Chatting with Earthworms

Was raking weeds from the sugarsnap pea bed when I looked over at Beatrix, who mucks around, eating dirt and what-not, and spotted the LARGEST spider I've ever seen (out of the tropics) poised on her chest. I quickly cultivated it off of her chest with the rake, all the time saying in a strained voice: "Oh! It's okay, it's okay!" And then I stripped her down to check for spider bites. Nothing there. It occurred to me later that, contrary to my reaction of horror, the spider could have been a friendly sort of presence, maybe a blessing animal, albeit one that I do not like to see on my baby.

We've started explaining to the earthworms as we till the soil, "We are turning the soil to feed our family. Thank you for your help, and we apologize in advance if we harm you with our shovel. In turn, we will feed you and your family."

I think they understand. Or at least I hope they do, since I have inadvertently sliced a few in half in an effort to dig a big enough hole for our fruit trees. My comfort is that they are AMAZING WEIRD ANIMALS and chopping them in half does not send them to the next world. The girls love them, too, and fight with the fat robins about who gets to pull them from the upturned earth. They are under strict instructions to BE GENTLE, since our earthworms are some of our dearest gardening friends.

_____
They must understand more or equally as much as the children, ONE in particular who seems to have her ears full of PEEPS.

Overheard tonight at the Cockroft house, where Elspeth had performed yet another flip by the baby on the trampoline:

"Elspeth! When will you start LISTENING?"

Elspeth, head down in the carpet from her time-out position. "Um, Saturday."

I can hardly wait for SATURDAY!
_____
These pictures are for my mother, to whom we send many kisses and the message: YOU SURE MARRIED A HANDSOME FELLA!


Dr. Long never looked so good.

We could send you Beatrix to help you unload your dishwasher. . .

Or perhaps you'd rather have Elspea, who has shown a flair for cutting (her own) hair. . .I'm sure she'd love to take a gander at yours. . .which reminds me of the best quote overheard at the Cockroft house lately: DON'T GET YOUR GANDER UP!

This ties with Elspeth's version of a wounded butterfly: a butterflap.

Spring in the Desert

Somehow spring in the desert seems even more amazing than spring in Pennsylvania. So I thought this morning when I looked at my sister's blog (from the Hopi Reservation in Arizona) and her gorgeous, hard-won-from-the-scrabble flowers.

I especially love the greening tumbleweed.

And. . .Saturdays are good days for puttering, so I puttered over to my good used-to-be-neighbor-in-Kenya-now-lives-in-DC's photostream and was amazed, as usual, by her incredible, creative artistry. Such precision I can only dream of.

Craziness, ETC.

A good rain last night, and everything feels better in the morning. I imagine the trees are supremely happy, as are the children, who (except for B, who is supposed to be napping but is rattling her crib joints) are outside under a tent Merry constructed out of blue tarp and chairs.

I realized anew that a little creativity on my part goes a long way, so instead of continuing to layer threats on Elspeth, who had come in AGAIN asking to watch a video (which is not scheduled until 11:30), I packed her a picnic to eat on their camp-out. I mean, what is wrong with me? Have I lost all my joie de vivre? Why couldn't I think of doing something nice for a change instead of mounting to frustrated-parent hysteria: "I TOLD you to blah, blah, blah." At one point Elspeth retreated to the sun room and I suddenly had a revelation: Hello! I am not very fun to be around at the moment!

No award to me for Ms. Congeniality lately. Perhaps, in my defense, I could list all the delights that have sent my blood pressure soaring: Elspeth going missing (turns out she was just smearing her face with my mascara and lipstick);

Elspeth smearing defecation on the floor and not telling me until it was crusty;


Beatrix climbing on every possible table and chair and open dishwasher (including perching on the TV table, holding onto the edge of the TV);

Elspeth emptying clothes from hampers and freshly folded baskets;

me losing my keys and credit card, etc., which blew off our roof on a busy road;

me running down the car battery to dead so now I have no car for a couple days;

Merry making sure her life is fair;

Elspeth spilling grape juice all over a friend's white carpet and then the next night dumping huge quantities of fish food in another friend's aquarium AND dumping salt on the chocolate cake;




and many other small things that go uncounted, like Elspeth drawing on our blue Subaru with a rock, Elspeth pushing the baby; Merry insisting her life-sized baby doll sit at the breakfast table to the squishing of her mother; Beatrix with a cold teething; children calling me at every turn; Merry tattling on her sister; Elspeth disobeying generally and suffering gut-wrenching time-outs where she screams;

let me end with a great, big ETC.

You know, just dumping all this on all of you out there in space makes me feel better, or more desperate, or at least gives me the strength to leave the computer NOW. . .and retrieve sad baby.

Man ohhhh Man

Man, oh, man. Am I beat. I'm sitting here, noticing the deepening of the greens outside, listening to the kids play in the bath, wishing Martin were here for DIVISION OF LABOR. It's something I count on. You take care of the kids, I'll cook up supper. Etc. It's been such a nice, sunny day--I planted four boxwoods around the fruit trees and know I need many, many more. A few at a time. . .

Beatrix took a few steps this morning, right after Martin left for work.

It's been a lovely day. I am just exhausted. We've all been fighting with a cold/head virus for the last few days and I feel like watching TV and having my mother bring me supper on a tray. Let's see--I'd have chicken and rice and bright green peas. And a cup of milk. And a slice of lemon meringue pie, thanks very much.

Anyone have any input on the current question: charcoal vs. gas barbecue?

Write your recommendation on the bottom of a plate filled with chicken and rice and bright green peas. Inscript your contact information in the meringue on my lemon pie. And send to:

ME,
IMMEDIATELY. The kids are waiting for their hair to be washed.

Thanks.

Early Signs

Out of my window, I see a blue jay hopping around the sharp frame of the sleeping roses. He's bright against the varied browns of our garden, embarrassingly overdressed for what looks like a very somber, very dull party.

Looking more closely, though, you'd notice that the weeds and the grass are greening. The crocus along our front path are crowned with saucers of purple and white. The daffodils are a stubborn green (though I've yet to see the buds on mine), and even a little pink tongue is curling out the ruins of last year's peonies. If you squint, the forsythia bush down the hill is just beginning to twinkle yellow.

And the fifteen trees we planted last week show promise in varying degrees--one of the apples has furry brown buds on her branches, coaxing me to get that deer fence up. As Garrison Keeler reminded us on NPR last week, March is tasting-table season for the deer, and our deer are sweetly obnoxious. Never will I forget the way they waited, biding their time, until all my roses were fully budded until they munched them down systematically and (I imagine) gleefully the night before promised bloom.

In fact, perhaps the laundry can wait just a little longer while the girls and I tromp outdoors and get that fence up. Perhaps we'll even have the pleasure of crossing paths with one of the fat, warm, feathery robins that are filling our garden at the moment. Robins make me so happy.

TREES

My friend Nancy called me up this morning to see if I wanted to shop for trees.

YOU BET!

Martin was wading through his grading so the two of us loaded fifteen trees (and two for her) into the back of the purple van and headed for home.

I guess we all know what Martin is doing this week! Eastern redbuds, flowering crabapple, assorted fruits. Hoorah for trees.

Merry and Elspeth and their friends spent almost the entire day outside, cooking soup and rolling down the hill and playing Laura Pioneer. Even little Beatrix crawled up the hill and tumbled down again.

Did I mention Martin grading? At least he's taken it all out to the porch, into the warmth of the day and the spring wind.

To close: first open, shockingly yellow crocus seen today. Elspeth picked it and
gave it to me, saying, "It's for you, Mommy. It's a swamp lily."

PS. Thanks to friend Tonya for the above picture.

Being By Oneself

"Sometimes, Mommy," said Merry tonight, after Martin and the two youngest had cleared off to the bath, "I just like to be alone. I love my sisters but sometimes it's just nice to be by myself."

"I know exactly what you mean," I said. How many times have mothers heard this line and commiserated in exactly the same way?

Two Very Grownup Girls

These are two very grown-up, lovely girls. They can spend an entire day in imaginative play--I think yesterday they were gymnasts who kept getting bothered by a nasty fellow named "Martin." But they had a ring which told them Martin's heart and thoughts and doings(very suspicious), could alter their appearance such that they were unrecognizable, and could bring them food and water.

Cold March Dreams

There's something about the haziness of this picture that really makes me long for summer. Then, at closer look, I realize this is the garden near sleep--look at the leaves turning on the maple. The farmer's market would have lined their stalls with deep crates of crisp apples and they'd be selling the last of the corn. We would have been sick of picking the straggling wax beans and eating chard.

I would have slipped out quickly and wandered barefoot through the early September evening to be with the insects and the cooling air and the heady scent of the garden going to seed. The cosmos' bright orange petals had begun to sharpen into black seeds, and the whole garden was a mess of weeds and invasive don't-belongs. I would have snapped some pictures, felt discouraged at the state of things, and hurried back inside for dinner.

But now, at the end of this fridgid March day, all I want to do is strip off my shoes and my sweaters, wander outside in the gathering dusk, and lie down on the garden path, hidden from everything and everyone by the rambling, scented flowers.

So sing a song of picnics, of wet feet and warm grass!

Of sweat and strawberries and naps in the shade! It's just around the corner, folks, just around the corner. . .

Two Elspeth Quotes

Elspeth, at dinner: Mommy, when you die, you get a prize.

Me: Really? What?

Elspeth: A pizza!

Thought: I'm not sure this is what St. Paul had in mind, re: strive for the prize before us.

___________
Elspeth, out of the blue: Summer means pink dresses!

The Inside of Music

I told Martin last night, "I bet nobody has ever done Lenten dancing to Better Than Ezra," and he agreed.

"I really don't feel like dancing," Martin said, all bleary-eyed from too much grading. I know how he feels, though I think he is, in general, a more patient and wise person than I, and that's why he's a teacher and I'm not. I absolutely hate grading a stack of papers--there's the writing that makes me hope for the future, but there's also so much bad writing--and then I'm torn between relationship with the student and the righteous indignation I feel when I write F, just stopping myself from adding, "Excruciating to read. After reading your drivel, I feel closer to despair than I did before I started."

Martin shows real patience, though, and he sees real progress with his students. He delights in their progress the way I find joy in the burgeoning of a story I'm writing. When we were in college, our graded papers bore--maybe--two or three comments, or check marks or just a grade. Martin fills his student's papers with comments and scribbles and marks, and he's gained a reputation for being a hard grader. But if they have any sense, his students know that this is the way Martin, as their teacher, pays them respect.

And so Martin emerged from the murky tunnels of essay grading not a little wall-eyed. And some weird dancing followed, people. Occasionally I'd see him behind me, with the purple hat pulled down over his eyes, writhing in inner pain. "Are we done?" I'd say, ready to turn off Ezra and go on to TV. "Another one," he'd answer, and pull down that hat again. "Can you even see?" I asked, and worried for his safety as he wriggled and dove all over the room. At one point he was thudding on the armchair with his fists.

"I'm inside the music," he said.

Let me give a little background here. Martin's and my first days together were marked by his musical snobbery. Minute by minute, he pulled down my castles of feel-good music and happily trampled on my preferences for show tunes and Roger Whittaker--in order to educate my tastes and raise me to his erudite mesa of artistry. In our little, two-door Honda with the bad sound system, he played tapes and CDs of music that literally made me want to jump out of the window. Or pound my head repeatedly on the dashboard. It was so unlistenable, so wretched, so discordant and NOISY. I resisted education at every possible, painful juncture. I had never cared about musician's or songwriter's histories or stories or approaches, and I jolly well was not going to start caring about what I thought was mere trivia.

BUT. . .ten years later, I'm opting for The Decemberists or The Weepies and saying things like, "That song is very Dylan, but he's totally butchering the approach--there's only one Dylan, and this guy is not him" or "That song has a real Beatlesque sound, but it's actually more like. . ." Blah, blah, blah. I can actually listen to a song and say who's singing it. And I enjoy a much wider range of music. But I still have little patience for music I don't like.

So this is why Martin, who's absolutely gaga for music and listens to the most appalling noise, got inside the music and was moving around our library like a bear with a toothache. Me? I was practicing kicking my leg and lifting my arm ballet-like. I was still aware of droopy boobs and how I wanted to take some more off the thickening wintry middle area of Kim Cockroft. But then. . .I shut my eyes.

And the whole library was gone, and so was Martin, and so was I. I was suddenly inside the Better Than Ezra song, and I was exploring the complexities of the music with my body. Mostly, I was pulling my arm toward my head, over and over again, like somebody caught in a loop, but this repetitive motion worked like a meditative prayer--I mean, it cleaned me out and took me to a place beyond sight or words. Needless to say, if I could have seen myself, I would have laughed myself silly or blushed beet-red. But I couldn't see myself--I just was.

I've always both envied and also kind of looked down on people who lose themselves in something. As a writer, I'm always writing about an incident as I'm living it. There's often the Voice narrating action and reaction and there's little chance of getting so lost in an experience that I haven't already formulated one or two descriptions of it. I'm rather embarrassed and anthropologist-like about ecstasy, of all kinds. My ears light up like ambulance sirens or I break into hives if I become too emotional with anyone I don't know too well. And if anyone had come into the library last night, I would have given a good explanation of our craziness and offered them tea. I mean, no way would Martin and I dance like this around other people.

And yet. . .maybe we should. Or maybe we shouldn't. There's no real cultural home for this kind of expression in our tradition. My stripe of Caucasian American doesn't do any kind of ritual drumming or chanting or dancing. The only venue for publicly losing self-consciousness is a charismatic church or. . .a bar? Or maybe a group therapy session? Though I am duly grateful for all The Enlightenment did for us and our culture, it ruined us in some ways, don't you think? It saved us from superstition, cleared our minds, gave us scientific method, and absolutely ruined our capacity to dance like fools. Or maybe the two have nothing to do with each other. Maybe, if we loosen up some, we who are tied up in self-important knots dance MORE like fools because we HAVE to--we have to give ourselves up to some expression that doesn't rely on the entanglements and pomposity of words.

Dance Party with Thirty-Somethings in Bathrobes and Purple Hats

Martin's cookin chili and the two older girls are quacking like ducks. Regular sort of night at the Cockroft house.

I wonder how a big bowl of chili and a beer will mix with Lenten dancing? Yep, Martin and I are dancing fools. And I mean that. This man, this man with big hands and fabled feet, who trips over rugs and collides with multiple household items on a regular basis, this man can DANCE, folks.

The first night we switched on Jamiroquai, with the lights on and the curtains open (we noticed at least one car slowing down as it passed our house, and we wondered what our new neighbors across the street must think of us). It took us a while to find our groove, and that was the night Martin figured out that if he wore the hat, he could dance.


The second night we turned off the lights and loaded up Ricky Martin. I started off in my huge red flannel robe that makes me look like a stuffed taco (it was cold!) but by the time the World Cup theme came, I had shed the robe and Martin and I were throwing ourselves wildly all over the library.

The third we tried some Kenyan/Tanzanian music (Martin said, this sounds like Paul Simon, and then corrected himself: Paul Simon sounds like this). We left one light on. It turns out that music from different continents stretches a whole new set of muscles you didn't know you had, and so ten minutes of this music knocked us flat.

And here's the funny thing: almost every night, I'm completely exhausted, and I kind of drag myself into the library. Martin often grumps about the music until he's got his dancing hat on, and after that he becomes a different crazy person. But after dancing, we are completely renewed, our appetites have altered to want fruit instead of our night-time junk fest, and we've laughed ourselves into a younger mood. This is the stuff, people. Sheer silliness and shine.

The Chicken Knows

Ah, peace at last.

If you're ready for some nasty stuff, read on. Otherwise, go fold your hands and think nice thoughts.

Tonight Martin managed to come home for dinner. I was ready for a little time by myself, if only to sweep up the waves of rice that flowed from our table during supper. But the bliss was short-lived, since after depositing the children in the bath he selected music, packed up his guitar, and took off to his literary magazine's twice-annual open mic.

By now I'm pretty used to evenings with three children and only one of me, and I thought tonight I had things pretty covered. But have you noticed how things always go wrong in droves? Never only one thing goes amiss--say, baby scattering dirt all over your rug--but there are three more that follow, and they are always totally unrelated to each other. You'd think, for instance, that the three things going wrong at once would make a cohesive, interrelated whole: for instance, the baby gets into dirt, the toddler eats it, and the older child slips on it on the way to the bathroom.

But no, my life is more like this: the baby scatters dirt WHILE eating it IN a leaky diaper; the toddler runs into a wall two rooms away and bleeds on your friend's book she lent you; the older child's tooth falls out; AND aliens land in your back yard and flatten the petunias. These four things are completely unrelated, and yet, like old Murphy warned, once the chaos gets rolling, that's it. You may as well hang up your sanity on a hook and chuckle dryly to the five-foot chicken on your right. "It's happening again," you tell the chicken, and the chicken nods and clucks and reaches for The Economist. "Let me know when it's over," the chicken tells you, "And we'll have a beer together."

Anyway.

So pleasant scene: children splashing, cleaning themselves, luxuriating in the warm water. Merry lets out a scream. It turns out that Elspeth has leaned over and in a sort of gothic sisterly love, bitten her on the stomach. I haul Elspeth out the bath, wrap her in ducky towel, and march her downstairs, where I strap her into the time-out chair. She pulls the ducky beak off her head and begins to audibly protest her just punishment. This protest lasts all evening until much later.

Upstairs, the scene is once again charming. Merry innocently queries: "Why is Elspeth crying?" And then she says, "What's all this floating in the water?"

I glance over. "It's just fluff," I say, "From socks or something. Don't worry about it."

"Okay," she says, and proceeds to wash her hair. The baby continues splashing. Elspeth screams from below decks. Then Merry holds out her hand. "What's this?" she asks.

You know what it was, right? Let's just cut to the chase: POOP. A nice little baby poop pellet. And that alien substance all over was NOT fluff from socks.

Informed of the truth, Merry stands up from the bath, gouging her back on the faucet: she begins sobbing rather loudly. The baby splashes on and I comfort Merry and begin to drain the water. As the water drains the baby begins to splash her feet more and more vigorously, dislodging yet more excrement from her seat.

Knowing that my journey has just begun, I decide to pee while I can; I sit down and realize there is no toilet paper.

I told you this was not pretty. Add to this that we were completely out of easily accessible diapers.

Merry looks at me and observes, with dawning happiness (she's a writer), "This is a BAD night."

* * *
Well, to make a long story short, I survived, all the while retaining my calm--and soon all the children were freshly showered and bathed and all was right with the world again. I even got some laundry folded. Maybe this doesn't sound all that chaotic to you, but there's some spirit of chaos that presides over chaos that doesn't help matters much; the events become much more than the sum of their parts. You people know of what I'm speaking, right? Everybody has their own muse of chaos. Mine only happens to be a five-foot chicken. He never gets his wings ruffled; he just stands around, totally useless, reading the material I never get to, while I run around like the you-know-what with the head cut off. It's ironic, really. And yet this Chicken of Chaos knows the secret to his success. It's the secret that keeps us friends, keeps us popping cold ones at the end of the day.

Rock on, my chicken.

Totally Losing It For Lent

I've decided to give up moderation for Lent. This has been a running joke in our house for years now--I always have plenty of suggestions for Martin on what he might give up for Lent (of course they always directly benefit me) but all I am willing to give up is housework (especially laundry) or self-control.

But this year, I'm totally serious. Last night we were eating beef (a rare occasion at our house). I had carefully set aside a piece of fat so I wouldn't eat it but Elsepth, as befits her perfectly, grabbed it up and stuffed it into her mouth. "That's disgusting!" I said. "Don't eat that! It's yucky!"

"It's GOOD," she said, and she chewed it up and swallowed it. Seemed appropriate on Fat Tuesday. Elspeth eating beef fat for Mardis Gras. But before you vegetarians (sorry, my sister) faint dead away, I do have a point. I'll get to it eventually, maybe (unluckily for you people, I've given up pithiness for Lent as well).

Those of you who know us well know that Martin and I have moved an ungodly number of times before settling here at Wazoo. One of our years was spent in an incredibly frigid part of Iowa, in a picture-perfect little Dutch town. I do mean, PICTURE PERFECT. It was like a set from a movie. The streets sparkled, the park was immaculate, and the sound of mowers roared up and down the streets all week long, except on Sunday, when a preternatural quiet fell over everything like a blanket of create-in-me-a-clean-heart snow. (A couple people warned us that Sundays were serious business, but I didn't really believe them until, right before we left said perfect town, we ventured out to do a little gardening on a Sunday. And by golly, the nay-sayers weren't lying. We felt as if we were sacrificing goats on our front lawn to some unknown god instead of digging holes for flowers in the soil.)

In the spring, tulips popped up in absolutely perfect rows as if they were in a florist's window. And I wouldn't be joshing you if I told you that people went out with little bitty scissors to manicure their grass. Those of you who have ever driven by Wazoo know enough about us to realize Martin and I were totally and completely out of place there. And it was a funny thing, too--though everyone was very nice, I've never seen such sour, dour expressions on the faces of women.

After some months of this absolute perfection, what I wanted (even if I didn't articulate it then) was loud neighbors, big-boobed grandmas wearing skimpy tanktops that showed their armpit hair who called their children with booming voices. I wanted a Mama living next door who knocked people upside the head and boiled huge pots of pasta. I wanted some guy with a hat on backwards to take his shirt off and fix the car on a Sunday. I wanted a Mardis Gras parade in the streets. Instead, there was a Tulip Festival, where all the girls clad themselves in wooden shoes and swept the spotless streets so clean that you could eat Dutch sausage right off the pavement.

Now we live in such ramshackle glory that one sad day I actually yelled after a motorist like a banshee: GET A MUFFLER! But, despite the rather loud cars without mufflers and the coal mine not far away, Martin and I feel much more comfortable here in our completely imperfect corner of Pennsylvania than we ever felt in Dutch Perfection.

So I'm paddling slowly back to Lent here. La, la, la. It seems to me that many of us Puritans or self-deniers have a lot to learn from ramshackle, from the people we squint at who are too loud or too expressive in their grief or their joy. We use the same expression with both people who have lost their heads in tears or lost their heads laughing: Oh man, she's totally LOST it. Thank God, we think, we've got the self control not to slop ourselves all over the place. So we retreat to this great, terse, pithy sarcasm to sum up what's deep and mysterious within us. It's so East-coast of us. So funny. So dry. And so Oscar Wilde, too, and so smart. It makes us feel in control to arrange our thoughts and our faces so neatly and picture-perfectly.

I think I'm going to give that up for Lent. I've never been any good at it, anyway. I will not attempt to be a park full of tulips. I will be the weedy garden I am all the time, and I won't make anyone miserable because I'm not perfect. Hey, everyone, I'm a mess! And so are you! Happy Lent to you!

Becoming more and more loosey-goosey is a job for some of us, especially those of us with Finnish or German blood. Martin has a dose of Italian and Irish or Scottish, so he's okay. I, on the other hand, must continually remind myself that I want to be an eccentric, happy old woman, not a tight-fisted, angry one. And I want to do it largely without chemical stimulants.

Also, for Lent, I am taking up dancing. Or I should say, returning to regular dancing, since everyone dances when they are children. Every night after I deposit the children in bed I will turn up the music and I will dance like a fool. Martin is joining me. He has to wear a purple hat with a tassel in order to really loosen up enough to get his joints swinging. But once he tightens that purple hat around his ears, he's crazy magic.

If anyone would like to join us, I expect we'll start at around nine at night and go for about forty-five minutes. Bring your hats, bring your fats, bring your messy selves.