Our house in the woods is the unwilling host to squirrelish rodentia. I watched with a sick fascination from our bathroom window one morning as one, two, three, four, five fat squirrels leaped from a hole in the siding to the adjoining tree branches. (Not that we don’t hear them, terrifyingly there, morning and evening, because let me tell you, we do). We’ve been waiting for them to give birth, which we think they now have, before trying to get rid of them. Today, through patient ethical trapping by Josh, we have 5+x-1 squirrels. #ethicsiswaning #getthemout #fasterfasterfaster
An Anecdote of the Jar
Sunday night, the two ponds at Churchill Park became one. Now, the pond fish were in a predicament: marooned in puddles on the paved bridge, puddles which hourly lost their depth in the desiccating sun and wind. Droughts and floods go together.
The rain had thickened into the visibility that is not snow, but not rain either. It is spring, although it’s not so far accomplished* that snow's out of the realm of possibility. I'd been watching it the afternoon before, thinking, the rain is like lemon lozenges, or, the rain is like frosted glass beads in the bottom of vases. The rain made the sound on the roof that I'd always longed to hear on the roof, the sound of all the lozenges on all the tongues at once.
In the morning, Jackie and Mariah (the two girls who walk ahead of us on the trail, and whom I daily imagine in bright futures of environmental conservation) were stopped along the path between the ponds. They watched the smaller catfish flit skittishly whenever their shadows changed the light over the puddles. I could see why it was so arresting: we were walking on the same path as the fish swam. This seemed wondrous. Except we could walk on through, if our sneakers were getting a little wet. They were in trouble, or would be, soon, because it didn't seem like they could get back out of those puddles. A little overwhelm of water and there they were.
The rain must have slipped between the leaves of the fringe of reed grass at the edges of the pond, lipping out, and the fish must have followed its lapping, past the former shore. They must have felt that the reedy grass was just a patch they could get through if they tried hard enough, like a woods you were midway through, a bit lost from the straightforward path.
And so by Monday morning, the fish were swimming on the same path as we walked. They slipped over the tongue of path that had been the bridge. They swam in shallow hollows, spooked by every switch of wind or whipped lace, but with no hollows now to hide in, the hollows being the pool itself, with a little mud there. It wasn't, perhaps, even very different than the pond bottom--each puddle had its its own detritus and grassy bits, which swayed slower, underwater, mimicking the sway of their aquatic counterparts, rather than their usual brisk bristle in a stiff wind.
We were late; we were cranky; we were dehydrated. By Mondays, see, we've forgotten entirely how to get ourselves up and going in our big house with no light or water in the kitchen.* And we were late with the rain, the sound of it, that had put us to sleep so thoroughly.
And the kicker: we were late with the need to turn around and go back home when we were just halfway to the first turn from the first road we drive on, before we'd really even settled into driving, perhaps, but still quite in the time when I'd resigned myself to the drive, perhaps with gratitude that the hard part of getting going, with shoes and coats and lunches and bathrooms was over. But then of course the hard part of the morning wasn’t over because the child had said again, “I have a headache,” and then it has turned out I hadn't really been grateful at all, really, or it wouldn't have gone away so soon like that, with a rising flood of fury. When he said, "I have a headache," I remembered that I’d meant to get him some medicine, because he really is old enough now to know when he has a headache, and the cold he has is real (I know from the pile of tissues).
The difficulty of the hard bit could be described something like this: you’re late already, later than you want to be in starting out. Then a child says, “ I have a headache,” and you hear it with the exhaling spout of remembrance; you've forgotten the medicine you intended with all parental good intentions to give to him when he mentioned that same fact earlier. And then you remember, just then, utterly certain though you are that the child ate fruit and protein at breakfast, that he has surely not ingested even a drop of water--not even a small slurp of necessary, life-giving, healing water, this whole morning.
If there were the sound of water only
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
And you wouldn't say it like this, of course, but a child can be a cranky sort of fellow--at least when he’s sick and maybe other times, like when he's dehydrated, come to think of it, though you’d perhaps try and not say that--you would try, except for the fury and the hard part getting the better of you.
It was like this, metaphorically, I mean--using a simile: what you really just wish and maybe even say, because it is Monday, and it is rain, and it is late, and you're having to turn around the car, WHILE LATE, is that you wish he’d finally, at this age, this age, when he’s old enough to treat your admonishing words with the passionate, ironic disdain that only years can truly bring, know what the most basic creatures know, that we need water to live, that we need water not to feel as badly about things as we can feel, that we do really just feel a little better when we do drink a little water, when we're around water. This is something that most creatures know, especially when their mothers have told them so so very many times before, though not perhaps this very morning, until this moment. And of course, even though it took you thirty years and two kidney stones to really learn that lesson about the water, which is why you say it so very often now, it was still surely true that you weren’t as cranky without it then, when you were 8, as both you and he seem to be now. We could blame this on having no kitchen sink, of course. But that would be just as damning, because, well, you the have perfectly functioning water spouts of privilege upstairs in the bathroom sink and tub, and are you really THAT lazy that you can't get yourselves a drink when you need one? Shame. (And donate here to clean water.)
Here is an extended simile; this is what it was like. There aren't any solutions other than turning around and going back to get water and medicine. Even though he clearly needs water, you can’t, simply CAN NOT share your water bottle--which you were sort of proud to get filled at all, it being so hard to get these small tiny details taken care of on a Monday, with the rain, and the lateness and the upstairs sink business--because he is ill, truly has a cold, and, though you didn’t measure it (because where is the thermometer anyway since you moved?) he may have a tiny fever, though you definitely can't say definitively, because the back of your hand only felt warm right when he woke up, when you held him there, against you, willing him to wake in peace and get going right away because you were already behind schedule.
You pull into the driveway that says No Trespassing, and you turn around.
It's like this: you turn back, flooded with fury, and leave the car running while you bolt into the house where there are, in fact, no water other bottles, because, naturally, the child has broken or lost all the waterbottles--expensive, formerly-non-leaking water bottles that have been designed to remove the need for buying bottled water, saving the earth by reducing plastic, which, you are extremely sure at this moment, you have not in fact reduced, nor, in fact, the earth saved, because he has lost and broken so many reusable plastic bottles. At every reorganization effort, you have purchased another, because you can’t live without water, and you know that surely he needs water, for his cold, and he’s so cranky (as are you) when he hasn’t drunk any water (which, now that you think about it, neither have you this morning, just the coffee and maybe half a cup of hot water, which may be why you are so poseidonishly furious, tidal waves pouring from your temples, tsunamis from under your tongue). And your husband acts offended when you ask him where the water bottles are because, he reminds you, he has ASKED you where the water bottles are...as if there WERE water bottles, which you were to have taken care of, but the location of which you have withheld (the occult knowledge of motherhood) along with the water.
And all the boards did shrink;
That was a simile-type illustration of what it was like.
Here's what I did: I grabbed a pint ball mason jar and an old spaghetti sauce lid, and filled it with a cup and a half of water, which I knew would likely spill or break in the back seat--probably on a library book (which is so embarrassing now that I know our librarian so well: hi, Ita!). I grabbed the medicine for the headache. I got in the car and gave him the medicine and the water. Thirty seconds after taking the medicine and drinking the water, he said it felt better, which itself was slightly maddening, as it made me wonder about the whole thing's actual existence in the first, place, the headache, the dehydration, the crisis, etc.
But even so, I felt like there was nothing else I could have done. I drove on, the miles and the psalms ticking by, past water pooled in the fields, so much flooding when we were so thirsty, the river very very high. I drank my waterbottle down; he drank half a cup; I took the unbroken mason jar and put it safely in my cupholdher. I reached for his hand behind the seat; I said sorry for the whole temperamental-greek-deity-of-the-ocean thing.
And after 50 minutes of driving, we got to the ponds--the two ponds which had become one, shaky, but there. And then the fish, and Mariah and Jackie--gaping at the bright, wet morning after a flood, when you go out to see what wonders and anomalies are there.
At first, it was all delight--what a rescue of a morning! The wonder, fish! Rainbow, rainbow, rainbow, am I right? Fish flitting as shadows from clouds in the very puddles, now here, now there, but visible! We could see the workings. I thrust my hand in my pocket to snap a photo and thought of Marianne Moore, the fish wading through black jade, and us being finally close enough to see the fish closely, as close as she could.
But then it wasn't a delight. Because over there, there were scattered bluegills, on their sides in the dribble of that smaller puddle ahead, gills heaving, or, worse, some of them, scary still. Not flitting as the catfish, not skittish against the shafts of shadowtackle lacing, lancing, and pairing.
There was nothing else to be done. I sprinted back to the car; I grabbed the mason jar, sort of shaky with the panic of it, and a little teary, because--well, because there had been these fish, flitting visible, swimming in puddles, and we could see them, right there, on the path--and because maybe what this had meant, all my delight after derangement, was that if we could see them, they were maybe going to die.
It was all very fast. I grabbed a broken reed from the edge of the pond--one that had stood up through the whole winter's wind, and only now, after the prescribed burn and the new spring, came down--and jetted to the fish.
The bluegill was maybe just as long as a finger of mine, and wide. I scooped at one, trying for a mason jar fishbowl type scenario with water and fish together--to get them to more water, even if cramped, sooner. The fish flopped about and I was jumpy and skittish, not wanting to touch them, scared for no real reason, amped on adrenaline and morning coffee. I scraped the reed along the bottom of the puddle to swash it in. It was clumsy, hasty work, me thinking something like "Don't hurt it! get it in there, fast! It'll be just a second, fish, don't die! Water's coming!"
And then, with the same force, exactly, with which I swish around the water in the grounds of my french press and fling it into the garden to compost daily in the dark of pre-dawn, I flung the fish and the half cup of dirty puddle water from that mason jar toward the pond. It was a frantic fling--not aimed as much as hurtled, and I looked up terrified lest the fish should hit one of the pillars of the bridge and die on rescue's bank. It swooped up in an instant's rainbow of iridescence, a fountain***, a sort of sneeze or blowhole arc from the jar to the pond. And it was gone beneath the dark surface of the pond again--not something that can be seen anymore.
Each one was a new sort of startle--the still ones that didn't flop were even worse than the ones that did. There was one, rolled in mud, just lathered in mud, barely visible against the path. Now that I think back to the flopping as the puddles dried, that fish, trying to save itself, must have flopped itself so long and hard that it ground mud enough to cover itself completely.
There were five that I three back--three floppy and two still. I flung them all back, arc after arc. None hit the pillars, thank God. With the muddy one, I didn't even try. I put the jar back in the cupholder in the car, and headed off to work.
None of those fish were similes. This is an anecdote of the jar. Drink from it, all of you.
*The gown fell gauntly from her shoulders, across her fallen breasts, then tightened upon her paunch and fell again, ballooning a little above the nether garments which she would remove layer by layer as the spring accomplished and warmed the days, in color regal and moribund. (The Sound and the Fury)
**Fun house update: Found out there was no foundation under an addition that included garage, mudroom, laundry room, and half the kitchen. These were torn down. But, the remaking of a kitchen in the kitchen half remnants and the dining room has not yet been accomplished. There's an outlet for the fridge, and one for the stove. But no lights or water--no sink for the time being. And it's all going very, very slowly.
***"For, d'ye see, rainbows do not visit the clear air; they only irradiate vapor. And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray. " (Moby Dick, "The Fountain")
Commuting my Sentence
When I tell people about moving out to Root and Sky, I talk about the birdsong at dawn (see video above), the glory of the forest in Spring. The first thing they say, after the "green with envy" portion of the conversation when they wish that they, too, could live out in the country, is "wow, that's quite a commute." Happened this morning chatting with a man changing the giant lightbulbs at the office. It's true: 60 minutes from Marengo to Wheaton, straight up. That's 10 hours a week, plus more for field trips and special things. Let's not do the math, ok? Life is a short sentence.
We decided to allow the kids to finish out their school year at their Glen Ellyn districts, packing in every MINUTE of Spanish speaking possible for Beckett and every MINUTE of the best math teacher on the planet for Fiona. That means that we leave at 6:45am every day for the commute. Sometimes, we have an evening event--like last week when we had the orchestra rehearsal one night and the orchestra concert two days later and then soccer practice and soccer games on the other days, and we're gone from 6:45am until after 9pm. Only 26 more school days, I am told. This too shall pass.
What's bad about the commute is never the drive itself, exactly. In fact, we get wheeling, and it's actually one of the better times of the day to be with the kids. First, we listen to some Bible (best performance ever: look at the cast list!) with kids interrupting with questions, comments, interpretations, etc. and then some listening to Suzanne Collins' Underland Chronicles. There isn't much stop and go, and if there were, well, the stories and poems we're listening to help us through. When I'm alone, or when the kids are doing homework, I listen to Herman Melville's Moby- Dick ("Surely all this is not without meaning.") or Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (this too!) or whatever's up next on the Audible list. Marilynne Robinson, probably.*
The drive is allowing us to learn the landscape of the area around us in morning and evening. We give it our story names and learn its outside names. There is the pond where I saw the deer in it. There are the sloping south fields where the mist rises. There's the farm where they were tapping syrup in five gallon coolers this spring. There's Grizzy's Pumpkins, where the wood is stacked so fine that I think to myself that even my most fastidious snow-blower of a brother would tip his hat at the edges. There is Snow Forest, named so by Beckett because it's ALL white flowering pear there (or something we don't know the name of yet) across from the golf course. There is the most perfectly formed tree imaginable. There is the church with the bewildering hand lettered signs (e.g.) "Lent is a time to fill in the pot-holes of life." (I have no idea what this means. I have my suspicions, though they are mollified--as is so much!--by miles clocked.)
One morning, I was heading out at 5ish to get to a field trip to the Tippecanoe Battlefield and the Eiteljorg Museum for Native Art and Lit. Started early, took my...(let's be honest) doughnuts, and was driving east by a pond on Coral Road. Annie was on the radio, and it was just barely dawn--not even rosy red fingers yet--when suddenly I saw a deer, no two deer, no three deer. They were in the pond. They were still, in the pond. They were chiseled in the utter stillness of the still pond. Antlers, there, even. As if antlers themselves were the chisels flaking off bits of chert toward the possibility of a spear point, only the chert was the lake itself, or the grey blue sky. They were those deer with the blue grey of the cloud/sky with light near it, and I was driving by, and then, oh! they were a reflection. But where, I suddenly wondered, were the bodies of the deer that would substantiate reflection? I was driving by, seeing, perhaps, but not able to really look. And then just then, only then, neck craning around, did I get-- not the idea exactly, nor the thing, but through a window what would or might have been the idea, of three still deer--one with large antlers, the flash of the thing's end, in crystal-edged intuition.
This is the commute, see. It modifies the sentence.
On the 90 it hums, but there, too, is the land, the land, the land and wide sky as we race past. The empty Huntley outlet mall, yes, and innumerable companies' headquarters. But we say "Fox River!" as we roll by, and rue the concrete barriers that prevent all but the merest glimpse. I think of Joel Sheesley, whose latest project is painting the Fox--a river, he says, in recovery. I pray for his work when I cross the Fox and wish that I could see the river, wish that I was with his paintings. His painting is a still deer's antlers chiseling the chert of the river.
When we get to Glen Ellyn, I park at Churchill Park and walk Beckett to school between two ponds, through the woods and wetlands. You see things there differently, too, perhaps more, because of the commute there. It's slower. I see now about how the grasses stand up, stay standing, all through the winter winds, like sentinels, or the saints still with us. I see now about the raucousness of redwing blackbirds, and the sort of heart pounding scallop of a gold-finch's flight, and what fleeting bloodroot looks like. For a while this spring, I was seeing a blue heron wing its slow way every day, as if hurry never occurred to it. And I stopped hurrying whenever I saw it. I've seen a muskrat swimming with it's two shining wakes--two roads diverging--TWICE. Who wouldn't reconsider her way, seeing that? Today, I saw a female mallard poop--RIGHT at eye level, because she was standing on a pillar on the bridge as I walked by. She arched her neck, lifted and lowered her wings, and then out it came. (I've seen, ahem, a lot of crap (and more on that when we talk about the houses), but I don't see that every day.) There are two bizarrely leaning trees there. Peter Wohlleben tells me that with crooked trees, "the laws of physics come into play" (when don't they? when don't they?) and "the lever principal will" eventually "exact its tribute. Still," he says, "a shorter life-span with enough light for procreation is better than no life at all." And I have walked there, crookedly, every single week this whole year with Beckett, writing that Park into a poem season by season. There is never enough time, but there is just enough light.
Because what is bad about the commute is what is bad about all of life in time. It's not that you don't have moments of illumination--the rainbow above the wet forest when you've just had a fight with the kids and are 15 minutes behind, the utterly unique morning light on the ice between trees in frozen-over wetlands, the theological connection between Psalms and the crucifixion or between Psalms and the Exodus noted by offspring you thought weren't listening, the sense that that raucous blackbird makes exactly the same sound as your beautiful, beautiful son and it's somehow one of revelation's trumpets saying that even all THIS will be redeemed. You do have those moments on the commute.
No, what is bad about the commute is when you realize what other things you aren't doing because of the trip. All of life is this, of course, which makes it so banal a badness that it wouldn't even be worth noticing except that we just notice it way MORE on a commute. If I choose to do activity x, I will not be able to do activity y. Even English majors can do that math: it's a V, a fork in the road. "Two roads diverged," Robert Frost's most famous poem says, "and sad I could not travel both and be one traveller." Of course, Frost's point is that the roads you choose don't really matter--it's no big deal either way--the point is, you just SAY that that the path choice "made all the difference" when you get old and need to make meaning of your life.** The meaning I read here, though, is a fellow-traveller's fellow feeling of sadness, occasionally.
When I am driving, I am not writing. When I am driving, I am not baking bread. When I am driving, I am not helping with the farm--(actually, I am acting counter to our desire to be for the land--fossil fuels, etc.). But when I am not driving, I am not with my beloved campus in their time of great grief. When I am not driving, I'm not connecting with my Bible Study from Wheaton or my good friends.
Sometimes I don't even think about what I am not doing. I am just driving, see, and there is only one wake behind me. Unlike the muskrat. I can only leave one road behind me, the one I drove this morning and which, Lord willing, I will drive tonight.
I am trying to look. We all are, like Pip in Moby Dick, trying to look as much as we can: "I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look." And trying to make meaning of it. "Surely, [O Lord] all this is not without meaning."
I am committed to the sentence.
*She's coming to Wheaton for the Theology conference in April 2018. #peoplegetready
**Which makes almost all of the graduation speeches ever completely ironic.
Moving
We moved to the farm on the first day of Spring. We moved each and every lego. We moved each of a million pencils, screws, old lightbulbs, books, cups, hoses, plant pots, and pillow cases. We moved the freeweights, which, as far as I know, have only been "lifted" in an athletic sense in situations where they were moved to one closet or another, and then finally to the moving van to make their way to another closet in the new house. Continuity, anyway.
The kids wrote notes to the new family on our last mornings.
Beckett writing a welcome note to the new owners--on the only chair we have, a stepstool. I forgot to photograph his LOVELY letter.
Fiona's lovely letter--mixed feelings, expressed with great kindness.
On the very last morning of ownership--the sale day, I went by myself to the old house, finally getting the last bits of our things out of the place. I baked up cherry and currant scones for the new owners, prayed for them and their new life in the cottage-- and the neighborhood and all our beloved neighbors--and walked out one last time, leaving my keys on the counter. And we were off--
Goodbye, dear house!
Lessons from the Big House in the Big(ger than I Thought) Woods
Today was the first day up at the farm for me and the kids.*
Since close on Wednesday, Josh has been doing some of the urgent things: getting the house de-winterized so we'd have water, getting the inspections scheduled, contacting a roofer, getting keys made for when we lose the one set they gave us. Type thing. Of course everything turns into a couple of things--task rabbits. Dewinterizing meant finding a plumber because the winterizer company broke a pipe and refused to come fix it; it meant nailbiting worriedly as the $120/hour plumber no-lie NEEDED five hours to get the two scary houses dewinterized; it meant getting one out of three toilets in the big house working,** getting parts for the others, and making a mental note not to use the one toilet at all because of a sketch flooring situation beneath it.
I'd been pretty jazzed all week to get to the house, mostly because of a set of photos that Josh showed me of our house, all empty and waiting for us. Josh would take care of the icky toilety things and I would come in and, likely in a day or less, set up a new big house in our own little woods. Because that's how good someone gets arranging and tidying after 41 showings! I'd just take my perfectly well-behaved children for a little picnic day up at the Big House in Our Big Woods. They wouldn't mind the hour drive, but would fill it with homework, audiobooks, and elevating yet peaceful conversation.
Big House in the Little Woods
As a professor, I believe deeply in life-long learning, and today was full of several the raw materials of said learning: conundra and teachable moments.
And a few gleaned lessons:
1. The pictures your husband sent you, of the, sure, rough, but still ACHINGLY adorable 19th-century house and all its fun storage can NEVER do justice to two really important features of it: 1. stench and 2. true, disgusting filth.
2. An eight year old's nearly perfect competence at playing outside alone in a suburban half-acre yard is not, in fact, a predictor of whether or not that child can avoid the following yard-playing missteps:
- wandering off in 32 acres of pricker woods without telling you while you slave over aforementioned stench and filth
- wandering off the edge of your woods into some other stranger's woods that abuts a frisbee golf course
- crying adorably in front of the strangers he finds on said frisbee golf course such that they will call the police, who insist that the strangers NOT LEAVE THE BOY (even when his mother, hoarse with calling and scraped all over with prickers, shows up and clasps him to her sweaty bosom), thus requiring you, who have now left your OTHER child in the hands of the kind (but still stranger) neighbor while your phone leeches its last 7% of power, to wait anxiously for the law, worrying how you're going to prove ownership of a child.
3. Police car backseats are straight-up hard plastic. Not even a tiny bit of cushion.
4. Apparently, you can sweep some rooms three times with no discernible diminution of dirt volume.
5. It takes a really long time to passably disinfect every cupboard surface in even a modest kitchen, especially when you have to pause to imagine in detail all the ways your child, whose name you are meanwhile screaming out with all the pathos appropriate to your deep love, could be disappeared, injured, kidnapped, or dead on your watch.
7. I find myself utterly convinced that doing such disinfection (cobweb sweep, mouse poop and dirt sweep, and a disinfectant wash) is bare minimum necessary to put even our BOXES in there.
Thus, revised goals. We have a month till we close with the selling of our house in the suburbs. By then, I will seek to have one house in a condition such that that I'm not scared to a) be in it after dark and b) sleep there through the night.
Tonight, as I knead a loaf of bread to thank kind neighbor G for all his help with the whole "losing a kid on my first day in the big house in the big woods" thing, my chest feels weird. It's harder than usual to take a deep breath. I think: was there mold at the big house? Is this the Mr. "Neon-Chemical" Clean making its vile way into my lungs? Is breathing in vinegar baking soda dishsoap tincture bad for you? Then I remember--I know exactly what it feels like: like I've been swimming all day in the deep end of the pool.
*The farm consists of like 20 acres of fields and things, 30 acres of forest, and 5 acres of houses and buildings. All of the houses and buildings and things are in terrific shape--by which I mean, TERROR-INDUCING. The farm house (near the fields) was formerly rented by really angry hoarders who left it in a state so bad that the dewinterizing plumber gagged several times, Josh's chest hurt after opening the fridge, and Josh won't even TELL me all the things he's seen there. The little house (in the woods) is rented by G., a really nice guy, who seems most of all glad to have a place where he can live in the woods, and just be at peace. But we don't know much about it, the house. The big house (in the woods right next to G's place) is a lovely American foursquare once owned by CC. Miller, the great bee-keeper. It has, in G's opinion, "never had a good tenant" and seems to have animal waste products over a period of years, soaking into most of the surfaces. There is a fine grained dirt covering every surface, like a dust-bowl storm has come through, and it smells like there's a cat-pee rug in every room, even though there are no rugs. Oh, and we've been strictly warned that there are "foundation issues" even though no one will say anything about what those issues are.
**the term "working" here should not be assumed to connote an apparatus around which you'd feel comfortable pulling down your pants, but rather solely and strictly to denote flushability.
Ready, Set . . .
Coming soon: stories from Root & Sky.