnight, on New Year’s Eve, such a new beginning. I had no idea what marvels lay ahead. And I thought of having that kind of conversation with the Fox someday. About kisses, or something else. The important conversations where you are looking into each other’s souls. There are so many of those ahead of us. And I thought of friends Steve and Katy and Maggie, who are losing their cat of 12 years tonight to cancer. I am sending out my love to Makita. And to them, as they figure out how to explain this to a two-year old while they grieve.

You see? It has already begun. These important moments. It would be so easy to imagine that the important stuff, the first kiss type conversations are ahead of us. It has already begun.

But I thank my friend Robin for this tidbit, a moment at Diana’s grove, when I was three months pregnant and had no idea what marvels lay ahead. And she told me about her 17 and 22 year old sons.

“They are so close, and then they grow up. And they break up with you,” she laughed a little. “That’s just exactly what it feels like, to lose someone you love so much, lose them a little.” She looked at me. “You have so much ahead of you. I would give anything to have one of my boys small again, just for a moment, when he sat in my lap and his head tucked under my chin. Anything.”

I had that today, the Fox still in my lap, his weight and his smell and his shape. It feels like being whole. There is a lot about now, about being so responsive all the time that is very hard. I give myself that. But there is so much here that I will never have again. At moments like that, it would be easy to want him to stay just this way, just this height, fitting into my lap with his head fitting under my chin. And yet there is so much ahead. So much soul and grief and those moments where time stands still and there is something more in the room. Tonight, I am very grateful for M and the Fox, for my many friends. Goodbye, Makita, brave and loved kitty. Goodnight Maggie. Goodnight Fox.

What I Learned from the Crackers

Hands
Originally uploaded by jbenito's

I’ve always wanted to be ambidextrous. Wanted the creativity of being a lefty and the advantages of living in a world made for rightys. It always felt to me like the essence of not having to choose. Of having it all. Plus, I think the word “ambidextrous” is cool.

Yes, I always wanted to be ambidextrous, but never more so than now, that I am a working mother.

On the left brain: Working time, all the satisfaction of tasking, of focusing, of compressing as much production and creative spark into as little time as possible.

On the right brain: Mothering, the gift of looking into the eyes of a love that I never knew was possible and, when I can, just letting our time together drift.

And as long as I keep the two separate, I’m fine.

But I want to be ambidextrous.

I realized this today as I looked over my terrain. I’m working more, slowly building up this dream of a writer’s life where I get to make things out of words and make a difference at the same time. Right now, it feels like I am building it out of little bitty pieces. Two hours of work, two hours of mothering. Repeat. And it’s the transitioning back and forth that is the hardest. Stop tasking and start feeling. Vice versa. It’s like moving from land to water and back again, and of course, the hardest part is always the transition. Jumping in, drying off. I keep coming off of the high of working and transitioning to mama-ing and wanting to teach something. I keep telling myself: “Just lay down and enjoy watching the Fox play with the legos, Ella. You don’t have to show him how build the Vatican just now.” 

I actually caught myself sneaking one of the flat red ones off of his firetruck to make my ladybug.  I stopped myself, though. The second time.

I’d like to think this is creating some kind of crossover skill set, an internal ambidexterity. (Now there’s a cool word, eh?) To know when to use the left side of my brain, which is all logic and outcome. To know when to use the right side of my brain, which is all creation and feeling. I’ve been meaning to get my hands on Shari Storm’s book Motherhood is the New MBA. She says that “Rip the band-aid off fast!” applies at work as well as at home. And it’s true, I have way more skills at keeping my cool in the presence of unreasonable behavior than ever before. His and mine. Not perfect, but better. This morning, he upended a box of crackers. Fancy ones. I knew better than to let him hold the box, but he was hungry and I was cooking and I hoped he’d just eat them. I saw it happen in slow motion and I just couldn’t get there. Whoosh!  Toasted gorgonzola crackers all over our dog hair floor.

I freaked.

“We don’t. Dump. Crackers!” I picked up the box and threw it in frustration. (this is not only bad mothering, it is bad grammar. Obviously, we do dump crackers.)

The Fox was startled, then upset, of course. It was a stupid, sucky moment on my part. In fact, it was not unlike some other moments I can recall, where I was managing someone, and too busy to really pay attention, and gave them a task that was important, but not enough information or training or oversight. And then got pissed off  when they dumped the crackers and acted like it was their fault.

(Tell me this isn’t a teensy bit familiar.)

But then, this morning I did something I didn’t used to know how to do. I let it go and I owned up. I was so shocked at my behavior that it kind of woke me up, because – no offense to my former coworkers, but I never loved them like this. The Fox is crying, tears streaming. I knelt down and said, “I’m sorry. That was my fault. Mama lost her temper. I should have calmed down but I didn’t and I’m sorry. This kind of thing happens and it’s not the end of the world and I’m sorry.” And boy, was he taking it in. He listened and nestled into my lap and looked at me and it just… well, I don’t want to overstate things, but it felt like it fixed it. Then he got up and got the big broom and the dustbin, and I found his little broom and we practiced pushing the crackers into the dustbin together and it felt like we were sweeping up the little pieces of the broken moment as well as the broken crackers and like I could use either hand, or both at once. That I could both accomplish this task and also love my son as he deserves to be loved.

But I still think I’m gonna need full-time preschool one of these days.

Holding the Line

Safety Line
Originally uploaded by Rich Baker

Sometimes it’s hard to know when to hold the line. To be the consistent, calm parent, instead of the frantic, mind-fucking parent who changes the rules every time the moon is full or just doesn’t listen.

For example: On Friday, I did a good job with this. I don’t know about your kid, but suddenly the Fox is very sensitive about who is deciding what. And what is very clear is that getting dressed and changing diapers is never his idea.

Now, friend Tracy says, “Can’t he just go out in his pj’s?”

And actually, the answer is “Yes. Yes, he can.” So be forewarned: if you see the Fox running around in an outfit that looks like green train pj’s, he’s probably been wearing them since the previous night. I am okay with this.

But I’ve been giving myself a whole bunch of exercise about how I need to figure out a way to enlist his cooperation with the getting dressed. And then feeling like a big failure, which is exasperating, and which is also like throwing gasoline on the “who-gets-to-decide-fire.” So yesterday I just said: Fox, time to get dressed. “You want to do it or you want me to do it for you?” He said: “You do it for me please, Mama.”

Yeah, right.

He said, “No, no, no, no, no!” And I picked him up and dressed him and put him back down and my heart was not pounding and Edith was not putting on her party dress. Calmness reigned. And I said, “All done! We can still have fun, honey! Let’s do something else.” And instead of launching a prolonged tantrum, he mellowed right the fuck out.

Supreme! I am kick-ass confident mama. This is the essence of parenting! Knowing when to hold the line and just do it. I am great at this! I am a freaking Nike commercial!

So then, that night, I tried it again. Despite supreme mama moment, I was winding up a couple of days of unbroken parenting and was done by the time dinner rolled around. However, this week, as well as having kick-ass mama moments, have had major Ma Ingalls moments and had all this great food cooked and ready to go. Plopped down the Fox’s bowl of brown rice with tomato sauce and cheese. (Have discovered that brown rice is excellent, nutritious, convenient sub for any pasta situation you offer it.) M and I sit down. We all hold hands. Forest says, “Family.” This is our tradition, which I love so much. Then he takes a bite of aforementioned rice and fixin’s and spits it all over the table.

Then says he wants tortellini.

At this moment, my margin of tolerance for being the short order cook is, hmm, let’s see: zero.

I look at M. “I’m done,” I say.

M says, “Forest, I’ll get you some tortellini.” Which is fine. So he gets some, and some sauce. And the Fox takes a bite.

And spits it all over the table.

Awesome.

Then he says, “I want smoothie! I want smoothie, please!”

(As I am telling this later to Eve, she says, “Oh no! Don’t do it! Not the smoothie!” That’s what you think too, right? Me too.)

And M says, reasonably, “Forest, you asked me to get you some tortellini and I did. I want you to eat that tortellini.”

“No!” He is starting to cry. “Please! I want smoothie!”

So, finally M says, “Okay, if you eat the tortellini that I got you, I will make you a smoothie.”

I am fine with all of this. I am not, at this particular moment, giving Edith the opportunity to ride her consistency pony. It’s his shoe leather.

So Forest takes another bite of tortellini and spits it all over the table.

And then he make the noise.

“That was the diaper noise,” I say, referring to when Forest had a gnarly diaper rash and M figured out that he made this sort of creaky cry when his rash was making him feel sad and confused and unable to deal.

“Forest, do you have an owie?”

“Yes,” Forest said.

“Where honey? On your foot?”

“No.”

“On your bottom?” (I hate that word, by the way, but can’t bring myself to say “ass” or “butt” to my two-year-old.)

“No.”

“Where?”

“In my mouth.”

Holy St Christoper and Mother Moon.

He fell last night, cut the inside of his lip on the teeth. The whole situation shimmers into focus. I/ we were trying to hold the line. I thought he was being a pain in the ass. (Am fine with “ass” here, by the way.)

He just wanted to stop rubbing hot tomato acid into his cut lip.

I’ve noticed that my tendency to assume his negative intentions is in direct proportion to how tired/ overwhelmed/ done I am. The other day, Steve and I were at the park with the kids watching Forest run like a really fast antelope, and contemplating how much longer I was going to be able to catch him and Steve mentioned how great it would be if we had little remotes that would just sort of turn them when they got too far away. Like those toy airplanes. And I said, as I prepared to dash after the Fox, “That would be so great.”

You know what else would be great? If I had a little remote that turns off my I’m done = You are being difficult on purpose thing

Now, Eve’s kids are six and four, and she regularly says wise and hindsighty-comforting things. Of this she says, “Honey, we do the best we can with the information we have. With kids this age, we are code-breakers… And sometimes they are just speaking Navajo.”

There are so many places to hold the line in this gig. With the Fox. With myself. With the unnecessary accommodation and with the many, many opportunities for self-criticism.  So, I am going to give myself the props that I deserve, now. More often than not I remember to make these decisions with my heart as well as my head. This, I think is the key. It’s not about blind consistency. It’s about looking, and listening, and doing the best I can with the information I have. (Thanks for that, Eve.)

So, tonight, on all fronts, for me and for the Fox, I am continuing to hold the line.