Monday 20 June 2016, Summer Solstice | Grandma tells me that out at a garden center of one of the area hardware stores, in front of a display of heavy duty insecticides that boast "kills over 500 species of bugs," she begins complaining, loudly, "What are the birds supposed to eat? What are the turtles supposed to eat?" Spent much of the solstice sitting in Grandma's back yard with Sierra and the kids while Grandma dug in her little garden. Sioux Bea, her leggy, tawny mutt, found a turtle under the fig tree and excitedly bounded up and down, barking, and nipping at its shell. It hid for as long as we watched it, until we weren't watching it anymore and then, undoubtedly, disappeared as quickly as it appeared. Stumbling upon turtles (and usually it is the dogs who do the stumbling--and barking, and nipping) is among my favorite mundane bits of summer magick.
Tuesday 21 June 2016 | I miss putting my baby to bed on days when I close the shop, but I do savor these morning hours spent with my menfolk. Wolfman cut the front lawn with the push mower this morning, and I sat on the front step with a cup of coffee and watched him, ready with the glass of ice water for him. I watched Mads trail behind his dad with his toy mower and was very much in love.
Wednesday 22 June 2016 | Mads and I woke in the morning and went outside to check on our vegetables. I tried to set up the sprinkler, which resulted in my boy and me, running and shrieking through the yard in our pajamas, soaked. Not the right kind of sprinkler for the job. Mads loves watering the plants--he tells me zombies are hiding in the stalks and he has to spray them. He loves watering the garden so much, that when it's time to turn off the water, a fit always results.
Thursday 23 June 2016 | When I'm particularly impatient and exasperated with my kid, I find that if I just stop what I'm doing and listen to him, his requests are actually very simple and pretty delightful. Take today, for instance, when all he wanted was for me to help him cover his arms in stickers, like tattoo sleeves.
Friday 24 June 2016 | My baby will be three in just a little over a month. He won't be so much "my baby" anymore as "my kid". We've let him be wild so far. If he wants to be shirtless, we help him peel off his shirt. If he wants to clown at the dinner table, we laugh at his antics. If he wants to scream and howl, we scream and howl with him; we chase him around the house on hands and knees; Wolfman wrestles with him and tosses him onto the sofa. But soon, we'll have to socialize him, potty train him, civilize him, learn him some manners, get him to sit through one whole library story-time without bolting out the door. In the mean time, we're doing a lot of Bubba-ing. It's summer time, after all.
Sunday 26 June 2016 | Mads plays the trumpet. Long before getting pregnant, I pictured myself with as future mom to a little boy, a little boy with long hair sitting in a tree, a nature boy.
Monday 27 June 2016 | I don't get a lot of time to myself these days--just my lunch breaks, really, which are spent surrounded by strangers and their echoing voices at the mall. I sat by the carousel today and read Faerie Magazine, drank canned coconut water. Listened to the music filtering vaguely--from where?--and thought that even though Coldplay has become The Soundtrack to Your Mall Experience, Parachutes was a really important part of my musical upbringing, one of the first albums I fell really hard in love with. I probably bought that CD here, at this mall, at the Sam Goody that used to be across from where this carousel sits now.
Tuesday 28 June 2016 | Has North Carolina been declared an official Rain Forest yet?
Wednesday 29 June 2016 | Wolfman found this little guy while he was weed-whacking around the garden. I carried him to the pond behind our yard with Mads to let him go. I wouldn't have known this was a snapping turtle, had my husband not told me, pointing out the ridge on his shell. I hope this little guy makes it, lives to be huge and scaled and fierce. The back pond his haunted by these shelled dinosaurs, and I respect their right to be there by not dangling my toes or fingers in the water.
Thursday 30 June 2016 | My friend Kath knit this little tiger for my baby and sent it to us around his first birthday. Wolfman and I are the ones who began calling him Hobbes, and perhaps because we named him, making him special of all Martigan's toys, Mads took a liking to him. Mads does not get particularly attached to toys, not for periods longer than a day or two, but he still asks for Hobbes by name every once in a while, as I tuck him into bed. Today, when Mads and Ella stole a bottle of sunscreen from the hall bathroom, they rubbed all over themselves, a couple library books, and Hobbes. He got his first bath today, and though I worried about a loose stitch in one of his legs, he survived.
Saturday 2 July 2016 | Old man. He is never loved and adored enough. If he wrote a memoir, that's the story he would tell.
No comments:
Post a Comment
share your thoughts!