How in heaven's name did we amass so much stuff? The pit is bottomless. I clear one layer, and there's another. I honestly think I could fill a dump-truck with the amount of sheer razzle we have in this home of ours. It's dazzling. When we moved every year for that first half-decade or so of our marriage, I purged at regular intervals. And now--after only five or six years in one house, I feel utterly ashamed, enraged, (and now cold and calm) over the state of things. I'm done, people. I mean business.
But
first, a cup of tea. A childhood in East Africa taught me that business of any kind, serious or pleasant, is better with tea and with a friend.
Martin is my friend. He loves tea. I'll go and find him.

Skulking

Mama's doing some skulking. Snuck off to Barnes & Butts this morning for a latte with the handsome boy who lives in my house (there's only one). Chewed on a bagel and a long listing of literary magazines.

And this afternoon I slunk around, getting rid of loads of stuff. Buried children's artwork and "treasures" under scraps of paper. And hid the Halloween candy.

Mama. Mistress of magnificence. Master of subterfuge.


Sal took the pic. Not me. I'm not that good.

Too Many Treats, Not Enough Tricks

It is that time of year again. . .the one holiday that gets Americans from every walk of life out and moving as a community, and they're filling huge sacks with candy. There's something strange about that. I have to admit that I turn the lights off and clear the whole family out of the house. We gave treats one year but I find the mix of happy people--some in sweet outfits, grinning as they hold open their bags, alongside the sour-faced, too-old, ghoulish, frowning out of downright disturbing masks--stressful. I do not come back until Trick or Treating is over.

I keep thinking, as I'm out on my porch collecting mail or putting away the stroller, that my neighbors are out on their porch--and then I glance over and realize that it's just the witch and the skeleton. As we sat on the swing in the sun today, Elspeth told me, "They [the witch and the skeleton] don't talk except when you're not watching."

"Maybe they're just sad they don't have any friends," I said. "Maybe they feel sad inside."

"No, Mommy," she said, "They're mean. And they don't have anything inside."

Our neighbors also seem to have buried some relatives in the front yard. Merry skipped over to their small front lawn the other day to collect wind-fall pears from among gravestones and skeletons rising out of the ground.

This is my nod to Halloween: I baked up two huge pans of extra chocolately brownies from scratch, iced them, and sprinkled them in orange and purple and black for two school parties tomorrow. They are so gooey that I'll have to spoon them out. Elspeth brought home a huge pink ghoul head filled with candy that I sorted out while she was busy eating a lollipop: the emergency car bag, the Martin-take-to-college bag (which included a white jelly mouse in a jar of clear corn syrup and three spider rings), and the very paltry left-overs, which I hid in the sauces/oils cabinet above the stove. And I may still steal the snack-size KitKat tonight when the kids are finally all in bed sleeping. I have to say I get immense satisfaction from dumping out the kids' candy and sorting through it--a childhood, post Trick-or-Treat feeling. Ah. Look at this loot. Of course most of it goes to the college students, but I take a charitable donation on our taxes for that.

In case the IRS reads blogs, I'm just kidding.

For Uncle A.J.

These pictures (all except the goon in the middle) were taken by my friend Sally during apple-picking at a local orchard. They go out with much love to my dear Uncle A.J. in North Carolina, who's not feeling too well at the moment. Wish we could send you one of the delicious, crisp winesaps or the sweet Macintosh. Much love from your grand-nieces, and many prayers to you and sweet Auntie.

Ten Things

Martin and I are about to start playing our Ten Things Game. Curiosity peaked? Well, at this point I could go so many ways: we sit down at night when the kids have gone to bed, and name ten things that drive us crazy about the other person OR we sit down and read ten poems to each other OR we eat ten pieces of chocolate or ten jalapenos OR we choose ten things we want to do with the rest of our lives. Ten freckles on the other's face. Ten nose hairs. Ten facial expressions.
Or none of the above.
Actually, the Ten Things Game gets instituted when the house feels as if it is closing in around us. I picked up a magazine this morning and flipped to a quote that was celebrating clutter, though the example of clutter cited in the article was a stack of books next to your bed. Wha? This person must not have children. Clutter in our house includes, but is not limited to, endless masterpieces created by the children at school and at home; stuffed dogs and cats and naked baby dolls; wooden vegetables; apple cores; "lost" toothbrushes; hair clips; endless articles of doll clothing; single socks; crayon stubs; treasures such as rocks, nails, pieces of glass, feathers, etc., etc. I even found a secret cache behind the children's poufe (large round sitting cushion) that consisted of, but was not limited to, a large hunk of stale white bread and an empty (sucked dry by the M.C.) plastic lime. (This is an aside, but I have to mention that the M.C. also painted the inside of our fridge the other day. Blue. She and I scrubbed for a while and then she sat in time out and pondered what a bad choice she had made).

So every night, Martin and I both have to find five things in the house that we will throw or give away. We put them in a pile, step back, and assess. If by chance one person really wants to keep that old picture frame that the other person chose, they may challenge the object only if they are willing to find two more things to give away as forfeit, bringing the total give-away total to eleven.

Martin and I played this game so well last year that we were almost down to essentials by the time we finished. Since then, our house has been eating with a voracious appetite, and is about to burst. It's time.

A couple of our friends are joining us in this game. Last night they freed themselves from the enslavement of ten clutterous items. Do you want to join?

We'll Always Have a Friend Wearing Big Red Shoes

It's a long story. It begins in Walmart. No, wait, it goes back further than that to a tiny skateboard with red wheels, a choking-hazard that Beatrix fell absolutely gaga for. She talked about it all the time. "Where my skateboard?" she'd say, at nap time, car rides, random moments throughout the day. "I think it's in Aunt Sally's car," I replied for two days, to which she said, "Oh, NO!" and burst into tears. Aunt Sally had to bribe her with an extra special treat to tide her over to the next day, when said skateboard was reunited with Beatrix. And then, Friday morning after the conclusion of my interview at a local bakery, it went missing.

This has caused great consternation at Wazoo Farm. This afternoon, the family finally drove out to Walmart to find a skateboard to make it all better. We found some, in plastic cases with wierd decals and extra wheels. There was even one with a skateboarder included, all in black with hair slanting over one eye. "No!" Bea said. "Little TINY skateboard." These offerings, at two inches long, were far too large.

Then I remembered that McDonalds had been giving out skateboards as the Boy Toy with Happy Meals, so our family turned our car that direction and we all piled out into a sticky parking lot.

"That ChickALay?" Beatrix queried, her whole body tense with excitement.

"Nope. It's McDonalds."

"McDONALDS!" she shouted, in a way that would have made our good friend with the big red shoes so very happy.

Inside, Martin almost shouted, "LOOK! The McRib! It's back!"

Now, we adults were planning to get nothing but water, but Martin said, "You HAVE to get a McRib. It's the right thing to do." I never found out exactly why this was, but he ordered and the girls sat on swinging chairs which they worked with an intensity that was truly impressive. Beatrix almost fell off.

There was a woman sitting on a high table talking at great volume to a man in a McDonalds employee cap. "Look," she was saying, "They got their own life, I got mine. I'm single, right? So I got nobody I come home to and nobody I'm responsible for, and that's my privilege. And then they're driving by my house and saying, 'Your company stayed for three hours,' and they're saying, 'She had company in her house for three hours,' and I'm saying, 'What goes on behind closed doors is none of your business!" The man in the cap kept nodding and listening.

I shouted up to Martin who was at the cash register, "Boy Toy! Boy Toy!" I wasn't calling him my hot and handsome play thing--I was reminding him to request the skateboards instead of the scented, molded plastic Strawberry Shortcake dolls.

The single woman with privileges went out of the restaurant, flipped up her cell-phone, chatted for about two minutes, and came back in to continue her monologue with the same guy, though he'd moved toward the door by then. She seemed incapable of silence. Martin was back by then and he raised his cup of ice water to mine and said dryly, "Cheers."

By this time the children were chowing their pale chicken nuggets. "I just knew this would happen," Martin said, as he gnawed his McRib. "They're giving out these buckets instead of the skateboards." The girls were pulling their food from neon green buckets decorated with Halloween Potato Heads.

"I thought I remembered skateboards," I said.

Merry said, "They only have the same toy for a limited time." Or something knowledgeable like that. She ate a medium fries in a sad way, eyes downcast.

Beatrix was dunking her nuggets in her caramel sauce. Martin passed over his McRib so I could taste it. "This is the strangest menu offering ever," he said. "It's called a rib sandwich but there are no bones. Observe. It is a fillet."

I bit into it. It tasted, in consistency and texture, like scrambled eggs doused with barbecue sauce. I passed it back.

Beatrix requested a straw, stuck the end into her caramel sauce, and began sucking. Then she dunked the straw into her milk. And back into the caramel sauce.

"That's disgusting," Martin commented, and continued eating his McRib sandwich. (Please do not miss the delicious and unitended irony.)

Near the end of our meal, the table piled high with trash, Beatrix poured her entire cup of water on the floor. She was suddenly like a creature possessed; she would not stay in her seat; she ran about and threw her arms around a strange man's legs until she saw his face and realized it was not Martin.

"I think it's the caramel sauce," I said.

"It is pure sugar," Martin agreed. We watched her run. A man in hunting gear with his son stood by and waited for his order. The checker, holding a tray piled with large fries, searched for a party who had moved to the back by the restrooms.

Then Elspeth began to take on the characteristics of a rubber ball. I noted that her caramel sauce package was also empty, licked completely clean.

Suddenly I jumped up, began throwing empty burger wrappers and caramel packets on to the tray. "I think it's time to go!" I announced.

Elspeth began to jig. "I've got to go potty!" she said. It apparently could not wait until home so the girls disappeared into the bathroom. Martin and I stood in an aisle discussing how long they would take. "At the soccer game, they were in there for, like, a half hour," he said. I sipped my decaf coffee. There was a moment of peace.

Soon after Elspeth almost collided in the parking lot with a car, but then we unstuck our feet and rode home through the darkness. Martin listened to baseball and Elspeth yelled from the back. Then Merry yelped as Elspeth pinched her. We waited for lights to turn green. As we neared home, Beatrix said, "Where my skateboard?"

Told you it was a long story.

For more from the Onion News Network on our favorite golden arches, click here.

Rainy Day Activities

Zombie Dancing. New Wazoo favorite.

"Let's get in the autumn-mobile and leaf."

Last night, we romped about the College Parks.  This common green land was originally set aside for grazing.  I like to think of the ghosts of sheep and cattle and horses roaming about the place as the children run up and down the sidewalks, among the trees, around the fountain, stopping to pose with the statuary.

 Leaf-pile building with friend "little Will."

 Standing below Lady Justice and the Civil War Soldiers (not pictured :).

 And here's some leaves for the folks in Texas.  Wish you could be here--all of you.  It's a stunning autumn.

Autumn Weeds and Rodents

A few visions of autumn at Wazoo. . .no pictures of the colorful leaves (yet) but a child in a corn maze up at a creamery/farm. Here's my maze-partner, JM, who calls me "Aunt Kim" (isn't that fine?)--with her I wandered through stalks and learned that cows have four stomachs and a full-grown Holstein weighs far more than 950 pounds. . .

and then there's my favorite, cosmos, as happy as if it it were July. Cosmos never lets me down, probably because it is technically a weed. I love weeds. They don't make a big fuss about themselves; they're just happy to be alive.

And they're tenacious little suckers. This is also why I secretly love our groundhog, Grassy Sam, who has been with us many years now. Enormous rodent though he be, he found a way up to the table where we were housing Merry's prize pumpkin, beautifully orange and plump with a smooth skin. He ate a huge hole (seemed partial to the seeds) as he sat on our table. Thanks to visiting friend "Uncle Jeff" for the picture.
So we moved the pumpkin (we figured we could still carve part of it into a jack 'o lantern) to the front porch and. . .something else ate it. Possibly Rocky Raccoon found it there--he is a menace I could do without, since he is cheeky enough to come in the back door to our enclosed porch for our trash. Grassy Sam, I like to think, has better manners than this. For instance, he never molests our main garden, though he could; and we are fairly good natured about letting him roam about the back yard. I did shoo him away from the red raspberries one year, and as far as I can tell, he hasn't been back.
I figure, if you're going to be a rodent, you should be a big one. The poor and awful field mice have been fleeing the harvesters and I keep seeing their blackened carcasses around town, one in our driveway and another on a sidewalk. The Wazoo cats (none of whom I know by name, none of whom are friendly or seem to care about us, but who prowl around the garden like royalty) keep them at bay--we haven't had a mouse problem in the house for years. That may also be in thanks to Sammy the Snake and his prolific offspring.

It's a jungle out there, I tell you, but nothing like my friend, Tonya's country lands where she almost gets run down by cows in the night and then horses the next night and then has to pound a rabid 'possum on the head with a flashlight and bury him early the next morning. That is exactly why I am a townie--3/4 of an acre is pushing it for us, but really it's the perfect size to tuck flowers and herbs and trees in helter-skelter and have it be alright.

Okay, just one little leaf picture.

Our magnificent maple. She's almost bare and the sound of the wind through her crisp leaves seems from another world--I puzzled over it for a while the other day. Is it a rushing sound, or a whoosh--does it sound like the ocean or a thousand birds flying through the sky--and I've come to conclusion that it sounds just like a strong autumn wind blowing through hundreds of dried yellow maple leaves. I love that tree. She wouldn't nod at any of my metaphors. And so a rodent is a rodent, a weed is a weed, and a maple is a maple. And with those deep thoughts, lovlies, plus a picture of Elspea hard at work in the playhouse, I bid you goodnight.

being nice

Tonight.

During practice for the Harvest Festival, I slipped away from my harmonies to track Beatrix and found her filling up a play teapot at the downstairs bathroom sink. As I tried to convince her that this was a bad idea, the entire faucet fell off--the ENTIRE thing, spicket to neck to base--and a fountain of water sprayed off sideways down the left wall. I fumbled with the handles, finally turned off the water, gave a lame attempt at screwing the faucet back on, and settled for locking the bathroom door.

This evening Bea, who spent her nap time yelling from her crib for three hours, acted like a world-class punk; she screamed every time her friend Will came toward her, grabbed, shielded favorite things with her body and said, MINE. She did this for approximately two hours as my friend Sally and I kept down the fort over at her house while the husbands were (and still are) out on a man-date. This is after all day and all week with all the children (school's out today and was yesterday): vacuuming with two year-olds on our hip, breaking up arguments, feeding hungry mouths, etc., etc., with nary a break. "I don't even have the energy to make conversation," Sally said, and I responded by slithering off her living room chair.

Tonight--after watching homecoming fireworks and a clear sky full of stars in Sally's driveway with Elspeth snug on my hip--after I pulled into our driveway, Elspeth inexplicably locked all the car doors from inside, shutting in herself, Merry, and Bea, and setting off the car alarm. At this point--almost 9 o'clock, I calmly looked for my keys, finally getting into the driver's seat and turning off the alarm.

About twenty minutes ago, I rocked Bea and yelled commands out the door and down the hallway: "If you're not in your nightgown in ten seconds. . .And that's 10, 9, 8, 7. . ." Things were starting to get ugly.

About ten minutes ago, I was settling Elspeth into her bed when she made a weird turn and whacked my head with hers. "OW! OW! OW!" she stuttered, staccato, to which I, with swelling bump on my forehead, snapped, "Be QUIET, Elspeth! Your bump can't possibly hurt as much as mine!" She set off wailing: "You yelled at me and I hurt!"

I finally simmered down and realized how childish I was acting. "Elspeth, I hit my head and I was in pain and I'm really tired, so I talked to you with an ugly voice. Will you forgive me?" I felt so bad; here she was, exhausted herself and tear-streaked, and only four. "Did you have fun with Ben?" I asked, redirecting. "What was your favorite thing you did today?"

"Watching the stars with you," she said.

And that, the final heart-stab, ended the evening. Ah, sigh, why is is it so hard to keep my temper?

I've got to go downstairs, mop up the water (I'm not going to try to fix the faucet), put away muffins for a church event (I baked about four dozen today), and boil water for tea. And then I'm done.

Happy weekend, all. Be nice. I'll try to be.

guitars

Downstairs, a round plung of a guitar being tuned. Now something bluesy: dup, dup, dup, daoooa, dup, dup, dup--the hollow thunk of a guitar being put down, murmur of voices. Outside the rain falls straight down on the mail carrier, a man with square shoulders and square red face who, on hot days, flushes as red as Santa Claus. Like a spoon serving up mashed potatoes, the sunshine rounds off thick cloud cover. Does that make any sense? I know that last sentence didn't, and neither does this day--sunny, cold, rainy, sunny and rainy, drafty, warm. . .a capricious day.

Oh, the guitars are picking up. Soon Frank's harmonica will cut through the strumming. I should be down there--we're supposed to be practicing to play in the Harvest Festival this weekend. But I just needed a few minutes to surface from the sea of friends and children who have jigged through the house today. My head feels a bit ragged, the coffee I poured three hours ago is (surprise!) cold, and I just now--at four o'clock in the afternoon--managed to brush my hair from my morning shower. One of those good days, packed like fresh basil leaves into a cup--fragrant, dense, a whole summer in an hour.

I'm not making too much sense, people. Better go down and join the musicians.

Direct Hit

Today at the creamery with its pumpkins painted like cartoon characters, where we bumped up a road on hay bales in puffs of tractor smoke, where the children fumbled up a bald dirt slope to ride a slick white slide down to a lawn with corn stalks and a field of plucked pumpkins. . .today at the creamery, within the first five minutes of our visit, Beatrix tucked up to the rusty red fence to touch the baby goats with their tufty horns and soft tails--and got sprayed by a male goat. Fore hooves propped in the rail, he sprayed all down the line of children with their hair pulled back picture-perfect, his pee a torrent of glittering beads caught in the pure autumn sunlight--

Step back! Step back! I yelled

all to no avail. . . .

Stinky, stinky Bea on my lap on the hay bales up the hill to the endless corn maze, stalks glowing papery in the blazing morning light.

Joie de Vivre

This child here is my grace, my payment, my trial, my wonderment, the subject of my resolve, my grief, my befuddlement, and my joy.

This is true about all three girls, of course, but nobody has put me through the wringer like the child you see here. Her antics have been so unbelievable as to bring me to jaw-dropping astonishment, tears, and hidden laughter (the sort where you force your face into a frown to mete out punishment and then laugh silently through your hands just out of sight before you can compose your face again).

In a way, Elspeth reflects all that is craziest in me that I've had to tamp down to be a proper adult. I'll say, "Don't you ever, ever, ever draw on the walls again," before whipping out my paintbrush and painting something crazy on a wall. I get to because I'm an adult, but she is not allowed.

And she's surprisingly different too; did you know, for instance, that my Elspeth is an introvert who will slip away from a crowded room to draw for twenty minutes? She is a prolific, unstoppable, incorrigible (a word my mother taught her two years ago that fits her like a sock).

Elspeth brings me to my knees where I beg mercy from God to help me keep a modicum of composure, to save her from self-destruction. Hone the craziness, I pray, to fine points with which she'll be able to write good stories where she is brave, wild, and creates beautiful things. You can never know for certain about your children, but you can hope and do your best.

Elspeth, too, is incredibly quick to forgive, forget, and move on with life. I'll lose my last modicum, shout, and ban her to her room where she'll cry, heartbroken. Then twenty minutes later she'll throw her arms around my neck, squeeze me like a lemon, and say, "You're my dear love, Mommy. I'm never going to leave you." That child. Freezes and melts me. Reminds me that life should be exciting, that composure and humdrum is for the birds.

Apple Days

Today dawned sparkling; the sky was perfectly robin's-egg, the air as clean as a sheet on a line. I spent the entire morning walking with Bea, my friend Sal, and her boy. We walked up hills and down hills, around neighborhood corners and across streets, over gravel, grass, brick, and concrete. At one point we puffed up a hill that Sal's boys have named "Steep Street" and gazed out over the town--the steeple of the courthouse, a graveyard on the ridge, the mine in the far distance, trees bronzing and flashing pumpkin-orange all over the hillsides. Took a deep breath and plunged into the valley again: gourds and autumn paraphernalia on porches, ghosties in the windows, gardens at their last brilliance before they begin to wane.

Our neighbor, Mr. Wilson, has already cleaned his beds; a few stragglers remain, but the tomatoes are down, nesting in dark soil--I guess he'll plow those under for compost. Our garden is popping with late zinnias, pink and orange, dense marigolds and cluttered with fading zinnias, dried dill-heads, the black domes of shasta daisy.

Time to fling open windows, simmer apples, roast squash in the oven. Time for leaf-piles and seed-collecting. Apple Days! Delicious days!

(I'm tempted to begin rhyming but will stop myself. Nutritious days! etc. Told you sunshine makes me giddy. Thankfully the snow and freeze is coming and then I'll be so depressed I'll have to write well. . .)

Sunshine

thanks be for the sheen of bird opening like a sun
for the smaller suns of glossy dew
the garden glistening & popping

Folks, it is sunny today. After three days of rain and grey. I feel my spirit flying. Hope a sun rises for you this morning, too. Or many suns throughout the day. I have to stop writing now--sunshine makes me giddy and prone to cliches.

One of my favorite suns:

And another:

and. . .one more:

Pine Box Trail

If you're headed up the steep, wooded path called Pine Box Trail, there are only a handful of reasons for your trip--and they all have to do with death and burial.

This is a fairly old (by American standards) graveyard, seemingly lost in a small clearing halfway up a mountain in Ryerson State Park, about twenty miles from our town. Most of the markers are too old and worn to read in their entirety.

From a distance, the stones seem as if they're merely littered around between trees. Many of them are falling over in the rich soil, packed about with rotting leaves and loam, but of course this is not the case. . .somebody must care for the cemetery; trees are sparse within the running fence and none of the stones have cracked in two as a result of tree trunks.

My sister and I used to hike back to a cemetery in North Carolina, and that one had a gravestone so old and neglected that a tree had hewn it in two and left it crumbling into the soil. When we visited the same neighborhood as adults, we found that the miles of our forest--tall pines, thick dogwoods and other deciduous trees, shady creeks with clear water and sandy bottoms perfect for wading--were long gone, given way to an enormous housing development. And our graveyard, the one where we used to sit on a gravestone and eat our packed lunches? Well, that was now in the middle of the development, on the top of a fenced hill with a proper little path.

I have a feeling it will be an age before Pine Box Trail meets the same fate. As we walked among the gravestones, Beatrix plunged her fingers into patches of thick green moss, the same type of moss that we'd walked over at the base of the trail; it had stretched before us into the darkness of the woods, unbelievably lush and springy underfoot.

In the glory of a rainy autumn day with the colors of changing trees glowing around us, we imagined a party of pall bearers, or more likely, a mule, dragging a coffin up the wide mountain path.

"I feel as if we should sing them a song at least while we're up here," I said, to which Martin's friend, Jeff, countered,

"I think just reading the stones pays respect to the people buried here," and I had to agree. Anyway, the trees did more singing than I could have--a song of seasons, age, regeneration, beauty. A good song.

*Martin Cockroft took all the photos.

Three Minutes of Peace

End of Monday: Martin's downstairs marinating pork from our friend Mike's, pigs, for a stir-fry. It is grey again but I am mustering cheer, for all is well at Wazoo Farm; the children are happy and the house still stands. I am determined to make a better week than the last one.

At one point last week, as I stood at my kitchen window soaping mugs (the kitchen window that looks onto my neighbor's grey house-siding, on the third day of deep, rainy grey), I felt a deep peace and sense of good-will infusing me. Why was this, I wondered, as I gazed out into the dark day. . .and then I realized: the children had been quiet for three minutes in a row. That's all I needed to feel calm again for a few instants.

The calm did not last. In fact, this is what launched off the worst morning of the entire week:

Need I explain? Baby powder. Everywhere. White footprints across the upstairs. A very old-looking two-year old. Desert sands in the children's bedroom. And this was JUST THE BEGINNING.

The morning ends with a mother finally giving into tears and despair, becoming preternaturally calm and shutting a middle child into her bedroom, who then gives into tears and despair. One mother concludes that a middle child is contrite, only to find colored sand heaped in a slipper and spread around the floor which was just cleaned of baby powder.

FINALLY all ends happily at the lunch table with the M.C. saying, "Can we just start this day over, Mommy?"

Yes, please.

Lovely ones, this dreary day I have a piece of fiction to send you to, under my name at Apple Valley Review (and check out everything else at that fantastic site). . .and if you are in the mood for a gorgeous cemetery on a hill, click on the Observer-Reporter link at right. Today we went hiking up Pine Box Trail to yet another cemetery hidden by tall deciduous trees--it was so wet my shoes were squishing by the time we reached the car again. But beautiful. The drear just makes the gold of changing maples glow more brightly.

For Keeps

Elspeth and Bea sleep and Merry sleeps soon, hopefully, at a friend's house. Martin and his life-long friend Jeff are off in Ninevah, PA, attending a meeting about UFOs and Bigfoot. We saw the gathering advertised at the local Farmer's Market and off they went. I'm waiting for the report.

Tonight, tucked up in my bed, I read Elspeth an old favorite, "Little Bear's Friend." It's a green hard-back book and pictured on the front, Emily (in a straw party hat)sits across from Little Bear (in a striped, peaked party hat); on the table sits Lucy the doll, who has not yet broken her arm by falling out of Owl's tree.

Inside the cover of the book, I found a red, circular stamp: THIS BOOK IS BELONGS TO HML * HEATHER MARIE LONG; underneath, in large letters printed in blue crayon: and Kimberly Long. The stamp (grammatical error and all) was made, I'm sure, in Bangladesh, and the book is copyrighted 1960, so my sister Heather and I must have been about eight and six, respectively. The pages are yellowed and brittle but wonderfully familiar. I found myself almost choking up as I read the last chapter, which tells the story of Emily saying goodbye to Little Bear:

Mother Bear said, "Let us eat up all the cake. If we do, then it will not rain tomorrow."

"Let it rain," said Little Bear. "Emily will not be here tomorrow to play with me."
(Little Bear's Friend, by Else Holmelund Minarik, Harper & Row)

Then there's that wonderful bit where Emily, moved by her love for Little Bear, hands over Lucy, her dearest possession, and tells Little Bear she wants him to have Lucy for keeps. Little Bear barely responds before Emily pulls Lucy back again and says she forgot, but she has to take Lucy to school with her. Minarik is particularly perceptive in this book; we long to show our love in the face of impending loss, and yet we hold fast to the things that make us secure in the face of change.

Two big tears run down Little Bear's face after Emily and Lucy leave, and Mother Bear scoops him up into her lap. What Elspeth didn't know as I read the story out loud, what she has not yet experienced, is the bittersweet pain of leaving dear ones and dear places; what my childhood was filled with; what I felt when I saw my sister and my child-names in the front of this book.