I will just write titles and let you fill in the blanks. Like:
Spilled milk is blue under blacklights
or
Pinkeye and red nose
or
It’s really cold in the parking lot at three in the morning
(Note to self: don’t leave contact lens case in car.)
Monthly Archives: October 2006
See, Our Old Neighborhood Is Having a Bit of a Bear Problem
Rose: What do they have in San Diego–wolves, foxes, or coyotes?
Me, thinking it’s the setup for a joke: Um, coyotes?
Rose, dead serious: Oh great. From bears to coyotes! That really is out of the frying pan into the oven.
Goodbye, Almost Heaven–Hello, West Virginia
We’re in Charleston WV, not-sleeping in a hotel room. This morning was hard: the goodbyes. Then the Blue Ridge slipping away behind us. But oh the gorgeous views. We saw autumn progress by the hour: so many more reds and goldens in the trees here.
Stopped for a long break at the New River Gorge visitor center: awesome. Kids had a ball hunting the answers to nature mystery exhibits. I stopped there on a whim and we wound up staying almost an hour.
Oh hooray. Wonderboy is finally nodding off. Me too.
Words Fail Me
The house is empty, and it’s time to say good-bye to this green valley. Away, we’re bound away…
We Survived (This Far)
Well, here we are. Loading day. The girls have spent their last night in this lilting house. Tonight they’ll stay with our dear friends, the friends we moved into this town and this neighborhood to be near. The little ones and I will sleep here one last night on a borrowed air mattress, and tomorrow morning we’ll hit the road.
But that’s tomorrow, and first there’s today. The truck will be here in a couple of hours. We are ready. After all the frenzy of the past week, yesterday brought a bit of a lull; the packers finished early on Monday because we’d done so much of the packing ourselves (and by "ourselves," I mean me and a dozen-odd friends and neighbors, some of whom drove all the way down here from northern Virginia and New Jersey). (Amazing.) So we had yesterday afternoon to spend with some friends we met in our first weeks here but feel like we’ve known our whole lives. Eileen, the mom, is Wonderboy’s godmother, which means I get to keep her forever no matter where we live. Her six boys and two girls chased my gang around the boxes, and we dug up a clump of the mint that I planted from a sprig Eileen gave me when she was moving out of her old house. Her clump had come from her mother, and now she’ll start it at her new house on the other side of the mountain. I had saved some columbine seeds for her from my flower garden this year, too, and I like to think of those blooming in her pretty farmyard next spring.
Anyway. Lots to do this morning. I’ll probably be back to blubber on the keyboard tonight, though, me and my empty house.
Meanwhile, Scott has moved into our rental house in San Diego (where "moved into" means "carried in his bag of clothes and his guitar, which is all he took with him") and is eager for us to get out there and set it lilting.
Our Backyard Gave Us a Going-Away Present
It’s a good thing I don’t have much time to write today, because I would no doubt get all weepy on you. Today is loading day. The truck will be here in a few hours. But I had to tell you. It wasn’t long after we moved here that I discovered Jane’s undying passion for butterflies. The two of us conspired to create a butterfly garden on our little slope at the edge of the yard. We planted butterfly bushes, asters, bee balm, coneflowers, turtlehead, fennel, cardinal flower, and a whole bunch of other plants, including—and most important— milkweed.
Milkweed is the only host plant for monarch butterflies, the only plant monarch caterpillars will eat. A monarch butterfly might stop to sip at your flowers but unless you have milkweed, she’ll never lay her eggs in your yard. And since monarchs migrate to and from Mexico each year, they need lots of milkweed along the route for each successive generation of travelers. But as more and more housing developments (like ours) are built, there is less milkweed growing wild in meadows. And hardly anyone plants milkweed on purpose.
But we did. We ordered it from ButterflyBushes.com and planted it all around the yard, and we waited. And waited. And waited.
For four summers now, we have watched for monarchs. Jane has inspected our milkweed for caterpillar eggs or big fat green caterpillars, but we never found any. Now and then we’d see a monarch (or was it a viceroy?) flutter past, but there was no indication that our little garden was serving as a stopping point on the great Journey North. Or South, for that matter.
Until—oh, it was breathtaking. A few days ago I walked out onto back deck and looked down the hill at my little trees grown so tall, and the street beyond, and the meadow beyond that, and beyond the meadow, the Blue Ridge: the gorgeous vista that sold me on this house. And just in the nick of time before the tears welled up, I saw something. Around the enormous clump of asters, a fluttering, a flash of orange. Many flashes.
I walked down for a closer look. Oh! How can I tell you how my heart leapt at the sight! Dozens of monarchs, more than I could count, lighting on the asters beside the bees.
They came.
There must have been eggs on this year’s milkweed, there must have been caterpillars, but we were packing and we missed them. But we saw our monarchs, a whole flock of them—I can’t say "a rabble," which is the proper collective noun; I prefer the Deputy Headmistress’s coinage: a fluttering of butterflies. And oh that’s what it was. The purple flowers, the orange wings, the green jungle of neglected but dearly loved garden: my heart fills up all over again to write it.
Of course I called the girls, and of course Jane (and everyone else) was over the moon with excitement. We tried to get pictures but I never got more than five or six in the shot at once
and later that day a storm blew in, and afterward the great fluttering was gone. Perhaps they have journeyed on south.
But all the rest of this week we’ve seen monarchs, not in a flock (a fluttering, a rustle, a blessing!) but singly, flashing through the air past us, and we’ve known—how deeply gratifying to know this—that we did it, we brought the monarchs to our neighborhood, and they will be here after we are gone.
Which is to say, tomorrow.
All the Action Is Over There
Look, No Exclamation Points
The packers are here. I am sitting still long enough to nurse the baby, but I will take great care not to convey excitement or frenetic activity because PEOPLE WANT TO TAKE AWAY MY DR. PEPPER. Oh, look, I blew it already. Ah well. I’m a woman in labor, remember? Right about now Dr. Pepper is my equivalent of a nice hot bath. (Says the woman who spent most of her last labor in the tub. NOTHING beats a hot bath during labor.)
Anyway. Jane thinks you should entertain yourselves with her favorite website today: Absurd Math.
Sunday Morning Update: Stage Two Begins
Much better, wrist and knee-wise! So that’s good. Knee still gets me whenever I forget and kneel or squat, but we can work around that. And by "we" I mean me and the small village of people who have assembled to help me through this last push. Push! The pushing! I think that’s where we are! Four days of pushing ahead! I think I want an epidural.
(When Alice reads this she will be saying "Those are words I never thought I’d hear Lissa say." Ha! I am all about running a metaphor into the ground, baby!)
So: yesterday. Got a call from a realtor Friday night. She wanted to show the house yesterday morning between ten and twelve. I left her a message asking her to just call when they were heading into the neighborhood because there was no way I could vacate the unpacked premises for a two-hour chunk of time. Never heard back from her. We tidied up as best we could and my mom took all the kids to the playground. Lisa came over with her vacuum because mine is kaput. (Nice timing, Eureka.)
House readyish for showing, we turned to the dreaded Loom Room closet. The Loom Room is so named because it’s where we stuck my table loom when we moved in. I have done no weaving here and for months at a stretch the loom itself moved to the girls’ room (named the Blue Room because of the lovely coat of paint Lisa’s husband Dave gave it as a housewarming gift to us the week before we moved in—how awesome is that?)‚ where it (the loom, if you lost track during my long parenthetical) served as a combination playhouse/pirate ship when the mood struck. It sits upon a little stand, see, just the right size for draping with silks and hiding under. It’s hard to beat a playhouse with cool levers to move up and down and a beater bar you can bang really hard.
But good golly, how I digress. Anyway, the point is Lisa and I packed up the craft closet. During which time I learned a couple of things about myself, which were: 1) I am not the sort of person who should stock up at sales (case in point, the twelve boxes of crayons I bought for a quarter each at Staples two Back-to-Schools ago, ditto the fifteen packages of loose-leaf notebook paper); and 2) I really really love Waldorf-type crafts. Various people had mentioned to me the FlyLady rule of thumb regarding Stuff, which is that you should only keep those things which make you really happy. And every time I happened upon a ball of wool, a tuft of doll hair, or a box of that gorgeous translucent colored beeswax, my heart went pitty pat. So I kept that stuff. But I passed most of the loose leaf on to Lisa.
By noon I was pretty much clued into the fact that the realtor wasn’t coming. (Because that’s how sharp my deductive powers are.) Later in the day I discovered she had left a message at ten thirty, which I probably missed during the vacuuming. They are coming TODAY instead. "Between ten and twelve." Ha!
More darling friends (including Hank’s mom, Holly, and our longtime online pal, Sue) showed up after lunch to fetch the other loom, the one that lived in the basement, and to be at my general beck and call. Which was fabulous. Plus I got to meet Hank! Who is an absolute charmer! And who dazzled me with the boatloads of English he has mastered in an extremely short time.
So the rest of the day was work work work pack pack (nurse baby) pack sort sort sort (nurse baby/eat slice of pizza) pack sort pack (eat a brownie and then one more) call Scott with questions every 45 minutes (keep this? toss that?) exclaim over old picture at top of box but do not look at the rest or else blog commenters might scold you for slacking off but oh look how cute she was!
Everyone cleared out around dinnertime, my mom and I got the kids to bed, and I went back to the basement to work until around midnight. Which: thanks Alice, Chari, and of course my Scott for the phone company while I tackled those last boxes. I made it to the bottom. At last.
Crawled into bed between sleeping baby and toddler, tried to sleep but couldn’t because, well, THE PUSHING. Then DID sleep because I woke up at 3 in a panic: RAIN. Oh noooo. Ran outside (blessing the child who carelessly left her umbrella on the porch so I didn’t have to hunt one up because I think the rest are packed already or else are in the van) and moved all the Freecycle stuff I’d left in my driveway up onto the porch. Stupid move, the "leaving in the driveway" bit. Whoops.
Fell back into bed, rather damp but too tired to bother finding dry clothes in the dark, sank (I think) instantly back to sleep. Woke up at five because Wonderboy was, I don’t know, annoyed about something? That’s the best I can explain it: just a random toddler sleep-gripe. Then the baby woke up and thought about staying awake, but I drugged her with breast milk. Good stuff, that.
And here I am at sevenish, awake again for the next contraction. I can’t believe the packers will be here tomorrow.