This Pot's Bubbling Over

Oh, it's so grey again (sing with me). It's ever so grey and rainy today! Yesterday we spent all hours outside--even rain didn't drive the children inside, just prompted them to kick off their shoes, and in Beatrix's case, ALL her clothes.

Inside, there are three roses the color of velvet Christmas ribbon; one faces me, the other is taking in the rain, and the third faces the piano, as if waiting for someone to sit down and play. Last night our house was fairly bouncing with people and the scent of ham and mashed potatoes and homemade apple sauce--an early Easter feast--and now the table is cleared, the laundry tumbling below floor, and the children are lounging about lazily on the couch watching "educational" TV.

And my mind tumbles like the laundry too. I can't believe I sent that story exclusively to Prairie Schooner and didn't change the cover letter that noted it was a simultaneous submission! Guess who received a highlighted copy of the Writer's Guidelines in her SASE yesterday afternoon? I'm just kicking myself. Oh! A cardinal! There are horrible things happening in Cote d'Ivoire and the sadness goes on in Japan. . .I need to to e-mail so-and-so about tea, ARG! ALARM! Have not written my column yet and the deadline is tomorrow! WASH the soccer socks! Wash the soccer socks!

I will not subject you to the ongoing panic in my brain. A few of us sat outside the other week trying to answer this question: If your brain were a room, what would it contain?

Our nine-year old friend, Cat, said her brain contained file drawers. Merry accessed her brain and found two easy chairs with a table in between them (sounds good to me!) My mother swings the door to her brain and finds a giant tiramisu with endless layers of pastry that hide facts from her until she reaches in and fishes one out. Martin's brain is the craziest of all: he's got a game show host talking constantly inside, and his life-long struggle is to shut that guy up. My brain contains multiple industrial stoves with hundreds of pots bubbling. I often forget what a pot contains until I lift the lid and the steam clouds my face. Oh! Blast! There's my cloudy, misshapen column bubbling around in there. It needs vegetables, meat, seasoning! What have I been thinking, and with so many people arriving for dinner! I don't even have a recipe yet!

My dream is to climb into one of those pots and linger for a while and not go onto the next pot until one soup is finished. But it is not to be right now. Today, griping between the two youngest girls started at breakfast and continued afterward. As Martin exited the house, I said, "When you come back tonight, if you find the children plucked and hanging by their ankles, you'll know why."

As I hauled more laundry downstairs, I thought, Just wait until they're all gone, and then I realized, they won't be moving out, just going off to school, and now I amend that thought: You don't really want complete silence for the rest of your life, do you? And the image of Elspeth cuddling into the crook of my arm after she read her first book out loud yesterday fills me. She said, "I want to marry you and Daddy, and then I wouldn't ever have to leave you when I grow up." Martin and I reassured her: "You don't ever have to leave if you don't want to." And we said this knowing that the time will come when she will be anxious to leave, and she'll run off with her face turned fully toward the blooms and branching of her own life, and we'll be the ones looking after her. We'll be sad.

But not so sad we'll sit at home and mope. No, siree; we have dreams of a little retreat in Oregon with a tea pot, winding paths through forest, and two chairs on the porch where we'll edit our manuscripts together.

But for now, a shower, some column acrobatics, and a trip to the library. We will jump into the grey mist outside, and we will warm it with our happiness.