Rattle

I am echoing inside, today, rattling like a key in a can.

Who am I? Who are you? Who are we?

******

"Look at that bird up there," I tell a young friend I am trying to distract from her task of pushing Sam off my lap. She stares up into blue.

"It's you," she says. "It's you in the future. Hey, Sam, look, it's your mom in the future up there!"

I swivel my head to take her in. Is it true?

I can't tell if it's vulture or a hawk.

******

I struggle at times with disappointment, sadness, frustration. Are these feelings authentic, or do they spring from my attachment to people, ideas, understandings? If the "understanding" is mine alone, where is the truth under what is standing? Which is an authentic feeling if so many arise from the way I think things ought to be? If I perceive my needs to be met, I am content.

I am a center of perception, a mirror, shiny and round. What is the sound of me in this hollow place?

********

Sam came to me three nights ago and told me his brain was going to burst.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because I am me. But Trinidad is also "me." How can that be possible?" He groaned and held his head, falling to the ground.

The echoes are not all mine.

Last night, he told me that he wrote a story at school. It goes something like this:

There was a boy named 'I Don't Know My Name," and he'd just moved to a town called Me. He went to school on the first day and his teacher said, "What's your name?"

"I Don't Know My Name," he said.

"Oh. I'll call you 'George,'" said the teacher.

"But that's not my name! My name is 'I Don't Know My Name!'"

The boy went home and told his mom, "I hate Me."

"What? Don't say you hate yourself," she said.

"I didn't. I said I hate "Me" [the town]."

That is all that Sam had written so far.

And me? This is good enough for today.

What's For Dinner?

Tonight, I wavered between the temptation of "going out" for a burrito or .... I couldn't even imagine. Hungry, tired, I collapsed into a chair announcing that dinner was beyond me.

"That's okay," said Trinidad cheerfully. "I'll cook. You two just rest, and I'll take care of dinner."

Seda swung around and gave me the look only parents can share that says, "Wow, did you notice that we just peaked Mt. Everest? Check...out....this...view!"

I made myself horizontal and offered to write Trinidad a recipe for quinoa. Sam said he would help by making instant pudding (thanks to Trader Joes) for dessert. Wink, wink.

Trinidad picked greens in the garden. I only saw because I couldn't find him when I delivered the recipe. I am under strict instructions to stay out of the kitchen, and by Golly, I'm up to the task.

It's been 30 minutes.

"Boy, I don't get a break!" says Trinidad, running between turning off the timer, stirring the potstickers, and setting the table.

Sam informs him he can take 30 seconds, and Trinidad jumps at the suggestion, chasing his brother around the house with the stirring spoon and swinging at him dramatically with sound affects.

This must be "growing up." This is our household getting old, the tip of the Collier/Krebs iceberg with its wide bottom so far under that I can't consciously recount the stories of my ancestors, each of them struggling with growing old and raising families, each of them wedged wordlessly between past and future in the features of ten and seven year old boys manning the kitchen alone.

I will be fed by this work.

My Teachers

"Did you ever notice that pie isn't very good without whipped cream and whipped cream isn't very good without pie?" said Sam.

"...stars and moons flew past me as I fell," Trinidad told me, wide-eyed after a fall.

Sam's poetry vernacular dictated and scribbled onto a recipe card stuck to the refrigerator last year: "I sneakily hid and ate a piece of chocolate."

"Why did the intestine cross the road?" Sam asked me tonight. I shook my head and shrugged.

His eyes narrowed. "Because he didn't have the guts."

And finally, the paddle ball.

Sam got a cheap version of this classic toy at our local credit union as a "prize" for saving money under duress. He played with it for hours determined to strike it more than four times in a row.

"What if you could play paddleball infinitely?" he asked.

"What if?" I answered.

"That would be impossible," he said.

"Are you sure?" I asked. "What if an alternate universe opened its space and time to you right now and all you did was play and play and play paddleball...infinitely?"

I looked around me at the grocery lists, emails up for response, laundry to fold, and chickens waiting for their daily scraps. "Would it be so different?" I asked. "Sounds a lot like what I do all day."

Sam looked at me hard

and did not disagree.

In Future Memory

"When you die, I am going to write something on a piece of paper and put it on your grave," says Sam.

"What will it say?" I ask.

"You want to know now?"

"Yeah!"

"Oh. Okay. It will say, 'When you die, you fly.'" He smiles.

Crossroads

Yesterday, I lifted the lid off the beehive in order to add a queen separator and third box for honeymaking. Queen Mab and her Dreamy bees barely paid me notice. Their business before them stretched onward and up, the wax pouring from their bellies to form countless cells stacked -- a duplex, a triplex, apartmental compartments from which to hatch, to eat, to raise their young.

These are the words of the bees: build, build, build. What interest have they in a white-veiled minion from another world who puffs smoke at them questioningly before scraping, scraping away their work as it rises to touch the inner cover? She is a Breaker, they think. She does not understand.

The chickens escaped last night at dusk from their makeshift pen. My one, my girl, my Henny Penny crouched dutifully as I approached. She had taken out the front of my garlic bed and found the sandy loam a thrill to scatter, vastly superior to the clayed crabgrass and nettle that I allow her to graze. She lifted her wings and bent her knees as I reached down for her, sure that somehow my fate was inevitably intertwined with her own. One liquid amber eye gazed quietly into mine, unabashed. She believes that this orchestra of feeding, fluffing and laying somehow centers around my peripheral presence. She knows me as the Gatekeeper. This is the mythology of chickens.

Death is all around me this week. People, animals, and even trees I love are dying, inexorably silhouetted at the threshold of another world. I am flooded with emotion -- care for their comfort, love and appreciation for the gift of their presence in my life, sadness to imagine their departure. I question my attachment, the hunger that I feel, the desire to sink myself into another being, seeking attunement. Am I looking to escape?

Walking in the cemetery with the children this afternoon, I find peace in breathing through the inner storm I weather. This is compost, I think. My heart is full of decay -- a celebration of life in the face of letting go. I am heating up, I think, getting up to temperature. This is what it feels like in the middle of the pile. Transition, fruition, life pulsing into form. I am the spiral filled with light, swinging arms outward into darkest space. One in a million.

The boys have stopped by some vinca vines. "Mom! Come here!" they say.

They are watching a gray squirrel. It does not run away, and this is odd. I tie up the dog and come to see.

The tiny squirrel moves back and forth beside them for some time, and finally I reach out to pet its soft silver fur. The squirrel's response is almost immediate. Within minutes, it is hiding beneath our still, squatted forms then dashing out again to look up at us expectantly. It is young, I surmise, too young to have fallen from the nest. How young, not even my iphone will tell me with exactitude.

And that is what one needs when considering what to do with a squirrel sitting on your shoulder. One needs clarity about its age, its circumstance. I had to decide whether or how to detach its path from our own. Then, what peace could be made in whether it was served in that deliberation?

We take the squirrel home. A local wildlife rehab center did not respond to our calls, and we pack it along with us in hopes of reaching them by evening. More internet research points to the likelihood that this little fellow is just on the edge of weaned independence and could, perhaps, be rescued yet by his own mother. We take him back.

Peacemaking again with our emotions -- worry, disappointment, gratitude for the crossing of paths. Then I receive a call from the wildlife rehab worker who assures us that our instincts are correct, the squirrel is probably starving and orphaned.

We meet the volunteer back at the cemetery, find the squirrel where we'd left it (we had to bolt when we first returned it and were followed even so), then we send the tiny shaking creature on its way in seasoned hands.

This is the way of interspecies communion, the unwords of all kinds who, in desperation seek to give and receive.

Attuned, I am, even if the pitch shakes me at such a vibration that I think to lose myself. The world is dying, dying, living all around and here is my honored place at the crossroads.

Such is my mythology.

Good Things By Sam

Mom's

Small dogs

Chickens

Peace

Snow

Hot chocolate

Curiosity

Books

Love

Easter 2010

"Mom! We just got this great idea," Trinidad told me excitedly. "Sam and I are going to make you Easter baskets!"

It was after 10:00 at night on Friday. I smiled and suggested they make a list of what they wanted to do for that the next day. 

"But, there's a problem," Trin told me. "I don't know what to give you. If it was for me, I'd want a soccer ball, some crossword puzzles... but for you? I have no idea. What would you like?"

Delighted by his awareness of my individuality, I thought about it a bit. "I always love what you make me," I said.

He and Sam talked it over. "We'd like to give you something we cook. What do you want -- cookies, pie, cake, what?"

"Well..." I hesitated. I had decided to forego our traditional sweet bread to meet other needs the next day.  "There is something that I would really like, but I don't know if you could actually make it -- that's Easter bread."

"Do you have a recipe?" he asked.

"Yes, but you've never made bread before, and Easter bread is not easy for beginners."

"Oh, no problem," he said, with the confidence of his nine years. "We'll do it!"

The next day, I got a call on my cell phone. "How do you heat the oven to 125 degrees? I can see 175 and 200, but not 125."

"Are you heating the milk?" I asked. He was -- in the oven. He couldn't remember what part of the recipe went into the ceramic bowl, so he asked if he could wait for me to come home to interpret. I was only 20 minutes away.

I explained further where necessary and Trinidad did it all (except the measuring, which Sam took charge of -- that little ring of spoons jingled so attractively). Trin measured, mixed, kneaded, shaped and baked the loaves. The last steps he did without my support. Wow! I was so impressed.

Late Saturday night, Ben told Sam he'd better go to bed so that the Easter Bunny could come down the chimney.

"The Easter bunny will not come down the chimney. She is sitting on the toilet [referring to me]."

We laughed. "I know this because I am old enough to know this," he said proudly. 

"Mom? Will you please make us Easter baskets even when we are teenagers? If we make them for you, too?" Trinidad asked. "Because most kids stop getting them after they're ten."

"You know it, dude," I told him.

Have yourself... a very merry Easter.:)

What's Up With the Collier/Blakemans....

Here we are, singing our theme song again: Transition.

Seda's fantabulous city job is turning into a pumpkin. Due to budget cuts, Seda's job has officially been eliminated, leaving her to seek (with preference) another job under the city's umbrella.

She ran the options by me tonight. We nixed the 911 operator job, despite the fact that she is clearly qualified after parenting for a decade. There are a couple of jobs that look attractive, but will appear so to dozens of others who are hot on the search, as well. There is the "Park Specialist 3 -- Tree Maintenance and Planting" job which I told her she was not qualified for.

"What?" she retorted. "I worked for a nursery for a month once and... (pausing for my peals of laughter).. and I was a logger for a year!" Just the balance Eugene is looking for, dontcha' think?

And the one that she'll likely get on as: Wastewater Maintenance Mechanic. You got it -- a life in the sewer. Talk about your job going down the drain. The irony is that the pay is equal to the work she does in Plans Examining. She is rather irate about the fraction of an income that a clerical worker, traditionally a female occupation, pulls in by comparison, and she will be bucking for them at the next union meeting. Probably spoken from her new pedestal -- or should I say, "throne?"


Ben and I are exploring job possibilities in the North Pacific. A new highschool built in Kosrae (Micronesia) likely has need of a music teacher and program, and Ben is well-suited. I am prepared to return to the work force as a teacher to support our household income next year while offering the kids a fantastic learning experience (more "public school") on an island that has escaped the causeway of consumerism. The siren song of adventure lulls oh so sweetly....


Trinidad, meanwhile, is trying to break a world record. "Do you think I could hold 60 pounds of bricks hanging from a rope in my mouth?" he asks.

"I don't think so, but you could do a little less and set the record for 'The Most Weight Held By the Mouth of a Third Grader,'" says Sam. Photographs forthcoming on FaceBook.

Everything flowing along remarkably swift and easy, despite the forever newness of it all.

A Late Night Concert (By Sam)

Last night I went to a strings concert at south Eugene high school, and one of my friends was in it. It was fun. After the concert, I got a cookie and some juice, then I went home.

A Celebration

First publication in a major mag: The Sun picked up a short essay I wrote (on the topic "Borrowing") for the Readers Write section of their February issue.

Best part of this news: it's my favorite magazine. Real beauty, real ugly, RealPolitik life. Literary bluecollar, almost-always-respectable.

Check it out.

One Lap Saved

Sam has been very snuggley lately, launching at me with open arms when I pick him up from school, curling himself into my lap whenever I sit down at home. It seems impossible to me that his body is so gangly and long, bizarre that he is so heavy when his wings entrust his full weight to my arms.

"Do you think you'll always love me this much?" I ask, not fully attending to the fact that I actually said this aloud.

"I don't know," says Sam, without worry in his voice. He jumps up to get something from the living room.

"I think that's a very wise answer," I say.

"Save your lap for me!" he calls.

The Grand Finale

Setting: Monday of the final week of closing on the Collier's refinance of home pending all final inspections.

Kristin: What?! We can't get the final inspections done this week! We are missing a vent pipe for the composting toilet that is on order. It won't be in until at least next week.

Banker: Oh, no problem. The bank is not going to hold up the loan over a piece of hardware. Just do the best you can and give me a call.

Later....

Electrical Inspector: So are you guys ready to insulate?

Kristin: Insulate? Yeah, that's done, and the sheet rock's up and painted.

EI: Well, there's this memo that says I need to check out some work that didn't pass inspection that is in the walls. This is important stuff. I need to see it.

K: Let's call Seda. (Seda doesn't answer her work phone.)

EI: Do you understand what an important thing this is? I need to see in those walls for you to pass.

K: Well (pointing) is this the memo? With these initials that it's been done?

EI doesn't get it, keeps frowning, calls the office, gets word that the work he's concerned about has been approved since and initialed as K pointed out.
EI: Hmmm. Well, all these outlets will need to be changed out. They aren't to code without the child tamper resistant part integrated on.

K: Oh.

Kristin returns and buys 22 new outlets (how can Home Depot sell this stuff?), and various other required parts, some of them apparently impossible to retrieve, but acquired in the seedier districts of Eugene where they sell "Gorilla Nuts -- torque me!" Seda returns home from work feverish and coughing, Kristin bursts into tears trying to get supper on the table, and Ben offers to reschedule his evening in order to install outlets with Seda. At 10 p.m. all electrical is complete, but K is not done crying. The loan, it seems will never come, there is not enough money to pay next months mortgage without the refi, lost waterbottles and keys will never turn up, dinner is burnt, and Seda may never get her vagina. All, it seems to K, is likely lost.

Tuesday.Final, Plumbing and Mechanical Inspector-in-one: It looks like you need a back-flow vaccuum for this hand-held shower unit and a vent pipe for this toilet. Then I can sign you off.

K: Okay.

K calls all local warehouses desperate to find vent piece sooner, but to no avail. She returns to seedy districts for back-flow vacuum piece.

Proprietor (whose breath smells of liquor): Inspector get you on this?

K: Yes.

P: Well, here it is, the piece you need -- $25. Take it off when he leaves, it'll restrict the flow of your shower otherwise. Then you can use it as a fishing weight, get your moneys worth out of it.

K: Thank you.

While in seedy district, K debates and finally surrenders to the urge for serious decadent support: a coconut cream filled chocolate cupcake from Sweet Life. If that broke the bank, there would be no sweeter irony.

---

K(on phone to Banker): What shall we do? Everything is done but the vent pipe. Will the loan be held up?

Banker: Oh, no, it's no problem, as I've said all along. Look, all we need are the final inspections. I'm sure the inspector (K's NOTE: not the lender as aforesaid.) won't hold up the finals for one piece of hardware. You just tell him your situation. I'm sure you're in good stead. Just get those documents signed and over to the title company by tomorrow and we'll get you your check on Friday.

K: And if they won't sign?

Banker: Oh, it's not going to happen. But if it does, you'll lose your interest rate we locked into and we'll have to start the process over again. Let's not do that.

K: Oh.

---

Last day for inspections. Seda has finally taken the day off sick. K answers the door prepared to beg for vent pipe forgiveness from the inspector, but, surprisingly, the inspector is a young man she's never met -- a temporary fill in as all inspectors were booked.

Seda: Did you see the memo?

I: No. What did you do?

S: I put in this vaccuum breaker piece.

I: Is that all?

S: That's all I did.

I: Okay. (Miraculously, he doesn't appear to take notice of the toilet, signs off, and leaves.)

Kristin: But what if he takes it back?

S: We wait and see.



The last inspector arrives and signs off on Mechanical. He casts a backwards glance at the toilet.

I: Well, you're not going to use that toilet without the vent piece, so I'll trust you to put it in.

S: It's nearly arrived.

I: Yeah. (He signs.)

Kristin, who has been hiding with Sam fully under a sleeping bag in the far back bedroom, rejoices at the news. All, it appears is not lost, even if the keys and Seda's vagina have not yet arrived.

After almost four years of living with a variable rate, interest only loan, unsure of their future on 62nd Avenue, the Colliers have a foundational loan and the space to support this uniquely structured family and their urban farm.

Hurray.

Growing Up and Growing Down

Oh, blissful day, abandoning myself and all else to the celebration of Sam, today turning seven.

I made popovers and fruit parfaits with custard (in wine glasses!) for breakfast, surprising the children with a breakfast guest from down the street. Then I took them to school and decided to stay.

I spent the entire day mostly with Sam and some with Trin doing everything they do. I even played Wall Ball at recess and impressed their group of friends by outing the fellow currently undefeated (well, I am an adult, even though I am also somebody's mom). "She doesn't really know how to play," Trinidad told his friends apologetically, "but somehow she's still pretty good at it."

My favorite quotes of the day, gathered from a variety of 1st-3rd graders:

Gym teacher: ....So you were chasing the boys instead of racing the boys, and that is not what I asked you to do.
Girl: Well, I actually WAS racing the boys.
Gym teacher: It sure looked like chasing.
Girl: Um. Yes. I did chase them, but that was to get them to run faster. So I could race them.

Sam's teacher: We are having a problem on the playground with people arguing the Ref's call during wall ball. What are we going to do about it?
(The students have a conversation, come up with a plan to have someone pulled from the game for 3 days if they argue more than 2 times/week, then the teacher asks them to vote in an attempt for consensus. 2 thumbs point down.)
Teacher (to a thumb downer): So, I'm trying to understand this better. Are you concerned about this decision because you are someone who argues with the Refs?
Boy: No.
Teacher: No?
Boy: No. They argue with me!!

Boy on the playground: We're rockstars!
Me: Yeah?
Boy: Yeah! He's Prince, he's Michael Jackson, and I'm Elvis Presley. (All assume radical air guitar positions.)
Me (to self): Dang, I'm not as behind as I thought I was!


We played Wall Ball after school for awhile, then the children took me to a toystore where they planned to buy Legos with their savings. I annoyed Trinidad and amused Sam by attacking them with stuffed animals until they both giggled. Then I played with the Jack in the Boxes as they looked at me sideways with a gleam in their eye. I am so glad they are growing up so that I can properly grow down.

Turning New Leaves

The earth and air are pregnant with spring. The plum tree is budding, and my seaberry bush has set forth 1/2 inch of new leaves -- green! -- with a brazen hope for warm days ahead.

According to my blog, we started this remodel at the end of April, and now we are surely in the last lap. Drywall, plaster and paint are up, floors are down, and the way is lit with genuine electricity. The composting toilet (many prayers offered for its correct installation) is nearly taking seats. The clawfoot bathtub, elegantly arching its white swanlike presence in our jewel of a bathroom (provided the composting toilet does not perform to the standard our building inspector predicts) rests serenely in a sea of blue marmoleum. So what if we still haven't figured out how to plumb the faucet?

For almost ten months, we have worked this remodel and our thoughts and feelings for each other. We have laughed ourselves to tears, cried ourselves into laughter. We have held each other and taken space. The children have come in close, bridging the gap into adulthood with hammers, shovels, and screwdrivers. They have taken in more screentime than we enjoy so we could finish one last thing on the building outside.

And finally, here it is: the inside. We can take shelter in this space, find quiet (!) and safety in the walls we have built. How much math went into its calculations? How many words kept us connected, reminded us of our commitment to each other within this work? How much have we learned?

The blossoming always seduces me from around the next bend. When, exactly, will it be spring?

Today, I am expected to fill in the trench that now houses a storm drain. The sun is out, the rain has lifted. The banker is awaiting completion, rapping his pen on the table beside stacks of unsigned documents. Still, I am not inclined to go out just yet. Four Bosc pears sit on my drainboard, softly reflecting the late winter sun. Four golden pears remind me that food can be cooked, one dish at a time, and not always pulled in meal-sized portions prepared weeks earlier, from the freezer. Four pears tell me that art is now.

I find myself flipping through cookbooks, furtively, as if I could be caught and hung for such a momentary sweetness. Smiling wistfully, I decide on a recipe for poached spiced pears in honey syrup. As they cool on the countertop, I whisk fresh eggs -- the chickens are laying! -- into goat milk. A baked almond custard will accompany the pears.

Dessert. Perhaps, like the seaberry bush, I stretch too much of my neck into the sun. Perhaps, in the ecstasy of imagining spring spaciousness, I lean a little too hard into creation. Is this the wisdom of a fool? Only time will tell.

And until then, we will eat dessert.

Hickory Dickory Dock

Our bathroom is a happening place.

Last summer, a raccoon attacked the chicken house in a midnight raid. With cunning paws, it ripped a piece of corrugated plastic right off the side of the building, and our bathroom became home to a flock of nine overnight. You should have seen Seda's face when she went to shower the next morning. Still, the happenings today proved stiff competition.

Sam had decided to get out of the bath and asked me to bring him a towel. I slid one off the shower curtain rod above his head. A dark object immediately appeared in the tub beside him.
And it swam. In fact, it swam laps around poor Sam while I shrieked and he looked bewildered.

Sleek and dark, the mouse dog paddled for its life. Apparently, it had been sitting on the towel I'd pulled from the rod. It swam remarkably well for a matter of minutes until I had the wherewithal to get Sam out of the tub, at which time it beached itself on a floating, empty shampoo bottle. By then, Seda and Trinidad had joined us to check out the commotion. Harley the cat watched, as cats will, with wide eyes -- noncommital.

Trinidad was thrilled. He somehow arranged it so that Harley got the mouse and he got the bath, but all behind a closed door. I sat with Sam wrapped in a towel in my lap in the kitchen. "That was scary!" Sam told me again. Seda went to fetch his clothes. She forgot about the mouse in the bathroom.

Of course, Harley hadn't killed it yet ("just looking!"). Seda opened the door, and the mouse ran out to jump into the dirty clothes basket. Seda did cuss. The cat was dismayed and the dog now curious. What could it be?

One by one, Seda picked our dirty clothes out and set them into a new basket. The dog watched. The cat looked irritated and occasionally attacked the dog, claws extended, to make her opinion of teamwork quite clear. The boys cheered.

At the bottom of the basket, a wet mouse appeared. And this is the end of our story for no kindness is it to laugh at death, whatever the natural cause.