Wait for it. . .

Our band's last gig at the Harvest Festival, photo courtesy B. Randolph
Martin's beside me, picking out chords and trying to play Kings of Convenience's "Gold in the Air of Summer." The alternate tuning sounds really nice, even though he just stretched on new strings--the ends are sticking out like six lethal whiskers. New strings always sound cold and tinny, but he's warming them up.

Our friend Amy was just here practicing with us for our band's slot in. . .wait for it. . .the Faculty Talent Show at the U! Tonight Amy said we should all just quit our jobs and go on tour--our three girls and her daughter could ride along in the bus, do our accounts, set up and tear down for us. Who needs school? Tonight, over tomato soup and grilled cheese, Merry tried to get Martin and me serious about becoming famous. "You could go on the Prairie Home Companion," she breathed, her eyes round, "Or Mountain Stage!" (When you don't have TV reception, radio provides all points of reference. When asked at school to name a famous person, Merry named Carl Casell, who among other things, is the official scorer for "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me," the NPR news show. . .and he IS in the Radio Hall of Fame.)

I said, "Merry, if Daddy and I were famous, we wouldn't get to spend so much time with you girls."

She took this as a valid point, though she finally concluded that Martin's and my dreams were old ones, and we'd probably fulfilled all of them already.

In a flash of warmth, Martin told her one of our dreams was to have three girls, and we did, and one of his dreams was that he would marry me, and he did,

to which I said, "That was one of my dreams, too." (I meant, to marry Martin, of course),

and Merry looked at me and asked, "You wanted to marry YOURSELF?"

I said, "One of my dreams was to have a smart-aleck eight-almost-nine-year old, and that came true." And she grinned.

I am losing any cohesive thread that might have linked this blog entry together. Oh, well. The girls get school off tomorrow for. . .wait for it again. . .the first day of hunting. They will not be hunting, but most of the county will. I will be doing laundry and writing an article and praying for the deer.

Peaceful Family Outing

A woman with a beautifully dark complexion and a thick mass of hair that hangs down past the ties of her green apron just came and cleared my table. "Got left with the dishes," she commented.

"That is a GOOD deal," I said. "Left with the dishes but no kids. I'll take that ANY day."

I stood up and tried to help her load up the black tray and succeeded in tipping over plastic cups and wadding a bunch of white napkins in one fist. "We had a bit of an incident with the hot chocolate," I explained. (Was I twitching? Was my eyelid fluttering uncontrollably?)

"That's what a mop is for," she replied, waiting as I fumbled with more dishes. Finally she said, as I swiped at a storm of crumbs all over the table, "And we have cloths to mop off the tables, too."

Now the woman is wiping off the rack of gift cards by the check-out, her hair lustrous under the recessed lighting--and I realize that she's pregnant, close to her due date. Is it her first child? Heh, heh. Life is about to change forever, lady.

Another couple just came in with a baby strapped in a car seat--the man, an older guy with trendy glasses and hiking boots, just paused from working on his Blackberry to tuck in a striped green, white, and blue blanket back into the seat. His wife, also working on a Blackberry, speaks low in German. Goopy, spineless, relaxing music--high female voices singing indecipherable but probably Christmassy lyrics-- spread over us all like a vague blessing. . .the man utters a long stream of oogie-boogie--ahs and unearths his son, a surprisingly chunky kid, suited up in shades of blue, from the depths of the blanket. Now, over the loudspeaker, there's a disturbingly operatic cover of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah.

Just a few minutes ago, this corner of the box bookstore up on a hill just over the PA border in West Virginia was a blur of hands waving soup spoons, smashed bagel pieces, crushed green straws, and an arc of hot chocolate that spattered two out of five family members--Bea had already speckled her white turtleneck with chocolate and Elspeth, who dropped the cup, missed the fountain entirely.

It was shortly after the chaos that Martin offered to take the girls to the children's section and the woman with the gleaming hair came and saved our table from its sad state.

And there you have it. Just another peaceful family outing. And still the Christmas music streams on--now a 1950's beat, a perky female voice, and lyrics that include: bells, ring out, Christmas every day.

It's a magical time, all in all.

Now Italian, a duet of two of the world's most full-throated tenors.

PIE

I just had a happy thought: Pie! Pumpkin and pecan, rummy whipped cream, in glittering foil south of the milk jug.

We carried home this treasure from our Thanksgiving home up on a ridge. This friendly fellow, J, roasted a turkey covered in fat-back. Oh, my. Can the spits of heaven hold anything more succulent?

I just chatted with my brother-in-law and their turkey, when they cut into it, spurted blood and was still partially frozen. Though I missed family this holiday, I am rumly satisfied to think that I ate the far superior bird. (Thank you, J, T, and kids, for a lovely feast!)

Martin and I have spent this guest-less holiday writing in the evenings. "An hour and a half!" he said tonight, and we sat down with our laptops and fell to. I feel as though I should be working on another short story or my article for the paper, but I've been swimming through the warm waters of poetry instead. Perhaps it's the changing weather--instead of knitting I'm turning to the tight link of words, though they haven't been particularly warm nor cuddly--mostly just strange.

But there's nothing strange about pie and I'm just waiting for Martin to give up so we can shake off the silence and eat.

I give thanks for Ogden Nash, my old friends, my father, etc.

I'd like to thank my father for reading Ogden Nash to me. At least I remember his boyish face, his eyes alive with the impending mirth, the expectation that Nash would bend us double with laughter. When I actually read Nash poems, I wonder if my memory is correct: "Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker" is one observation I don't think my father ever shared with us as he sat on the edge of my bed. And I was a young adult when I read about the clever turtle being so fertile, and I was older still--just turning NOW, as a matter of fact, when I found the gentle account of Miranda turning thirty: "How old is spring?" the poem finishes. And it was only last winter that Martin gave a splitting reading of that fabulous fable, "The Boy Who Laughed at Santa Claus."

But I am not giving a shout-out to Ogden, but to my father. Actually, scratch that. WHAT HO, OGDEN! YOU ROCK! It's not every man who can write a two line poem about a cow that makes me laugh out loud. Make yourself thankful for belly laughs this year and go read some zappy shorts. Please, I beg you, do not skip the one on parsley.

Leave dear Ogden for a minute, jollyish reader, and return to my white-haired, bushy-eyebrowed, laughs-through-his-nose father. He read to us for hours when we were children, mastering voices and even singing when called on by the text, though his singing voice sounds like Winnie the Pooh's. He read us everything from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, (where I first heard about menstruation) to the entire Lord of the Rings series, which we stretched out over our interminable summer car rides when we were on leave from Kenya. Go back further than that and I have my father's voice calling out the islands of Maine in Robert McCloskey's Time of Wonder --his voice is imprinted so strongly on those words that I still cry every time I read it to my own children.

My father travelled quite a lot, and I remember the smell of his suitcase as he unzipped the old, fake leather and threw it open. Nestled among his socks and toothbrush were small gifts for us. If he'd been back to America, the open suitcase smelled like ziplock bags and drugstores and my grandmama's house in Pennsylvania. If he'd been to Thailand or Dacca, the suitcase was damp with humidity and smelled of sweat, dust, and spices.

I just chatted with my mother on the phone as she floated across the Puget Sound to join my sister and her family and my brother for Thanksgiving. Here I am, sitting at a table covered with my mother's old blue tablecloth, spun in India; the white stripes in the cloth start at Martin, who works at the other end of the table, and flow all the way across to me. Silver sage from our garden dries among candles; there's a painted leaf Merry brought home from school and a paper with an upside down heart and the word MOM that Elspeth presented to me this afternoon. A box of Kleenex (Bea has a cold), the roar of the heater, lamplight glowing on our mantle clock. The sounds of my father's voice deep down inside of me, my mother's laugh fresh in my ears. I give thanks for all of it, for the glitter and drop and water-flow of so many stories, for the way they fill me with color.

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.