Monsters and Free Will

This morning over Cheerios, Elspeth (3 1/2) asked me if we were like Playmobil figures and Jesus just played with us and made us do whatever he wanted. She illustrated her point: So when P-- comes over tonight, it will be like this. . .

She extended her arm, pretending she was holding a figurine, and plopped it along the table: Plu, plu, plu, she said.

And tonight we rehashed a much replayed bedtime theme: MONSTERS. I tried to explain that her imagination belonged to her, and she was in charge of what sort of monsters came in. I told her a story about a little girl who plays so happily with her friend Fleurfleur that she never realizes Fleurfleur is a monster. Well, one day Fleurfluer comes over to play and her mother opens the front door and shouts: Ahhh! A monster!

To help Elspeth, Merry shared her memories of being afraid of monsters jumping out of her closet--she just imagined that any flick of light, in the house or on the street, would dissolve the monster, and so she was no longer afraid. When I came to kiss her she confided, Actually, I am still afraid of monsters sometimes. But (with a shrug) I just go with it.

And Elspeth made me alter the sign next to her bed so it now reads:

NO MONSTERS ALLOWED.
Only nice monsters in E's imagination.
WATCH OUT! JESUS IS WITH ELSPETH!

I heard her reading the sign out loud, presumably to the monsters assembled outside our front door, angling to get in and hide in closets. It doesn't matter how many times we repeat there are no such things. And why am I afraid to go into the basement by myself at night? And why are you?

letters to the dead, dahlias, and other daily things

Outside the wind has calmed a bit and the air is cool and buzzes with crickets. The sunflowers are heavy with seeds and rain; their faces almost brush the grass.

On my desk is a plate with the remains of an apple cake Bea and I baked this morning (she sitting on the counter, dropping whole apples into bowls and batter--I saved my hand-beater just in time) from orange, green, yellow, red local apples. Also there is the copy of my book for young readers (the first page scrunched by a zealous baby), an empty tea cup the color of an ostrich egg, a blinking answering machine, and an envelope, unaddressed. Inside the envelope is a letter Elspeth wrote last night by herself. I believe the page is covered in orange scribbles. She folded it up messily and asked for a case (envelope). After licking the flap multiple times and with great spirit, she sealed the letter and said, "It's for Greatgrandpa because he's dead. It says, 'I'll see you in heaven.'

So there it is. What to do?

Elspeth wrote a letter to a dead person and now she fully expects us to send it to him in the mail. Is the USPS up to the task, I wonder?
I close with a dahlia bestowed upon us by the lovely lady across the street.

If such a flower is REAL and actually grows upon a stem, surely a letter to a dead person can be delivered.

Cusp of Autumn

Autumn, I adore you! Hurrah for your golds and apple reds! For cold nights creeping under warm window sashes, for birds polished shiny as nut shells!

For children in slippers

Grandfather trees

Bowing sunflowers

A late raspberry on my tongue

Autumn, dear bearded one, come and simmer cider with us. Stay long! I do not feel as kindly to your successor. Why do you never come alone? This year, O Autumn, leave Winter behind!

For Slugman MD

Whether ‘tis nobler to drive your tractor
into a nest full of yellow jackets
and by opposing them not end them.
To sting, to sting—
One more—and by the third or tenth end
the stinging and make way for the natural shocks
and swelling. To swell, to smell of Benadryl—
aye, there’s the rub,
for in that stinking comes the verse of friends
who think: instead of almost shuffling off this mortal coil,
by bearing the whips and scorns of yellowjackets,
you should have paused
turned heel and run like hell,
plunged into your septic tank
or water well
with a bare bodkin! Who would fardels bear,
but that dread of bees, their great buzz
from which nest no traveler returns.
Soft you now,
The swollen Slugman!

Shed Update, in Pictures

A little red. . .

A lot of lupine. . .


Won't this be a cheerful sight on a bleak winter day?

It's almost done! Just got to paint the floor and get the doors up!

First Day of School

Finally! Here are first days!

Merry's first day of 2nd grade: she declared she didn't want us to drive her to or pick her up from school. Ms. Independence with stoic face and determined stride.

Elspeth's first day of preschool: she'd been chomping at the bit for weeks, and Martin could barely get her attention to say goodbye once they got there.


They left without a backwards glance, both of them. A sign of things to come, I think.

Bea and I went home, danced for a while, and then had some tea and cake with a friend. Hoorah!

Big Nosed Me

Elspeth, while snuggling with me last night, said, "Mommy, you look like the child-catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang."

"You mean I look like Truly Scrumptious?" I queried, hoping I had misheard.

"No, like the child-catcher." She paused and continued matter-of-factly: "You have a big nose."

All these years, struggling to accept my great big Finish honker, and the child tells it like it is. I am proud to say I laughed, and it was a good laugh from my tummy, not a sad laugh. I do have a big nose.

As an unrelated postscript, I made a cake for our lovely babysitter, decorating it with icing balloons, until I suddenly realized, "These don't look like balloons! They look like sperm!" Truly, green sperm swimming all over her cake. Thankfully Elspeth covered the images in such layers of sprinkles that you can't even see them anymore.

From a Mama Letter

You see above my mama with crazy-haired Baby Beatrix. Here my mama is saying, "You're just the funniest looking baby--" and Bea was with her hair always on end--now she's just the littlest of the Cockroft nesting dolls.

And below is a little excerpt from a letter I just wrote to my mama, who is very very far away today.

September 16, 2009

Dear Mom,
How strange to think of you so far away today. You are perhaps on your way to Lamu, that East African island fabled for its clear pristine water and white beaches. The night you and Dad were flying across the ocean toward Amsterdam and then onto Nairobi I slept badly. Maybe it was biology that made me feel bereft as you went further and further away. I thought the next day what it would be like to be without you completely and I am thankful that is not so.

I remember when I was ten or so and Daddy took Heather and me off to Ecuador, and how melancholy I felt looking out of the plane window at the clouds tinged with pink, thinking of you being very far away, back in Georgia with Kenton. Of course I had a wonderful time but I missed you every day. I still remember well how, after one of our vehicles rammed into the side of the mountain on a narrow road, Daddy let me walk through a field, heavy with dew or rain (I don’t remember which), and though it had looked Romantic to me and I had pictured myself picking a bouquet and wandering happily through the flowers, the whole excursion mostly produced anxiety about fat bees and soggy shoes. In the end I was a discomforted little girl who reproached herself for the rest of the trip until her shoes dried. Would you have let me walk through the field if you had been there?

So you are off to Lamu with Dad, continents and time zones away from our house, and I am here in my office, with the warm autumn sunlight filtering through the window screen. Outside the garden is at its mellow decline, alive with the sound of crickets. The sunflowers are heavy and will soon be bereft of all their seeds. Elspeth and I went out early yesterday morning to harvest the sharp, black cosmos seeds and the last of the raspberries. Some of the berries were half eaten by wasps and bees, and the lower ones were absent due to the vigorous munching of our groundhog, Grassy Sam, who is as fat as ever. He is more of a friendly presence in our garden than the renowned pest most people think of. I actually find the sight of his big wiry bottom disappearing down our hill comforting.

We have come to be more and more at ease about the garden, a bit more zen-like in our approach (though perhaps that translates to lazy), and we share our produce with the critters pretty happily though I must admit annoyance when the deer chomp down our lovely fruit trees to stumps on a regular basis. Then I am inclined to make myself feel better by thinking of all the trouble fruit trees could be: prone to disease, and having to be harvested year after year, and so convince myself that even the deer’s damage is okay. Isn’t it easier just to buy apples at Farmer’s Market, after all?

Well, that’ll do me for now. Beatrix is about to climb up my chair and stage a coup.

Groundhog? More like Life Coach

I have Grassy Sam, our resident groundhog, to thank for getting us out of the house this afternoon.

I had just finished complaining to Martin that I was getting The Cold, I didn't feel like making supper, I just felt like laying around, etc., etc., when I looked out the window and saw our substantially tubby groundhog, on his hind legs, devouring our red raspberries.

To tell you the truth, it was kind of adorable. I rapped on the screen but Grassy Sam was not deterred. So out I went, ordering the girls to turn off the TV and get outside.

The afternoon was mellow and lovely. The leaves on our Black Walnut were tinged with yellow, the sunflowers heavy with their seeds, the raspberries (black and red), hanging full on their stems. Beatrix immediately soaked herself in mud and then beat a path down our hill to the swings. Merry and Elspeth climbed on their slick sleds and slid down the hill (yes, they slide on grass, incredibly--its either the sleds or the red wagon, and the sleds go so much more gently).

I picked about four cups of raspberries, enough for another batch of jam, and I pushed Elspeth on the tire swing and made Beatrix laugh and scolded Merry for her "campout" debris still in the yard, made it up the stairs, and arrived at the house with enough energy to cook. Merry, my queen-girl, took the other two girls upstairs, poured the bath, bathed them, and brought them down freshly dressed.

I got to listen to NPR while I cooked dinner.

And it's all thanks to Grassy Sam, happy groundhog and life coach.

Name that Girl

Can you sort out who is who?

Elspeth or Bea?

Evidence of

I just had one of those experiences that makes you want to crack right down the middle because you are so full of goodness you can't contain it anymore. It's been a happy day, full of good people. After dinner I fed the baby ice cream while the girls went out on the porch swing to eat theirs in little flowered bowls. Martin drifted off to the piano in the hallway and began to play. Beatrix, stripped down to her diaper, swayed in time as she ate her ice cream, babbling companionably. Then she climbed down from her chair and began running up and down the hallway. The sun coming in the front door formed a column of shining light that stretched down the hallway. As Martin played she ran back and forth, her body aglow, her fat, turning legs silhouetted as they moved. When I looked away, I found my eyes were blinded with the light, and the sunspots were dark in my sight.

And I thought: Is this what happens to the magic? It masses inside us, it blinds our eyes, it leaves its marks on our soul, so when we look away into the darkness our sight is changed forever. So that when I am very old and the clarity of my happinesses are but impressions, like shadows left by a bright sun, someone will say, "There is evidence that this life was filled with great joy."

Miss Potter Letter One

August 25, 2009

Dear Ms. Potter,

I hardly know how to begin a letter to you. I don’t admire many people the way I esteem you; neither do I feel inspired by anyone who has already died, except maybe a few saints, my own relatives, and Jesus. And by living gratefully, I do try to pay homage to all women who have written and mothered and found joy in daily life and in the earth of their gardens. And I try to honor women like you—headstrong, determined, lovers of the earth and all that lives there.

I suppose we have very little in common. You were never a mother, and I married young. I value community and a full but simple life, and I believe your life was less peopled, though full. I am American, though I lived most of my life overseas. I have never made any real money from writing, so I do not have any resources to be a philanthropist like you. I cannot draw small animals. I do not really like touching small animals, including rabbits, and I never filled my room with leaves and sticks and small woodland creatures as a girl, as you did.

To tell you the absolute truth, and I hope you don’t mind—I don’t really read your picture books very often. I enjoy looking at your sketches, including the beautiful pictures of fungi. I love your illustrations, those with flowers, gardens, and especially geraniums (though it’s ghastly the way Peter has been marketed, I’m sorry to tell you—he nibbles his carrot on all sorts of places: baby blankets, silverware, cups, cards, probably even on diaper, or nappy, pails). But your books are a little dense these days even for my oldest, Merry, and they are sometimes frightening, as when Jemima Puddleduck’s eggs are eaten by the fox.

But I greatly admire your frank handling of farm and country life, and the girls think it’s very interesting that Peter Rabbit’s father was baked into a pie by Mrs. McGregor. Just today at the lunch table we were discussing the source of our ham—Merry thought maybe the pig just lived a long life, died from natural causes, and then we ate him—but I put her right. Maybe she will be a vegetarian. I was for a while, but then my love of meat convinced me to try to be a responsible eater—only animals who have been happy and healthy appear on our plates. I try to eat local food, conserve the earth, and. . .but this rather boring all in all and I’d much rather tell you about my friend the robin who keeps me company while I garden in the spring, who jumps down the rows, cocking his head and thanking me for fresh worms. At times like these, when I feel hidden from the rest of the world, with my hands in soil, quieting myself with things so other than myself—then I feel most at peace. This is one reason I admire you, a naturalist, so much, though I, being scatterbrained, will never be a true naturalist myself.

I love to picture you in your farm house, drinking tea and organizing important matters of property, discussing farm details with your husband, and adjusting an outfit for a mouse or a duck. It must be nice to belong to a place so completely, to love that place, and then to leave it to a country who will love it. We moved so often, and though I treasure the diverse experiences I enjoyed, I often longed to belong somewhere. I think you would like the country around the little town where we live now. It reminds me a little of England, though it’s heavily wooded and the hills are quite close together. We barely have a level space even for our garden.

Before I close, I do want to tell you that our last child is named Beatrix, after you, Ms. Potter. My husband and I both thought of your name, independently and without discussion: “Do you know what we should call her [the new baby]?” I shouted to the next room, my hands clasped on top of my pregnant belly. “How about Beatrix?” my husband called back, and since that was just the name I was going to suggest, we felt it was a sign.

Must get the girls to sleep now! It’s been a busy day and the night is finally cooling. Thank you so much for your time, Ms. Potter. I am very

Admiringly Yours,

Forsythia Fern