Peas Roses Lavender Strawberries +Bea

Little Creepy Animals

Let's see. . .it's been about four days since Martin left for Kentucky, with four days to go. Thank all heaven that my mother is here with me since if she weren't I would be stark raving mad by now. . .

Last night, after our eight installment in the British miniseries that Mom and I have been devouring hand over fist, I went down to collect some sheets from the drier.

--What is that smell? I asked. The entire laundry room reeked.

--Smells like skunk, she said.

Turns out that Mom had left the door to the back yard--teeming with life and all manner of small animals--to air out the basement. And what had crawled in and made itself at home? I know not.

--You should go look around, I said.

--No way, she replied.

My feet felt crawly and jumpy and I was glad to go upstairs and pull the covers over my toes. Thankfully Mom had kept her bedroom door closed all day, but as I drifted off to sleep, I thought of all the horrible creatures that could be hiding down there in the basement workshop. Groundhog, skunk. . .

Can raccoons turn door handles? I wondered, imagining a giant raccoon sneaking into Mom's room as she slept.

Also I mulled over the black snake sighting not long ago. I was clearing out the back porch when a long serpentine form appeared from nowhere and slithered away into the brush. Who knows what's living down in our basement? Please, God, don't let me find it in the dark. Let Mom find it instead.

Elspeth's Doctrine

The girls pretty much have doctrine sorted out. Yesterday Elspeth told me that Jesus lived in Seattle. "That Jesus," she confided as we lay on the pillows in my bed, "Has a red cape. There's a green Jesus too and also a brown one."

We went on from this to talk about death, which has come up at regular intervals since Great grandpa went to heaven.

"When will Jesus pick you?" she asked me (Jesus picking you means you're dead).

"Not until I'm an old lady," I said.

"When will Jesus pick me?"

"Not until you're an old lady."

"Why?"

"Because then your body will be all tired out."

"But Mommy," she said, stretching out on the bed, "My body IS all tired out."

When Merry was this age, she had it figured out, too. She compiled a list of facts about death and presented her findings in this pithy sentence: "First you get old, then they put you in a chair, and then they put you in a box."

(The chair was of course the wheelchair and the box of course is the coffin.) Merry also gave a sermon one day from a perch in an IKEA display: "Jesus Christ was born in Montana!" she yelled, with all the right intonations of a Southern Baptist preacher (we were living in Texas at that point). "He died on a cross in Iowa!"

Well, seems he's risen from the dead and now resides, clad in a red cape, in Seattle. Maybe we'll see him when we visit.
* * * *
Garden Update: Baby peas; lots of strawberries; a resurrected peach tree; a riot of yellow evening primrose; stunning climbing roses; sweet lavender. . .and no camera. Martin ran off to Kentucky with it.

A Day at Wazoo

It's been a strange day here at Wazoo Farm.

PART ONE: IN WHICH I BRAVELY SAVE A SHIH TZU
With a jauntiness in his step, Martin strode off to work for the day and the girls and I spent the morning in the garden. From where I pounded stakes for flowering tomatoes and Beatrix stuffed herself on strawberries from our patch, I could see the sad, blinded shell of our Subaru waiting for facial reconstruction. Deer hair still covers its little bumper like a spotty mustache. I kept an ear perked for the phone, hoping that our insurance representative would call back in good time so I would not be housebound for the next two weeks.

The phone did not ring, but about midmorning I saved a recently shampooed dog named Tucker from becoming mincemeat. In my reconstruction of Tucker's escape from collision with a midsized sedan, I hold off traffic as I bravely dash into the middle of the road to grab Tucker's leash. I do not know if Tucker will bite me, but I cannot stand by and see him flattened.

I did feel brave and noble, but considering Tucker is just a sweet little shih tzu and the two cars were rather far away and moving slowly, my deed was sadly unremarkable. Bea had a wonderful time grabbing his tail and I had a friendly conversation with the lady who came by searching for him. She parked her car in the side yard and I handed Tucker over the deer fence. We were chatting amiably when our erratic neighbor, who likes to drive around in his car all day swearing and cussing at the top of his lungs, found Tucker's car in his way and started doing what he does best off his meds: Yelling obscenities. This cut our chat short, since Tucker's lady was anxious to move off before he squeezed by her car again, and I went back to pounding tomato stakes.

PART TWO: IN WHICH WE MEET ANOTHER GARDENER
The rest of the day was marked by normal activity: Beatrix standing on tables, Elspeth helping herself to candy, Merry embodying perfection. We walked to work, picked up Martin, and headed home. As we were strolling along the smallish valley road before we hit the hill up to our house, a man on a Harley came motoring by. He slowed his bike and backed it up, one foot keeping balance, until he was level with Martin and me. This guy was clad all in army fatigues with cut off sleeves. His long white hair was smoothed back under a stars and stripes do-rag, and he had the typical white handlebar mustache. Did I mention he was covered in tattoos?

Martin was in a white shirt and tie, and we said hi to him over the stroller. He peered at us through his tinted glasses and said, "Hey, I've got about forty melon plants. You want some?"

"Sure," we said. We'd never met him in our lives, but he evidently knew where we lived.

"If you're not home, I'll just drop 'em off," he said, and then he soared off on his bike. A few minutes later, he drove by again to tell us,

"I had all these sunflowers in the basement on germinating tables, and my cat ruined them all." We expressed our sympathy, and he repeated that he'd drop those melon plants off. "If you're not home," he said, fists on the handlebars of that big bike, "I'll just leave 'em on your porch."

We stopped again at the rise of the hill to watch a neighbor filing down wooden spoons in his workshop. As he encouraged us to test different weights of oak and walnut, a woman came tearing down the sidewalk, trailed by a little black terrier. She informed us that a boy younger than this girl here (indicating Merry) had thrown a rock at her window.

So we finished our walk.

PART THREE: IN WHICH ELSPETH GIVES HERSELF A MUTTLET

There were messages from the car rental and the insurance agent when we got home. As Martin got those details straightened out and removed Bea from the top of the kitchen table repeatedly, I chopped cauliflower and a sad head of broccoli for dinner. Elspeth wandered into the kitchen and I looked at her.

"What have you done to yourself?" I demanded.

"What do you mean?" Martin asked.

"Just look at her."

"Where did she get those scissors?"

"Could they be--did she use my sewing scissors?"

"I don't know where they are now," Martin said, after casing the play room, which was covered in Elspeth's hair. Just then, Beatrix toddled in with a big pair of orange-handled Fiskar blades in her mouth. Mystery solved.

I sprayed down Elspeth's hair with a useless spray bottle that has been sucked and chewed on too often by little girls. "Elspeth has given herself a muttlet," Martin said to Merry, using the term Merry approximated long ago for that becoming hairstyle of short-on-top and long underneath.

I spent the beginning of dinner attempting to save the remainder of my middle child's hair. Merry sat in her seat and ate two helpings of vegetables and Elspeth finally got rid of all the tiddly hairs down her neck and ate her dinner in her underwear. Still, there was so much noise and ruckus that I tried to instill some order by saying enthusiastically, "Let's ask Daddy about his day!"

So Martin recounted his walk to work that morning, and how he had stopped to speak with our spoon-whittling neighbor, who had told Martin all about his car which was missing from his driveway.

"He was driving along toward the apple orchard," Martin recounted, "When he smelled plastic burning. So he got out and opened his hood, and his engine was on fire." The girls, who had been silly and loud, were suddenly quiet as mice. "He called the fire department," Martin continued, sipping his beer, "But by the time they arrived, the whole car was engulfed in flames." A great silence fell.

"Will our car ever catch on fire?" Merry asked, and Elspeth said in a low voice, "Tell that story again, Daddy."

Martin told the story two more times. It was worth it for the quiet of the two older girls, though the spirit of chaos still resided over our kitchen table, since confined and unhappy, Baby Bea energetically wailed in her chair. She spilled water in her tray, pooh-poohed her vegetables, and lost two of my spoons, so by the end of dinner I was scooping up rhubarb pie with my fingers.

"Are you happy NOW?" Elspeth asked me from her seat, where, by Jove, she was actually looking pretty good.

"I love you," I answered.

"Yes," she said slowly, looking down at her broccoli, "But are you happy?"

I paused. "Yes, I am," I told her. "I'm happy to have a girl like Elspeth."

And so I am happy to be here in this crazy, unpredictable world, with shih tzus and unlikely gardeners and precocious little girls at every turn.