ingrid

I like the phrase “dog days of summer”.  I realize that it is talking about the dog star being visible in the night sky and has little to do with actual dogs, but it still makes me think of dogs, lying under a tree in the shade panting.  It makes me think of my childhood and this obnoxious but lovable dog we had named Bilbo.

We have chicken days of summer around here.  I tired of stinky chicks in the house after a whole week.  That might be a world record actually.  The baby girls were banished to the henhouse last night.  I felt pretty proud of myself in this respect.  I rigged up a nice little place where the chicks can “hang with the big girls” without being pecked or smashed to death by the big girls.  You have to introduce any new members to the flock with care and consideration; that goes double for the little ones.  I had read enough horror stories on on-line chicken blogs, (yes, it is not just me), about baby chicks being killed by adult hens.  Other blogs suggested that new members could be introduced by the “seen but not touched” method.  Usually this would be by putting the new birds in caged off area where the established hens can get used to seeing the new birds for a while.  I think I may have accomplished this with the chicks by fencing them in above the nesting boxes in my storage place.

The babies still need warmth at night, so I ran a light out to the henhouse using my NEW outdoor plug.  I know that most people probably have one at their house and TAKE IT FOR GRANTED, but I do not.  We have not had anywhere to plug anything in to for the last 5 years.  Finally with the bathroom remodel I had them stick a plug through to the outside and now I have all this freedom to plug shit in!  How should I waste electricity first?  The possibilities are endless!  (I am thinking bouncy house!)

Unfortunately this is going to be a source of worry for me.  I wish I weren’t like this, but I imagine it will be a few nights before I can sleep without worrying about burning the henhouse down.  When I first got a running fountain outside I worried about raccoons getting in it for two nights.  What would they do there and why did that matter?  I don’t know, but I worried about it.

Besides chicken matters, little is going on these days.  After a summer jam-packed with fun and running around, my children seem to want to go nowhere and do nothing.  For the second day in a row I offered fun options, including requisite bribery.  They didn’t take it…. even for a pastry at the Italian bakery, even for a trip to the fountain downtown, even for a stop at the library.  What do they want to do?  Stay home.  Play with legos.  Dress up their animals (and sister) and pretend they are going to a wedding.

I’ve been vaguely frustrated with this because I am go-go-go!  I want to get out to Ikea and buy a new bookshelf for Francis’ room, hop down to Powell’s and pick up Suzanne Collin’s Mockingjay, (can’t wait to read that one!), get the right sized screws to finish mounting hardware in the bathroom, and we are all out of milk so we need to grocery shop.

But I am trying to go with the flow, and the flow seems to be a trickle, so I need to be hip to that.  I am trying to not push it so much, stay quiet and enjoy this lovely time of peaceful play.

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I have a babysitter for a few hours every Friday.  This is a life-saver.  Even when I don’t know what I am going to do with myself, I treasure those short hours of solitude where I can just be firmly in my own head, not listening to anyone, not talking to anyone, and not needing to consider anyone’s needs except my own.

My own needs at this juncture in my life are enough to balance.  I have come to accept that I actually need a lot… and I am not going to get it all at once, (or I hate to admit, maybe not at all!).  I have accepted this, but I am well aware that if I am going to get anything at all,  I had better prioritize.  Here is what I have figured out that I need for optimum happiness:

• solitude
• feeling independent
• being artistic
• being intellectual
• exercise
• a house that may not be clean but is at least not disgusting
• spiritual time to contemplate the Divine
• time to space out, sit in a cafe and read the newspaper or a magazine
• accomplishing some tasks that are either necessary or make life easier

Can I fit this all in three hours once a week?  Nope.  It is a balancing act, this motherhood thing.  I want to do an art project, but my body is screaming for exercise.  I want to read my book, but there is grocery shopping that must be done.  I want to stay home and clean but the kids are there with the babysitter.  I can’t have it all.

Today I went for independence and accomplishing tasks.  I did some light birthday present shopping, had a double latte AND attempted to read Ulysses, but my mind was completely wandering and I totally could not understand it.  So much for intellectualism!  On a whim, I hopped out of the coffeeshop and decided to go take a jaunt on the Wildwood Trail above Lower Mclaey Park.

Oh lovely, lovely, lovely.  I don’t know about you, but there are some things in my life that are so transcendent.  Singing in gospel choir is one of them for me, as is watching theater.  Sitting by running water is another, as is listening to early morning bird song and smelling the midsummer wild roses in bloom.  Wildwood Park is right smack-dab in the middle of Portland.  From some stretches you can hear the work on the waterfront and the cars zooming through downtown and St Helen’s Road, but from other places you can hear… nothing.  Nothing except the birds.  This morning I walked for a few hours, letting my mind go blank, dreaming of things, (specifically, how to hike the Pacific Crest Trail with kids and how I might get over to Japan this year to see my sister Anne).  Half way through this hike, I felt my chest lighten, my brain lift out of my head, my breathing become slow.  In short, I was really, really happy.

I am not an unhappy person, but I think a lot about holding on to happiness.  Why is it that sometimes we are so joyful and full of life, and then another day things seem flat?  It isn’t what is happening to us; somedays nothing at all happens and I feel so great.  Others, not so much.  I wonder though how to get back there to the happy place.  Why can’t I live there all the time?

I know that we hear this all the time, but we human creatures NEED nature.  We need the woods.  I returned home peaceful, tired, ready to meet my little ones and make some grilled cheese sandwiches.  Recharged.  Ready for another week.

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The weather is better and MOST of our chickens are looking much healthier and happier… all except the dead one that is.  We lost a chicken last night.  Dear sweet Bella (white one in the middle) had been acting sort of strange during the day.  I noticed her standing in a weird spot in the run.  I have a hard time quantifying what was so weird about this “weird spot” because there isn’t anything truly odd about where she was standing, but it is just not a place that my chickens regularly choose to hang out.  Does that make sense?  Anyway, she was standing there sort of nodding off and I thought, “That’s odd…” but left her there as it was sort of nap time and I was tired myself.  (Did you know that chickens nap during the day?  They are tired just at the same time I am tired!  Another reason why I like them!) When I returned to put the chickens in before leaving for a dinner party, she was sprawled out on the ground, twisting her head around and frankly not looking good.  It was apparent to me that she was certainly going to die and there wasn’t much that I might do about it.  I took her inside the house and inspected her body, gave her some water, and put her in a box full of clean hay.  There was nothing wrong with her body besides the seeming paralysis, greeny poop and messy vent.  I thought for about a minute about running a finger up in there to check for an egg that she couldn’t pass, but I mistakenly thought that I had gathered an egg from her that very day, so I didn’t bother.  Today when I got another tiny white and pointy egg in the nestbox it became clear— I had been matching this egg with the wrong chicken.  Even with this information, it seems unlikely that she had egg-bind.  The twisting head part makes the illness seem more nervous system related…. which is sort of a problem.

Bella was dead in the box by the morning of course.  Meanwhile, I was worried about possible disease that might bring the whole flock down.  I have this chicken manual that is THE REFERENCE for poultry keepers everywhere.  Unfortunately, it is written more for a serious operation than for a layperson like myself.  Most of the diagnosis for disease is only evident with an autopsy, and although I did spend about 5 minutes thinking, “Now I would bet I could cut this girl open and check if white deposits are on her liver!”, I think that maybe this sort of real science is not me.  I don’t even have a scalpel in the house anyway.  And the last time I cut anything open was high school science class.

So instead of picking up the hacksaw, I decided to scrub out the henhouse with bleach and water, pressure wash the roosts and make sure any infected poop was out of there.  This done, I settled in to check out the rest of the flock and saw…..nothing.  Everyone seems fine, healthy even.  Rosey fat foot is looking better, nearly normal actually.  Everyone looks plump and shiny with nice red combs and wattles.  And they are laying like a  henhouse on fire.  We are getting about 6 eggs a day.

The kids are sort of strangely unaffected.  They vacillate between being sad and asking if they can get another chicken… or maybe three!  Francis did have a 2 minute meltdown where she cried quite enthusiastically.  I don’t know how to respond to this sometimes as in these moments I feel the kids watching me, ready to follow my lead.  I don’t want to make a misstep in times like this.  Although I too am sad, I know that animals dying is just sort of part of life.  It is what happens when we choose this husbandry.  It is confusing in a different way from when people are sick.  You can’t ask the chicken what it needs, how it feels, if it wants a drink of water.  When I saw how Bella was acting, I knew that she would die.  There was nothing that I could do except make her comfortable and check back to see when the dying happened.  They live, they die.  We live, we die.  We are kind of powerless, aren’t we?

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I have decided that I need to give up Elizabeth Berg.  I think I have read about 6 or 7 of her huge body of novels.  Her voice is comforting and clever, and yet I am finding her insubstantial somehow.  I think I have decided that she is entirely too sweet, and it strikes me as unbelievable somehow.

Recently I finished The Year of Pleasures, the story of a 50-something woman who finds herself widowed and grieving.  She has no close family or friends to help her in her grief process, so she uproots herself and sets off on an adventure to settle in a small town where she might reconnect with society around her, specifically a cast of eccentric (but always kind) people.  I had a few problems with this.  First of all, it is a little unbelievable that anyone might completely cut him or herself off from EVERYONE around him or her and yet still possess the social skills to form friendships.  This character though is funny and charming, adventurous and willing to bond with all sorts of new folks.  Although she has neglected all friendships since getting married, she is able to summon a full-on gaggle of old “best friends”, roommates whom she had cut it up with “back in the day”.  She is accepted back into the fold and it is a non-stop girl-fest once they find her vulnerable and in need.  The explanation for her cutting off her friends after college?  She was too in love, too involved with her husband.  That is it.  Too in love?  I don’t think so.  How about Too dependent?  How about Too Unhealthy?  How about Too Lame?

It is hard to imagine that the friends want her back, but more so, it is hard to believe that she is capable of offering much to the friendship.  Somewhere along the way, the main character is bemoaning the loss of her husband and a friend attempts to comfort her.  ”You don’t know!” she whines.  The friend then quietly tells her about her daughter who died.  Hmmmm, I think.  Why would anyone want to be friends with someone that self-involved?  Someone who didn’t even ask or listen or notice that a friend had lost a child?

So Elizabeth Berg, you are not quite cutting it.  You are lovely and slightly cloying.  Sorry my dear.  Oprah may love you, but you seem like junk food to me.

In other news, I finished Louise Erdrich’s The Plague of Doves.  In contrast, Erdrich achieves an eerie sort of darkness that I find lush and compelling.  I always feel in a sort of trance reading Erdrich, and her newest is just as mystifying and ummmm—-erotic?  I am at a loss to describe this author sometimes.  She is such a beautiful writer, but strikes me as someone I DEFINITELY DO NOT WANT TO MEET.  She is creepy in that way; dangerous, changeable, divine.  I love her, I love that she writes so honestly about the uglier side of humans, but she freaks me out a bit.  (I will never forget her writing in her memoir of motherhood that when one of her babies was crying incessantly, she would swear at it in a sweet and loving voice.  ”You fucking, goddamn baby!”  This idea is totally fascinating AND repellant to me.  I absolutely relate to the love/hate experiences of dealing with crying babies, but could never quite pull that off.  Subsiquently, I am fascinated with a woman who swears at her babies.)

When Michael Dorris was alive, it was sometimes suggested that he was the genius and she the one who brushed up and organize his brilliant crumbs.  Now that he has been gone for some time and she has churned out 5 or more novels, it is clear that SHE is a genius all by herself.  Well, at least it is clear to me.

Last month I was forwarded one of those “100 Great Books” lists where you are suppose to go through and mark off what you have read.  I’m not usually a fan of spammy e-mail, but this thing sort of focused me a bit and I went to seek out some books I have never read.  ”Who is that Joseph Conrad guy?  And that James Joyce who everyone is always talking about!”.  The sad thing, (or maybe not?),  is that I was an English major in an early adoption time for multicultural literature.  By that I mean that I my university hadn’t worked out the kinks in their canon requirements and I managed to waltz through school never reading Hemingway, Conrad, or any other of a host of “dead white guys”.  If something was written by a lesbian or a person of color, well you can be sure that I read it!

This wasn’t much of a problem until I applied for grad school and realized that I really needed to be better versed in the literature taught in high schools and colleges.  Hence, much frenzied reading of “the classics”.  You can’t do that all at once however, so I am still hacking away at some of them.  Heart Of Darkness by Joseph Conrad was high up on my list.  This is getting too long, so I will say only that I thought it was totally awesome and totally not a book to waste on high schoolers.  People read this in high school?  My girlfriends agreed that they had read it in high school.  Needless to say, no one remembered what it was about.

In that vein, I am revisiting Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.  I am a huge Dickens fan, but well on my way to running out of Dickens.  Maybe when I finish his body of work, I can start into biographies about him to get my fix.  Anyway, I read Tale of Two Cities in college, but—well, I think I was too dumb for it.  I wasn’t ready for it.  I didn’t understand his humor at the time.  I took it all at face value.  I think I missed a lot of the point of the book because I just wasn’t mature enough.  I was too young for Dickens.

This is sort of an interesting issue to have to think about in regards to my profession.  Aren’t I in the business (or won’t I eventually be back in the business) of having young people read literature for their betterment?  What if they aren’t ready for it?  Okay, gotta get off here.  You can weigh in though.  Is it good to be “forced” to read classics?  Does it improve us as humans?  Would we eventually find that quality literature if no one forced us to?

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All my childhood my mom tried to encourage us to make our beds.  Every morning.  This seemed extravagantly meaningless to me.  After all, why make a bed that would just be torn apart come bedtime?  What was the point?

Suddenly this year I found myself making my bed in the morning, standing back to admire my handiwork, taking joy in the orderliness of one room in the midst of CHAOS.  I liked making my bed.  I enjoyed climbing into it in the evening, nice and neat, sheets tucked properly and blankets lying even across the top.  Order.  Sigh.  I love it.

So at 37, I now make my bed.  Change is possible.  There is hope for me yet.

If you look really closely at the picture you can see the Virgin Mary (and her dog) floating in spots of light slightly above my side of the bed.

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My uncle is making a nice new daybed/filing cabinet/reading nook/bookcase for us.  It is spurring all sorts of organization that is badly needed.

My life, okay–my personality–is problematic.  I am very sentimental.  I have a hard time letting time slip away from me, so I cling to all sorts of reminders of the past.  I went to move boxes around and noticed that I had two huge cardboard boxes labelled “memories”.  That seemed like one box too many, so I sat down and attempted to pull things out to recycle right there and then.  That was last month.  I spent most of that work session reading, laughing, and crying, clinging to cards with clever notes from deceased family members, precious reflections from friends during a time in life when WE ACTUALLY SAT DOWN AND WROTE REAL LETTERS TO EACH OTHER.  I couldn’t get rid of anything.  How could I get rid of the letter from a friend coming out to his parents and telling me how surprised he was that they still loved him?  How could I get rid of a letter telling about a friend’s new life in a new country with a new man she loved?  She was shocked to find love.  She was astounded to be learning how to communicate.  How could I toss my sisters’ early stories of the excitement of new relationships, especially when those boys they told me about are now my family?  It is all too precious.  I couldn’t toss any of it.  Finally I decided that I could recycle cards with just a signature (not good enough!), letters from people who I absolutely do not see anymore, and silly things that I wrote that are not immediately, apparently special.

A few things that I realized during this exercise:

• I have more friend than I ever though.   Many many people have loved me (*and hopefully still do!).  I think back on times when I felt lonely or sad in high school, and I am a bit in wonder of how I could have felt this with such a huge outpouring of support from all these friends.  I read back on these letters and see, “Oh, you’re so great!”  ”I love you so much!”  ”You are such a great friend!”, and yet, I don’t remember feeling that way.  I don’t know what my excuse was.  I guess I was a teenager.
• My siblings are so wonderful.  I have three of the most loving, clever, devoted sisters that a girl could have.  Throughout the span of my life, these women have been tied so strongly to me, and in their letters I see how, especially when I was off adventuring, they were continuing to reach out to hold on tightly to our sister-bond.  I have three sisters, so you would think that one could be a dud– but no.  They are all fantastic.  Lucky, lucky, lucky I tell you.
• Woa.  I was popular with the boys!  It makes me laugh at how transparent all these “friendly” letters are now (including the ones from my husband).  Why was I so dumb?!  Opportunities missed, I tell you!  Actually, I was very fortunate to have good male friends all the way through high school and into college.  These are charming, smart boys.  Their letters make me smile and hope that Zephyr can one day be somewhat like them.
• Thank you aunts and uncles who cared about me.  I have letters and cards spanning 20 years from aunts and uncles just showing that they were interested in my life.  That is important to get this sort of support outside of your own parents.  I hope to be a good aunt and god mother too.
• And yes, my parents were/are excellent.

Okay, now to ponder: do  you keep letters you “earned” (for drama & band!) even if you don’t have a letterman sweater to put them on?

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I am trying to play more.  I am trying to relax and just be more fun.  My TSPC requirement classes made me sadly realize that I sometimes look at my kids as one great big bother, a source of stress and distraction that I must struggle to escape.  And that’s too bad, because it seems to me that I CHOSE to have these kids, right?  Why the crappy attitude?

I am such a do-er in my daily life.  I feel massive satisfaction from what I accomplish in any given day.  When Brad asks how my day went, I immediately catalogue what I achieved that day as though that justifies my whole existence, as though I am not worthwhile at all if I didn’t complete the siding on the chicken shed, plant lily starts, hang art, finish laundry and clean the kitchen.  I’ve got to fix this I know, because obviously the simple, quiet things are important too— maybe more important.  So I am going to play more and maybe do a bit less.

I’m not going to change too much– I will always love working, achieving, feeling the accomplishment that comes with being physically exhausted because you just mopped the floor on your hands and knees– but I am trying to find a little balance.  The work of mothering is a wide skill set, and the things that kids note at the end of the day are not the same things that I might catalogue to Brad as “accomplishments”.  So these are the things I am trying to do more of:

• Snuggling up with Zephyr at nap time (I would curl up with Inez if she would quit tweaking my nose)
• Reading books with kids (no, my books do not count, although once I had Francis fooled when I read Snow Flower and the Secret Fan out loud to her a few days in a row)
• Art projects (like kid ones, not the ones where I tell them to go away and let mom work)
• Dancing around
• Playing instruments and singing
• Cooking projects where they get to make a mess and maybe even lick stuff
• Baths midday (with bubbles!)
• Setting up train tracks

Part of my goal with this year is just to calm down and not achieve anything, because you know, I think I am a good enough person just sort of sitting on my ass… and playing with trains.

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See this guy?  He’s a shepherd I was asked to make for my church’s religion class.  He is a painted wood cut out, and I think the goal is that he will someday have a whole flock of sheep that kids can move around and play with.  I was happy to do him, especially as I had seen the guy they had before.  He was nice enough, but far too white for a dude hanging out in the middle east in the sun all day.  And he had sport socks which sort of offended me.  My secret vendetta as an artist of religious themed works is to make everyone black or at least clearly Arabic.  Jesus-as-blonde-frat-boy does not work for me.  I fight whitey, and I have a whole host of paints to prove it.

Most of my art is sort of like this shepherd in that it walks out the door fairly soon after being created.  I don’t know what it is about the things I make— they don’t stick around.  I think some of it is that I am just not very motivated so I need people to ask me for stuff (like shepherds) in order to get myself organized enough to create something.  Maybe some of it is that what I make is really just not that useful!  I am okay with admitting that.  Not a lot of people need wooden shepherds or hand puppets of married couples.  And I have come to accept that NO ONE needs green tomato pickles.  (I broke open a jar of those that I canned in late September.  Sort of spicy and slimy.  Not super great.  Sorry if I gave them to you for Christmas.  You have permission to compost them.)

One day I will be gone and my kids will cast about the room for something that I made, trying to prove that their mom was an artist of sorts.  Meanwhile, my creations will be tucked away in some box somewhere, having forgotten their inception but retaining a lovely amount of pigment.

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The world is mysterious.  And for all our human focus on ideas of fairness, there isn’t a whole lot available in the natural order of things.  I’m not depressed, but I am thinking about how hard things happen to people and then happen and then happen.

My dear African friend’s little baby boy Shafi died in utero.  He had about three months to go to join us out here in the world, but his little heart was not enough.  Kendall and I made the trip up to Seattle to be there when C finished labor.  There is no fairness about it.  Even though she knew her boy had died, she had to labor to get him out.  At the end, she was tired, sore, spent, and heart-broken.  We held little Shafi and prayed over him.  It did not feel like enough of course, and even as I was doing this, I thought, “How many times will I be here again?”  It isn’t that I am sorry for myself.  I am young and my years near the deathbeds are just beginning.. I am resigned to that fact.  I am ready for this work, even.  It is her though.  She walked out of the valley of death in the Congo.  I love her so, I wish that her journey in those dark places was over.

But that isn’t the way it goes and we have no guarantees in this life.  Death is constantly with us.  I just wish it would clear out of places that it has already visited too much.

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I’m sick, but that is not interesting to talk about.  Too bad too because I have a whole lot of ideas about sickness.

I mostly think that I am a fairly hardy person.  I believe in moderation and my body forces me to stay moderate.  That being said, I am often sick after visiting my in-laws.  It isn’t them.  They are wonderful people.  It is me.  I don’t have it in me to stay up late, and that is what they do.  I want to be with them, but time and time again I find that after a few days of going to bed at some hour that would be fine for other people (like 11pm), I get sick.

I think some of it is the way that I burn through energy.  I am a natural morning person and sort of an extender.  I don’t save much energy during the day.  I don’t know how to conserve.  Even with taking a nap, I am really usually very tired by about 8pm or so.  The kids also don’t permit any sleeping in.  Sleeping in is about 7:30am (which is awesome!).  If only I had the discipline that I enforce on them!  They have a bed time of about 7:30pm.  If I were smart, I would follow at 9:30pm at the latest.

I feel like a big loser; the kid who can’t stay up late at the slumber party.  That is me.  Sicky.

Are you a toughy or a sicky?  What pushes you over the edge?

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