Autumn Now

For my parents in Bangkok and Martin's parents in Houston, here's a little of what you're missing:





Our first hoary frost lay over everything--the stroller, railings, car, trees--zapped the zinnias, but melted quickly to give way to a perfect autumn day. Beatrix's favorite new thing: chasing squirrels in the park. One threw down nuts at us today as we waited for Martin. My mother has always had a particular knack with squirrels--one at the Episcopal Church in Maryland chatted regularly with her.

Are there squirrels in Thailand? I won't list what I'm missing by NOT being in Bangkok. Martin cooked Thai noodles tonight, so it's almost as if we're there. Hmm.

Zippitydodah! Hoorah for yellow and red! And for Thai noodles!

The World According to Elspeth, Age 3 1/2, in Photos

I just downloaded some pictures with the intention of creating yet another ode to autumn. . .and then I found that Elspeth had been quite busy with the camera. I actually found myself loving her photo journal, though of course she's not technically supposed to be running around with our only digital camera. Technicalities like these have never stopped her before. I wish I could include all her takings, but I've chosen just a few. Without further ado, then:





You'll note that focus is also a silly detail she doesn't pay too much attention to, which tells you much about her: she is ALWAYS on the move. Most of our pictures of her are out of focus for that very reason.




The first set of photos are from one evening and the next set are from a following afternoon.




We end with a self-portrait.

Writer's Bird

This is Elspeth's photo of me, when my head was taken in glory. It was a great trip. I missed my body. Someday I will write of it.

So here I am. I don't have writer's block, exactly, which is a dumb name and makes me think of laxatives. We don't want writer's diarrhea, either, just. . .well, I'll stop there. I have these lovely shards to a story and I'm not brave enough to throw them all into the fire.

Maybe it's not cowardice, either, that stops me--maybe just laziness, or weariness, or the water is too cold to jump in all at once. What I need to do is just plunge in like those fools I've known who whoop like gorillas and beat their chests and whip around their wet cold heads like buffaloes in heat. They are not fools at all. They are brave.

I wet a little bit of my body at a time, afraid of the full hit of coldness. . .and then the story is gone. This is not how I usually operate. Usually I write like mad for four hours and then sit back with my scissors and begin snipping. Martin comes in with his chainsaw and takes off all the appendages, leaving maybe just the head. Or maybe just an ear. "There's your story!" he says, holding up that one ear with a grin. A small silver loop dangles. I hold the ear, despair for a minute, and begin mixing up the plaster to construct a body around it again. If I am brave.

I think all the reading of Sylvia Plath's journals has taken it out of me. I looked at a mushroom today in the grass on the way to class and I wondered, "How would Sylvia have described this mushroom?" And low and behold if I didn't open my book at random in class and read, "A mushroom's black underpleats."

What is that high buzzing in my office? I hate high, constant sounds. They get behind my eyes and stick themselves down in my throat.

Maybe, just maybe, I will start that story. As soon as I finish this exceptional cup of tea. Then. And maybe when that buzzing goes away. A black bird just flew past the blinding, sunlit clouds, like the blur of a waving hand in an overexposed photograph. . . .Actually, not like that at all.

Vegetables Make You Feel Lovely

Whether it was the perfect autumn day, a measure of my surrender to weariness, or the simple meal of vegetables I ate for dinner, I feel so content. Green beans and local purple potatoes and peppers that a farmer and retired professor showered into my lap (with a gruff, 'don't want to take these home') and I carried around in my capacious purse all afternoon. . .onions, a little tomato, and a long simmer.

I never feel this happy when I eat meat, except perhaps turkey, and that's the sleepy drug kicking in, I suppose, and the fact that I always eat it with family on holidays. I feel vegetarianism at my heels again. I've become picky and paranoid about meat lately, even local, all-natural, no-hormone meat. And then, the other day, this happened: We were driving along, almost off the interstate, almost into the bosom of our little town, when a big semi passed by. It was one of those with slits in the walls, and through the slits we could see great big soft, dirty black cows.

"Where are they going?" the girls wanted to know, delighted that, Richard Scarry fashion, they'd seen a truck full of cows.

"I'm not sure exactly," I said, not untruthfully, since I didn't know WHICH slaughterhouse they were bound for.

"I think they're going to the fair," one daughter suggested, and then another said they might be going to a great big cow park, and then Elspeth concluded they were headed for a field of flowers.

That would be nice. Ug. It was like a knife had plunged itself into my liver. All I could see was the death-agony eyeroll that accompanies a cow being slaughtered.

The sticker on the back of the semi said I [heart] LOVE BEEF. I did not read it aloud.

I think I'm a vegetarian, I said to Martin. That clinches it.

In other happier news, for the first time I saw a semi with its bed full of apples--not crates of apples or bags of apples. Just the naked spheres tossed in. There must have been thousands and thousands, piled to the top. It brought to mind another Richard Scarry fantasy: the overturned truck with apples strewn everywhere and the truck driver, in happy resignation, setting up a stand with "Apple Cider" advertised on a jolly sign.

Here's a cup of tea and some dahlias for you, be they a bit out of focus:

Enjoy!

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?