Being Paper Stinks

Just before bed, Beatrix came downstairs and said, "Aw. Paper can't draw."

I thought she was being particularly empathetic. In our world, where half of our household is drawing constantly, I never once stopped to think about the poor, sad plight of paper: assigned to passivity, made to carry adornment and art, good and bad. The pencil or pen or crayon--now, they've got the good jobs.

I suppose Bea suddenly had a flash of awareness into another creature's plight; that the sympathy was directed to an inanimate object just made it more charming. I love how children twist your head around on your shoulders like that.

On that note, Elspeth's friend Ben (who comes from a balanced, nonviolent household)educated me today as Martin and I made the kids lunch. "If you lose your head," he explained, "You're dead." He clarified: "If someone slices your head off with a sword, you're dead. But if they cut your hand off, you're okay." (Also, he added, a foot or a leg would be okay, too). A few minutes later he told me: "God is everywhere. So if you play hide and seek and God is counting, he'll tag you really fast."

There are No Monsters in This House

In the past few months, Beatrix has developed a complicated relationship toward Monsters. Like my big sister, Heather, who loved volcanoes and would bring home loads of books picturing explosions and decimation but who also hid them in the bottom of her closet at night, Bea both adores and fears Monsters. She jumps at books depicting anything with fur or horns or a scary or dopey (Jim Henson variety) face; she loves the book A World Full of Monsters, that shows that in the 'olden days,' monsters were plentiful but now only fix and clean things at night (Martin has major issues with this book as he says it reads like social commentary).

The other day Bea got a simperingly sweet look on her face and said, "Aw. Monsters best friend to me." Pit this against her panicked dive into pillows in the Play Room and the trembling that accompanied "I scared, Mommy. Monsters!" I watched her run into a room and pause, whispering to herself in a somewhat unsure voice, "No monsters!"

Tonight some friends kept our children so Martin and I could cram unbelievably big pieces of Spider Roll soaked in soy sauce and wasabi paste into our mouths. Bea came home freshly bathed and in her little friend's pyjamas. As soon as we stood in our front hallway, she requested that I remove her p.j. shirt, which sported a picture of a T-Rex. No monsters!

Before bed, she mentioned monsters again. Now, some parents may use Reason or a big can of Monster-Off to comfort their children, but Bea and I have together developed a song. If you have monster problems in your house or in YOUR HEAD, you can also employ this little ditty, adapting it to your needs, of course.

Chorus:
There are no monsters in this house!
There are no monsters in this house!
There may be a tiny mouse,
but there are no monsters in this house!

Verse 1:
There is a Beatrix in this house.
There is an Elspeth in this house.
There is a Merry in this house.
But there-are-no-monsters-in-this-house!

Repeat chorus.
Add verses as needed.
Sing until heart palpitations are less insistent and fear is less quivery and sleep is. . .imminent.

Got to share: a poem, Postscript, about leaving Kenya, accepted by The MacGuffin this morning. Also, my last column in the Observer-Reporter (click on geranium at right)may finally cast some clarity on your next career move. It helps to live in a sunny, warm climate, I expect, though our hot dog guy manages just fine in PA. See. . .if you can catch the grammatical error I overlooked as well as the tricky idiom (misplacing, mistaking, grasping for idioms runs in my family). Martin has given me plenty of roughing up over the O-R one, though I don't think it's as bad as my mother announcing that "some guy was going to sue another guy until his pants fell down." Mom, I know you told me not to tell anyone you said that, but the statue of limitations is up.

Poetry in the Church Kitchen

Tonight, I read Babar's Family, The Gardener, and Yesterday I Had the Blues to Elspeth. I made my way through that beautiful, gentle book, The Year at Maple Hill Farm, by Alice and Martin Provensen, and it might have been as Elspeth and I studied the cows snuggled into the hay that sleep began knocking on my head. And then I was gone for two hours. My Martin just awakened me to drink tea. Falling asleep early is a Sunday night tradition for me, especially after a weekend like this one, where we partied. And partied. And then partied some more. Our Mennonite Church had a big anniversary bash all weekend. We attended the coffeehouse Friday night, skipped the hymn sing Saturday, and came back for a full day today. In the afternoon Martin and I strapped Bea into the car for a short nap before he and I led a workshop on poetry as prayer.

The workshop was small but good, in a tiny, airless room with bright frogs on the wall. We looked over a diverse group of poems Martin had compiled, from Rilke to John Berryman, sacred East Indian verse to Denise Levertov, and some great ones by Maurice Manning, where he addresses God as Boss. We'd just started into our own writing exercise--I had begun:

You are the great huge boulder I saw
as we drove past broken-down houses
and bars with cold neon signs
Fast food wrappers clogged the gutters
and a woman staggered across a bridge past sealed cars

I had the boulder fixed in my mind: immovable, striped black, in the middle of a wide creek banked by bare trees--the water lapped and beat and foamed and streamed over the rock. . .I was looking forward to getting that boulder on my page. It had so delighted me as we drove a depressed, ugly part of town. That was during our drive where Bea slept--and just as I wrote To my, a little girl in a purple dress popped her head in to say Bea was crying.

And was she ever. Her little chest heaved against me when I lifted her up, her face was streaked with tears and snot, and she wanted to go home. I couldn't blame her--it had been a long day. She smeared chocolate on her face as I arranged a platter of cookies for the post-workshop reception, and soon other women from the Poetry workshop appeared in the kitchen, arranging things on platters, filling white coffee pitchers. I helped find a broom and a dustpan to sweep up the shards of a broken mug in the hall. I never got to finish my poem, and when I stopped back in with a clinging Bea, Martin was finishing up. I was disappointed at the timing of Bea's breakdown.

Now, looking back, I realize that there was a really good sort of poetry happening in the kitchen--the story of community, the movement of people in a kitchen, a smeared and broken child sitting on the counter comforted at last, food being placed carefully on plates and a stream of hot coffee filling pitchers. It's such a old, familiar poetry, and one I know well from growing up in churches--love becoming tactile, feeding and being received by hungry people. Poetry, incarnation, food--these together are good.

Just A Small Town Girl

I have had the Journey song, "Don't Stop Believing" stuck in my head ALL DAY LONG. I kid you not. As I type, it's reeling in the back of my brain like the handle on a meat grinder. I am about to be driven to distraction. I am about to. . .

break open another Troeg's Dream Weaver Wheat Beer. I'm afraid the song "Dream Weaver" is not sticky enough to displace Journey, though. Blast it all. If I could only. . .

hold onto this feeling.

Attended an eight year old's birthday party today; there were all these young children running about in fairy wings and stuffing red velvet cake with black-green icing into their mouths. The icing covered an Eight-dollar Bill Cake, embossed with the birthday girl's head. Also on the cake platter: three or four cupcake coins in the front. I hear that we will see evidence of this bright and delicious cake tomorrow at noon. They tell me this is something I can look forward to, since Thanksgiving is still some days away. It's the next big thing.

Don't Stop!

Oh, man. This is worse than the hiccups.

Sorry, But I'm Making an Abstract Right Now

Martin brought home gifts for the girls yesterday from a bookstore. Elspeth's was a big book of Chagall, whom she's shown an affinity for. The book wouldn't have been my first choice for a four-year old, especially since the cover, To Russia, Asses, and Others, depicts a woman painted in a cubist style with her head floating away into a black and red sky. Elspeth took it in stride, and Martin left her in bed last night "explaining the paintings to Pink Bear:" See, that woman is tossing her head in the air, Elspeth was saying as he walked away. It just goes to show you that children hold diverse worlds of wild and crazy things--they're not disturbed by the things that make us squeamish, and the soil of their imaginations are rich enough to produce sunflowers and wolves and teapots and monsters with six heads. No young child I know has ever showed any horror when Grandma is eaten by the wolf or when the woodcutter arrives and cuts the wolf's head clear off. . .

Anyhow, this morning, Elspeth was at her Drawing Table coloring like crazy.


"You'd better get dressed, honey," I said--she was almost late for preschool.

"I can't. I'm making an abstract right now."

So, at the price of timeliness, we let her finish.

Here's her work, rather influenced by Chagall, I think, though there are no discernible heads floating away. Maybe that's coming later.

Mice and Other Small Things

Martin stole this line from me and sewed it into his fabulous poem, Proposal:

We must have a proliferation of pockets--
pockets for money and mice and other small things.
We all must give a little.

Martin loves dashes. I am fond of semicolons, and it is this sort of diversity that brings real spice to our marriage.

He also loves the song, "Dreams," by Fleetwood Mac, which he is strumming out on the guitar next to me here. This is his second time through; the first time was folky, but this time he's playing it with staccato notes and a bluesy flair: When-the-rain-washES-you-clean-you'll--KNo-ho.

Back to mice: my friend Michelle ma Belle went to to a big box pet store yesterday and, persuaded by her love for her adorable children with their angel faces and the salesperson, who assured Michelle that the mice were of the same sex and therefore would not produce more rodents in the privacy of wood shavings, she brought home two manmice.

Next day, and the boys have made urine that would sink a freighter, much, much urine. So Michelle M.B. does a little research on the big-box-pet-store site, and finds out:

NEVER, EVER BUY TWO MALE MICE, YA IDGIT. TWO MALE MICE WILL FIGHT AND PRODUCE ENDLESS STREAMS OF UGLY-SMELLING PEE TO MARK THEIR TERRITORY AND PROCLAIM DOMINANCE OVER THEIR SMALL BUT SIGNIFICANT REALM.

So Ma Belle calls the good old staff back at same pet store and repeats information gleaned from their website.

"Oh, we only have male mice here," they say. "We only carry males of everything. But there's a Female Big-box-pet-store up in Pittsburgh."

It turns out mice are returnable for twenty-some days. Maybe damaged or already-been-opened goods go to the snakes. . .in any case, M. M. B. was going to buy something reptilian or amphibian in the first place, but it turns out that those suckers are rather expensive.

All I can say is that I hope my girls, when they visit their friend's new female mice pair, are not smitten. I was forever turned off of rodents-as-pets when I walked into my bedroom as a child and saw Juliet eating Lady MacBeth and two other tiny pink, squealing hamster babies. Romeo was small and a coward; he just stood by and let it all happen.

Then there were the Russian hamsters who escaped and attacked my mother in the middle of night--amid her shrieks my father had to locate a thick winter glove to haul the crazy buggars away. Soon after, they escaped into the local park. Nobody knows how exactly they got so far from home, but perhaps it was in the same manner as when my little brother's goldfish slipped into a hole in the arboretum's frozen pond. My mother said, "I'm sure he'll be fine." She may have added something about the wild being an animal's natural habitat, and I think my brother was placated. At least he didn't have to clean the bowl anymore.

Found: Excitement

Well, that's what I get for craving excitement. Martin's parents left this morning, but before they did, I shopped for a dinner for 15 plus people and cleaned and vacuumed out the car (you could have licked the floor and had a full meal before the vacuum sucked it away). I knew for sure about this dinner. . .this morning after breakfast.

This is what I accomplished (I'm sorry, I am weak and need praise:) one huge ham, one immense pan of washed and cut root veggies, two sheets of rolls, an excellent salad in an incredibly humongous bowl, a bowl of fresh broccoli/carrots, a double recipe of my favorite chocolate cake, plus cinnamon whipped cream (Elspeth held the beaters for me) and an elegant fruit platter. And a pot of spiced apple cider.

Who's the woman?

Not to mention, cleaned the bathroom and the house.

And stayed pleasant throughout.

I said, WHO'S THE WOMAN?

The occasion was to honor and meet an author, Sam Swope, who stood in our kitchen in his blue pull-over sweater, tousled hair and socks (he'd shed his brown leathers at the door). I liked him immediately; his smile was infectious and unaffected, his way of speaking easy, and he genuinely seemed to care about asking another person questions and listened well to the answers. This is, I've found, unusual for visiting writers--they often shine a bit with a sheen of interest but you can tell travelling and speaking in countless places have gotten to them--maybe it's self-preservation so they don't get too exhausted. Some travelling writers talk to you like they might chat with the person sitting next to them in a plane--the conversation is interesting but you know you're just one more face that they'll forget. There was something really tangible about Sam Swope, though--maybe it's his experience teaching young children--I thought he was the kind of guy we could have around the house, drinking coffee and chatting with the kids. That is my highest compliment right there. I'm looking forward to picking up his book, "I Am A Pencil--" he's also written picture books.

I've got to put the girls to bed. Oh, I really do. And then I've got to clean up the downstairs.

Oh, one more thing: I just got my copy of the magazine, The Christian Century, and my poem is in it. You can pick one up at a bookstore.

I've had enough excitement now to make me crave a little good old sitting around tomorrow. How capricious and easily satisfied is this woman--or easily satisfied until the next craving, anyway.

Your Assignment IS. . . .

On this grey day, I've written a column and a draft of a children's picture book text. Folded one load of laundry and look forward to another exciting basket of underwear, socks, and shirts. Eaten maybe four pieces of lemon tea cake. Kettle heats, as we speak, for more tea. Diapers changed, children dressed. I can't remember what I fed them for lunch because I didn't--Martin's dear mother gave them mac 'n cheese while I finished working.

In one way, Elspeth and I are very much alike.

Like her, I'm always craving excitement. A check, neatly tucked inside the acceptance letter in the mail, the envelope flap licked days ago by some bushy-browed or braided editor somewhere. Where did I get this sense for impending delight? Is it folded into my personality? Where's the next party, people? Where's the next new thing to happen? This is not a trait of an adult, I don't think, or not an especially good one when it feeds impatience and makes me want to shout out in church or nail somebody with a whipped cream pie.

Which I did. Last year. The pie, but not in church. Sometimes life needs refreshing, a little injection of the absurd, a little performance art. My pie-throwing was misunderstood by several people. But real artists have been misunderstood throughout history. Why do I live with my tongue in my cheek?

Today it looks like Wazoo Farm is past 32,000 visits. Thanks, all you who check up on me and the craziness. To celebrate this vague occasion, go do something absurd and interesting in: Five, four, three, two, one. Yahoo! Wazoo!

Hey, everyone. I've got to give a great big wave to Anna at farmphotographie. Her photographs are really beautiful; REDS are my favorite but you may find BLUES delight you more. Check them out by clicking on her link above. Anna and her sisters also have a fantastic photoblog--find them in "Calling Cards," below right. I love moseying over to see what they've been up to in a day, and to bask in the warmth of their sisterhood.

Sleep

Ah, sleep is stalking me. Could it have something to do with the fact that we just finished a bottle of wine, a lemon-roast chicken, sweet potatoes, and peach-apple sauce with whipped cream? Or is it that we were at church practically all day: service, teaching Sunday School to a group of chickens, and then choir practice? Or maybe it's just Sunday evening, my usual time to drop in a heap at 9:00, warm and content, until morning.

Martin's parents have been with us for some days now, and their visit has sped by at a sadly fast pace. We've been eating a lot and laughing. . . .

I need to write, drink, ride my bike, read, laugh, kiss, more. I need to sing more, yell less, relax, sigh deeply and not sarcastically, and only once a day, because I am content.

All you whom I love, and all you who hold worlds of longing and joy: pleasant sleep to you. Brightness and strength in the morning.

A Few Wazoo Events

The community is busy this season,
with tea parties on my mother's old crocheted tablecloth with a tea service from my own childhood (I saved the Holland blue and white from my mama's purges). . .

. . .fishing (Bea and her friend Ethan: "I caught a big one. . .")

Maia and Merry, urbane sophisticates (often in fairy wings)

Merry reading to Elspea and the "lost Cockroft sister," Lily. . .

I do not have pictures of our recent Mystery Party at Murphey, the dog's house, where Martin dressed as a sleeze and I dressed as a hippie, nor do I have pics of other events, such as the very successful playgroup on Poplar Ridge.

**PIC OF T'S AMAZING HUMMUS HERE**


I also do not have a picture of my most recent oven fire, though I will describe it in the near future for your edification.

**SMOKE HERE**

I do not have a picture of Martin's recent poetry reading at the public library, though that was immensely fun.

**HANDSOME POET HERE**

I love having such a good poet for my husband. He really read well, with expression and hand movemment, with humor and confidence. Though I had heard/read those poems and offered my critiques, hearing them out loud took them from flat words to three dimensional objects; I could see each poem catching the light, sparkling, casting shadows. We need more poetry readings.

Merry Wander

I just browsed through some of our old pictures, and I found a series I'd saved under "Merry Wander." Merry, my oldest, is one of those children whom I've often seen walk away, not because she's angry or doesn't love home, but because she's brave and independent. The first day of school she set her jaw and boarded the bus just as she used to steel herself for a ride on the merry-go-round as a toddler. As the painted horses bobbed up and down to the cheery music, she'd scowl in concentration. Once when I was pushing her on the swing, she said in a musing sort of way: "I recognize that I'm having fun."

Dear Merry, wandering about not because she's lost but because she's determined to experience the next adventure, whether that means leaving home without a second glance or hunkering over a book she's reading, barely glancing up for a kiss before bed.

I looked at those pictures of her wandering into the snow, across the rocks in Sedona, down into the desert scrub, and I felt this stirring every parent feels, a mixture of pride and a little sadness at the water-gush of time: you can't cup it in your hands; it just rushes out, cold and clear, astonishes you, and then passes on through your fingers, and slips away. Of course there's always more coming, and that keeps me so busy and engaged that I have very little time for sadness.

And today is so bright and warm, a fuzzy gift in my hands, that I think a merry sort of wander may be called for. Over the river, then, through the woods!

November in Africa

Thought you all might enjoy what I found in my inbox this morning, from my dear childhood-in-Kenya friend, Rachel Robinson. Rachel is Kara's little sister(Karaduck--she's got flat feet--my bosom friend through middle and high school). I spent a lot of time at the Robinson's house, basking in their peaceful, silent, wind-chimy, planty, sun-catchery home, avoiding their clever, unpredictable African Grey Parrot, sitting at their dinner table in slight awe of their bearded father, Uncle Robbie, who grew up in East Africa and could speak Masaai, Swahili, Samburu (did I miss any? I'm sure I wrote one of them wrong), teasing their little brother (who is now a hunk, by the way), eating Aunt Margie's peanut-butter bars and hoping she'd make me meatloaf sandwiches layered with sliced dill pickles and ketchup for my school lunch. With Rachel, I always enjoyed a sort of middle-child camaraderie: What up with those oldest sisters, man? Rachel and I used to do things like run in the rain, hurl coffee beans from the plantation around their second house outside Nairobi, and shout life predictions to the wide, blue sky. I think mine was to write a musical, direct it, and perform the lead part. Thank goodness some predictions don't come true (I also said I'd wear a purple wedding dress but that was years before the musical one).

Let's see--November here means dusty coats, footie pjs, the roar of the furnace, the garden dry and brown. Anyone for East Africa? Here's Rachel:

From Uganda-- whoot whoot!! :) Wish I felt as excited about that as I sound right now. Naw, I mean, its all good-- just somedays I feel lonely and far away from people who really know me. But community takes good time. So I'll be patient. In the mean time... being here IS good. I do really love it. I love that it is still sunny and HOT during the days-- mid November. I love the parrots that fly by every morning on their way to work... And the monkeys that hang out in my guava tree making a racket.

For more of Rachel's adventure and images of her life--pictures so beautiful they make my heart ache with longing--visit her blog.