I Have Loved the Beauty of Thy House

At 5:00 on Sunday morning I pulled a crying June from her crib and tucked her into bed next to me.  I have not done this– she has not asked me to do this— since the night before her first birthday.  I lay down with her and rubbed her back and prayed for her to go back to sleep.  She did, but I stayed awake.  And although I didn’t know it at the time, just a few miles down the road the church that I have loved for nearly 10 years was burning to the ground.  By 6 a.m. the church, in the words of our minister, belonged to fire.

The church was built 170 years ago by people who knew many things that I do not know.  They knew how to thresh wheat, and how to butcher an animal.  They knew how to mix a salve that would heal an infection and how to steep a tea that would end a pregnancy.  They knew how to sew bandages and how to ferment cider.  They knew how to build a church so that the morning sun would enter the windows in every season.  The people who built our church were the children of Revolutionary War veterans and the grandparents of boys who died in the Civil War.  They were people who loved their children and feared their God; people who spent their few precious hours of rest each week listening to sermons about serpents and demons, and fire.

Can I describe the church?  Can I conjure it for you?  I can’t.  And what would I say, really?  Beadboard walls, iron sconces, a wooden pulpit.  No cross.  I can tell you that you would have loved it, that you would have walked through the door and believed that this was what a church was meant to look like.  I can tell you that during the long and lonely years when I was waiting for my roots to take hold in the rocky soil of these hills that church was my salvation.  In that little room my life was made holy:  in May the flowers on the tiny altar were the same as the ones that bloomed by my mailbox; in March the congregants’ muddy bootprints covered the painted wood floor no matter how carefully they wiped their feet at the door.  These were people with whom I shared the same late  harvest and early frost, the same relief at the sight of steam rising from the maple sugar shacks in February, the same joy in swimming in cool lakes that we had skated across six months before.

On Sunday afternoon we gathered at the Parish House.  I parked on Main Street and walked toward the church.  There was bright yellow tape strung across the road leading up the hill, but I could still see what was left.  I cried loud tears at the sight of it, and kept walking.  During the service we prayed and sang and laughed; we clapped and we cried.  We collected an offering for Haiti.  I cried for all my Sundays there, and especially for our girls’ baptisms, and I tried to remember that they were baptized with water from a creek that still runs and by minister whose heart still beats strong in his chest.  So much remains.

There will be a new church.   And as a consolation prize, it might even have a bathroom.  But I hope it doesn’t have much more than that.  I hope it is one small and simple room nestled against that ancient rocky ledge.  We are a wild and creative, a holy and raucous, congregation.  We love big, we dream loud.  We stomp our feet and we laugh; we hold each other’s hands and each other’s babies and each other’s fragile hearts.  We are, dare I say, a bit undisciplined.  That church, that 170 year old building, held us.  It held us down and it held us up and it held us together.  It kept us quiet (sometimes) and it kept us humble.  That 170 year old building was built by people who loved these hills and who knew so many things we do not know. When it comes time to rebuild it I hope we bow to their wisdom which was, of course, born of necessity but also must have been born of grace, and of the prescient knowledge that nearly 200 years later we would need nothing more than a room filled with pews on which to rest our  bodies; nothing more than a dozen windows so that we might see each other’s faces in the morning light.

The Hen House

I am happy to announce that my first monthly column is up at Literary Mama.  I’ll be writing stories about my so-called rural life for the next year or so.  Thank you in advance, dear readers, for following me there.

Time for School

Last September Grace started pre-school at the public elementary school down the road.  On her first day she wore a new dress and a blue backpack monogrammed with a G,  and when we got to the classroom door I gave her a kiss and she ran inside.  I drove home, June squawking in the backseat, and when we got to the house I picked the last of the peaches from our tree and peeled and cooked them and fed them to her.  They were her first solid food, and because Grace lived on breastmilk and cheddar bunnies for the first 18 months of her life, I watched in awe as June leaned forward to receive one spoonful after another until she had eaten the entire bowl.

I did not want to send Grace to that preschool last September.   I wanted to send her to a charming community preschool two towns over.  But I knew that I could not spend two hours a day in the car; I knew that I needed June to take naps in her crib so that I could work and have time away from her.  So I sent Grace to a school that Chris and I did not like as much, a school that seemed too traditional, too academic.  I did it because I knew that a happy mother mattered more that preschool, and I knew that she was flexible and capable and would be content at either school.   It was a decision that has brought our family enormous good fortune and happiness in the year since, but at the time it was deeply painful for me.

Three afternoons a week I would pick Grace up from school and take her right home.  She would play for hours.  She played school with her babies and her animals and from the kitchen I could hear her in her room imitating her teacher:  “One, two, three: eyes on me.”

In the kitchen I sat at the counter while June, who could not yet sit up on her own, sat in a Bumbo seat in front of me while I spooned jar after jar of food into her mouth.  In all the time Grace was a baby I never once got to the bottom of a baby food jar.  I sat at the counter and fed June mushed sweet potatoes and whole avocados and bowls of oatmeal mixed with goat yogurt.  And while I sat and fed her I listened to Grace playing and I listened to NPR, to poll reports and interviews with people who believed in McCain and feared Obama and interviews with people who believed in Obama and feared McCain.  I listened and I worried about Grace and I worried about Obama and I scraped the bottom of those baby food jars with a long-handled silver spoon and I prayed that it would finally be enough food to make this baby sleep all night.  I can see the woman that I was during those weeks,  I can see her clear as day.  I was tired and worried about my children whose circles around me were widening, although not in a way that brought me freedom or perspective, but rather in a way that required me to watch them more closely, to read their signals and their signs and to figure out for myself, by myself, what it was they needed from me.

On Tuesday Grace started kindergarten.  Chris dropped her off on her way to work, and I stayed with June.  I thought it best to give Grace some space, to let her walk into that school on her own.  She already knows and loves her teacher who has been gathering the kindergarten children at the local playground on Friday mornings this summer.  She knows the principal and the teachers and the secretary and the nurse and the women who work in the cafeteria.  She knows most of the 80 children who go to her school, and many of their younger siblings.  To say that I feel lucky that she is there would be an understatement.

As I write this June is asleep in her room.  She fed herself lunch today: a bowl of yogurt mixed with peaches.  Some of it landed on her shirt, but she managed to spoon most of it into her mouth without any help from me.  The windows were open and I could hear the starlings in the bird house and the tractor in the field.  The radio has not been on in weeks.

Late Summer Bloom

I am working on a post and it will be up very very soon, but until it is I thought you might appreciate some new flowers.  Words are on their way, I promise.

Sweet Francaise

Perhaps by now you have figured out that posting will be a bit light this month.  Let’s pretend I’m French, or maybe a therapist.  Let’s pretend I’m a French therapist.

We are on our way to the beach this week and we’ll be back in time for the first day of school, about which I will, no doubt, have many things to say.

Stolen

This morning I swam at the lake.  Even though this summer has been wet and cool, I still manage to find my way there several times each week.  Swimming in open water is my version of putting up food: I store the water in my muscles and my memory so that I can make it through the seemingly interminable winter.  Some days I am lucky enough to go to the lake alone, and today was one of them.  I swam for a long time and when I got out of the water a boy, maybe six or seven years old, was standing in the shallows.  “You are a great swimmer,”  he said to me, “really great!”  His little sister concurred.  I thanked them both.

When I got back to my car I opened the trunk. The parking lot was empty, so I quickly peeled off my suit and put on my clothes, combed my hair, and laid my suit on top of my towel so that it would dry.  I went around to the front of the car and got in.  I turned to get something out of my purse, but it wasn’t on the seat next to me.  Had I put it in the back seat?  I turned to look and saw shattered glass everywhere.  All over Gracie’s car seat, and June’s, and the space between them.  Glass in the shoes Gracie always leaves on the floor below her seat; glass on June’s blankie and her pacifier.  And no purse.  A purse that contained my cell phone, five tubes of lipstick, an umbrella,and a wallet containing three credit cards, a driver’s license, a wad of ATM receipts, and eleven dollars in cash.  I could care less about the contents of said purse, it’s the purse itself that I want back, the Orla Kiely pear print shoulder bag that is mostly likely sitting in a dumpster somewhere in the Daughters of the American Revolution State Park in Goshen, MA.

I spent the rest of the morning and much of the afternoon filing a police report and calling the insurance company and the auto glass shop and the bank.  I also ordered a new drivers license and I thought about ordering a new purse.  I  talked to Chris a dozen times, and to my mother, and to several friends.  Karen, the girls’ babysitter and third mother, brought them home because the auto glass shop can’t fix the window until tomorrow afternoon.

Whenever something like this happens to me (and something like this–thank God–hardly every happens to me)  I think of a little boy I once knew, a boy I’ll call Jeffrey.  I knew him when he was four years old, and I was twenty-two.   I was his preschool teacher.  Jeffrey had a crazy life, a life filled with disorder and violence and sadness and loss.  His father was in prison and his mother was struggling to keep body and soul and family together.  He was a feisty and sweet boy.  Jeffrey loved the water table, he loved to wash plastic baby dolls and to fill and empty pitchers of soapy water.  He had trouble getting along with the other kids; he was aggressive and loud and easily frustrated.  When he was absent from school I was both worried and relieved.  One Halloween we took the children trick-or-treating to the stores around our school and when we got back to the classroom we insisted that the children put their candy bags in their cubbies.  Jeffrey refused.  He screamed, he kicked.  My co-teacher, Peggy, who was infinitely better equipped to deal with Jeffrey than I was, helped him to calm down enough to tell her why he did not want to take his candy home.  He couldn’t bring the candy home because his older brothers and sisters would take it from him.  Peggy took Jeffrey to the office and held him on her lap while he ate every single piece of candy in his bag.

Jeffrey would be nineteen now.  Maybe he made it though elementary school intact; maybe he was rare and diligent and lucky enough to graduate from high school; maybe he’s in college now.  Or maybe he decided that school just wasn’t his thing and he has a job that he loves and that gives him enough money to live a life that feels like a good life to him.  Maybe.

Who are you when you see something that you want behind a locked door and so you smash the window above a child’s  car seat so that you can get it?  Who are you when you don’t wonder if the child will be able to sit on that seat when she returns from the lake, or if that child will cut herself when she reaches down for her pacifier and it is covered in glass?  What, exactly, has been done to you?

I didn’t lose much today.  A fabulous purse, a cell phone that I think might have been broken anyway, and a half-dozen tubes of lipstick.  All of it, except the time I spent makes phone calls and signing papers at the bank, can be replaced.  Maybe I could say that I also lost some of the peace I feel at the lake, some of what I love about that place, but that wouldn’t be true, really.  I still love the lake. I still believe that it is mine.  But the person who broke my window, the person who shattered that glass all over my children’s car seats and their belongings just to get at that purse, well, I have a feeling that he has lost many, many things that he can never get back.

Turning Five

Yesterday I got an email from our CSA farm telling me and all the other shareholders that the tomato blight has reached our tiny corner of heaven and there will be no tomatoes this year.  No tomatoes because of a perfect storm of rain and fungus and sick plants grown in Alabama and sold in Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Kmart stores all over the northeast.  As I read the email I wondered how many people bought those plants because they heard Michelle Obama telling them that every American should grown a garden.  I wondered when we are going to get serious about the politics of agriculture in this country and start talking about the connections between the production and distribution of food and the health of our bodies and our planet.  And then I wondered if I would still be able to make gazpacho for Grace’s birthday party.

This year Grace is turning five.  She wants a castle cake, an Easter egg hunt, flower appliques on her fingernails, and a Bitty Baby.

She doesn’t care about the gazpacho.  The gazpacho is for me.  And so is the enormous bouquet of yellow flowers that I have picked every August since she was born. The flowers grow behind the hoop house at our farm, and they are singing their swan song every year right before Grace’s birthday so the farmers let me pick as many as I want.  One year I picked enough to fill two big metal florist buckets from our wedding.

It’s a pleasure to give birth to an August baby.  There are so many symbols of her arrival and her blossoming life.   Peaches, tomatoes, lake water.  Clear warm days and long views of beloved hills.  Blueberries.  All of these things remind me of my girl.

My girl.

When this girl was a tiny tiny baby, we wanted the same things.  She wanted to eat; I wanted her to eat.  She wanted to sleep; I wanted her to sleep.  I was running on instinct then, an unconscious loyalty to evolution.  I would do anything to keep my little one from the hawks.  What she felt, I felt.  The needle pierced her skin and I flinched.  The amniotic sac was burst, the cord cut, and in their place grew a membrane so thin it may as well not have been there at all.  At first.  But over time it began to thicken in places, and so eventually I could listen to her cry and not want to fall to the floor.  I could deny her my breast and my bed and I could be relieved to do so.  I could put her in the hands of other people and I could sit at a desk and work and not think of her at all.

We still live close, that girl and I, even though we want different things now.  There are thin spots in the membrane still, and I believe that they will be there a long time.  I believe that they will be there forever. But I can see that soon we will enter a time when it won’t be as easy to find them.  We will bump up against each other, we will chafe, she will turn away from me.  And– I find this harder to believe, but I know it must be true– sometimes I will turn away from her.

We talk about her birthday party everyday now.  I haven’t bothered to tell her about the gazpacho dilemma;  she never eats it anyway.   Yesterday we decided that we will serve fruit kabobs with balls of watermelon and “real melon” (cantaloupe) and a single blueberry to blunt the skewer.   I made a test skewer for her and sat with her at the counter while she ate it.  After she finished she licked her fingers, pronounced it perfect, and slid off the stool to find June.  Next week I’ll make a dozen of them.  Maybe she will make them with me, or maybe I will make them while she plays with her new Bitty Baby or rides her new bike.  She can do whatever she wants.  It’s her birthday, after all.

Tomboys

Early Sunday morning Gracie and I were outside painting her toenails when our neighbor, Meg, and her beau, Rick, drove by.  It’s always fun to see them coming up the road on a weekend morning after they have been at Rick’s house; Rick is Meg’s first boyfriend since her divorce many years ago, and he makes her so so happy.  He also makes us happy, and not just because he loves Meg.  Anyway, they slowed down and Meg called out the open window “Are you going to church this morning?  I’m singing!”

“Definitely!”  I called back, even though Chris was on her way out for a bike ride and I hadn’t planned on going to church.  But I wanted to see Meg sing, so I got myself and the girls dressed and packed up an overnight bag of snacks for June and headed over to West Cummington.  We were a few minutes late, which didn’t matter to anyone except June who does not like walking into a room filled with people.  She got scared, so scared that she wouldn’t let go of me and couldn’t stop crying.  I tried taking her to the back and then outside for a minute, but she still clung to my dress and cried.  I sent Gracie back into the sanctuary to get my purse and we walked back down the hill to the car.

“Can I still get that candy?”  Gracie was referring to the Lindt truffle I told her we could stop for at The Creamery on the way home from church.

At The Creamery counter we were behind a woman who was buying a basket of lunch food.  “Have you all been at some sort of function?”  she asked me.

“Oh, just church,”  I said, “for about 45 seconds.”

“You all look so beautiful!  I have two daughters and we are all total tomboys.  I can’t even get them to shop in the girls’ section at the store, let alone wear a dress.”

I don’t like the word tomboy.  I don’t like the idea of a girl being referred to as a boy just because she doesn’t conform to traditional ideas about how girls act and what girls love.   Why can’t the definition of girlhood include everything that a tomboy is and wants to be?

“Oh, they always wear dresses,”  said the woman working the cash register.  She was exaggerating.  A little.

A few minutes later we went outside to the parking lot.  Tomboy Mama was parked next to us.  “Can I show you?” she asked with a smile.

“Sure,” I said.

She called for her girls and as if on cue they came out from behind their red Eurovan.   Both of them (twins, maybe?) were dressed in t-shirts, long shorts, and Keen sandals. They both had long curly hair; one of them was wearing hers in a pony tail.  “See, she said. “we always look this way, we hardly ever get beautiful.”

“It looks to me like you are always beautiful,”  I said.  And I meant it.  Those girls were stunning.  I also wanted to tell this mother that she should be careful, soon enough her girls would be breaking little femme hearts everywhere, but I didn’t want to scare her.

The truth is, I think this woman knows how beautiful her daughters are.  And from the way she was dressed, I also think she genuinely delights in the sight of them.  Perhaps she wasn’t always allowed to look the way she looked yesterday, maybe her mother forced her to wear dresses or told her that she looked grungy when she insisted on wearing pants to birthday parties.  And maybe the sight of me in my brown linen shift and my daughters in their pink and flowery sundresses reminded her of an old standard that sometimes, despite herself, she thinks she is supposed to meet.

Or maybe–hopefully–she was just taken by the beauty of my daughters the same way that I was taken by the beauty of hers.

You Must Do The Thing You Think You Cannot Do

No, I didn’t join Facebook.

I bought cloth diapers.  Cloth Diapers.  As is diapers that you put in your very own washing machine after you rinse the poo off of them in your very own toilet.

Cloth diapers have always been my stay-at-home-mother line in the sand.  I will be completely financially dependent on my partner, spend entire afternoons blenderizing cooked kale and freezing it in ice cube trays while intermittently blind-sweeping Polly Pocket stilettos out of my baby’s mouth, but I will not wash shitty diapers.  Rural life has enough challenges, what with the wood stove and the weekly trips to the dump and the 30 minute commute to the children’s pain relief aisle at CVS.  There’s no ordering out for pizza up here; there’s no running out to Target.  There’s enough work for twenty lifetimes in these hills, even if you never wash a single diaper.

So then, why in the world did I order them?  I’m a little embarrassed to say I don’t entirely know.  Maybe it’s because these diapers are so damn cute.  Really.  You should go and see for yourself how cute they are.  I can’t wait to see June’s biscuits in them.  And maybe I ordered them because I see my life as a Baby Mama drawing to its natural close and I just want to see what it’s like to use cloth diapers.  Maybe I ordered them because if the girls ask me someday what I did to save the planet I want to be able to tell them I did something more than use lots of those grocery bags Sheryl Crowe designed for Whole Foods.

Whatever the reason, those diapers will be here in 7-10 business days.

Wish me luck.

Blogging for LGBT Families Day. . .

. . .was yesterday.

I drafted a post last week, but instead of finishing it over the weekend I worked in the garden.  (You remember the garden, don’t you?  I swear it’s going to be different this year. )

Anyway, be sure to visit Mombian’s list of participating bloggers.  The list just grows and grows.