More on Ella

I'm sitting here at home on the computer, the screen blinking in front of me as I try to figure out what I'm about to write. Bill is standing behind me looking through the dvd's, trying to figure out if he's in a surf flick mood or a Lord of the Rings mood. We hear the thud, thud, thud of Ella's feet running down the stairs and sliding through the kitchen, and hear her yelling with urgency "Dad! Dad! I have something for you!"

In an instant she's in the doorway, flips her body around in a little sassy swing so that her little pygmee ass is facing us and then proceeds to let out a little helium pitched fart.

This is how it is in the thick of winter this far north.

Mommy ramblings

I've made it a solid three days, plus half of this day.
I feel like a recovering addict, assuming the mantra of 'one day at a time'.
I've resolved to not turn into psycho-bitch grump mom every morning in the rush to get Ella to school on time and in the hustle bustle routine of bedtime.

On one hand, the routine of a school schedule has opened up a new rhythmn for this household. Routine is something we've never known much of. We have a regular bedtime now for Els, which means that Bill and I get to catch up on a nightly basis about day to day stuff without the jungle house pygmee bouncing off the walls, demanding constant attention. There is a kind of reliability to the day to day that didn't exist before this year. Homeschooling was kind of off-the-cuff when it came to how we planned everything and with that, Ella seemed to always feel caught off guard when it came to the comings and goings of everything. I think now she feels like she at least knows what to expect.

On the other hand, there is so much less flexibility. If we have a late night for whatever reason, she can't just catch an extra hour of sleep in the morning. Instead, she drags her little behind around for the rest of the week until Saturday comes, when she can indulge in that extra hour or two in bed. It's wake-up-get dressed-pack the lunch-get to school and then get home-do homework-make and eat dinner-clean up- and go to bed. The mornings are rush rush rush and in the evenings, I've found myself barking relentlessly, till I'm annoying my own self, in my effort to get her to round up her hurricane messes and get to sleep at a reasonable hour.

The barking, I've resolved, has got to go. I do not want to be that kind of mom and so, four days ago, I decided I wasn't going to be anymore. I've made some basic rules for her to follow when it comes to being responsible for her own shit (taking her dirty dishes to the sink, cleaning up messes after she's made them, and being mindful about other people's space) and while she's bitching endlessly about how strict I've become, I've also pointed out that, by her following these basic rules, mom won't have to be a super-nag anymore. It seems a fair trade, really.

More often than not, when I find myself in the throws of reeming her out for her thoughtlessness, carelessness, forgetfullness, if I tune in carefully to my own self, I find that, really, it's my own shit that's getting on my nerves and my bitching at Ella is really just a venue for venting... a vehicle for release. How fair is that?

If I'm unhappy about the workload I carry at this house and if I feel like it's being taken for granted, then I need to take the necessary steps to make sure that I remedy it. I need to get creative. She's 9 years old, right? I'm the adult. If I don't want her to behave like an entitled princess, wallowing in her own foodscraps and paper cuttings, then I need to round her up and get her on track. If I don't want to be psycho-bitch grump-mom, feeling like an asshole every time I say goodnight or drop her off at school in the morning, then I need to rally my own self and make a plan.

So, walking down the stairs last night, after getting her to sleep, I patted my self on the back for getting through Day III of kindness and patience. I'm sure it's not been as bad as I make it out to be in my own head but if something feels off-kilter in our hearts, then it's all we can do to remedy it. So I've rounded up a bit of first-aid kit for how I go about my day to day. So far, it seems to be working.

I AM done digging out. Thanks for asking.

The snow is still waist deep but, fortunately, all the paths we walk here in the winter have been shoveled. It's something like a labyrinth right now on the farm.

The day after the storm, when the winds were really strong, I came to terms with the fact that I HAD to take my compost out to the pile outside. I had no more strength in my shoulders to actually the shovel the long path out there, but, the container on my kitchen counter would just no longer accept any more foodscraps.

Normally this is Ella's job, but seeing as the snow levels at her chin, I didn't think it'd be all that fair to send her out there. It would be hours before I saw her again. So, I pulled on my snow pants and Muck boots and took a deep breath before I tackled the 100 yard stretch through the tundra to the compost heap.

Earlier that morning, Bill headed north to the mountain with his snowboard. He waited at the lifts for about a half hour while they dug out from underneath five feet of snow. The winds were strong, 70mph, and by 8:30 am, the mountain decided to close for the day. Bill, snowboard in hand, located a snowmobile path that traversed a path up to the top of the mountain and proceeded to hike TO THE TOP.... earned his ride down.

About halfway to the compost heap, I decided he was fucking crazy. I was breaking each step of the path with my thigh, rocking back and forth twice to get momentum for the next step, all the while balancing the compost bucket in the crook of my right arm. My two dogs followed behind me, thinking, surely, that I was taking them on a hike...of all days. The winds were harsh and, for the most part, I could hardly see three feet in front of me.

At one point, in the quiet of the pasture, just the sound of winds blowing through, a handful of red onion skins blew off the top of the bucket and rolled, like tumbleweed across the snow. It was like a scene from blizzard western ghost town.

But, at least it's winter in February.

SNOW DAY ~ TAKE II

Whereas yesterday, the snow was up to Ella's waist by sundown.... this morning she jumped from a snowbank into the pasture and couldn't move from there. Just had to stand there, like she was in a straightjacket. She asked me to dig her out but I had little sympathy, as I'd been out in that knarliness for two hours by then, shoveling a path through waist high snow to the barn and then from the barnyard door to the pile of composting cow shit. I knew I had at least six 5 gallon buckets of poop to carry out there so I figured I may as well make a comfortable path rather than trudge through each time. Els came out to roll around and have fun just as I was finishing barn chores and starting to tackle the project of digging out my car and making a walkable path to the mudroom.
In the barn, I herded the adult girls out into the yard to devour their hay. They each stuck their nose out the door and, like choreography, turned to look at me as if to ask if I were serious. In my mind, all I can think of is the Little House books when Pa would have to tie a rope from the house to the barn, lest he get lost in the swirling whiteouts in between.
Bill's at the mountain making turns. He called at 8:30 this morning and they were still digging out the lift stations.
This is the kind of snow that makes for spring floods. How's that for looking ahead? I guess I should go out and dig Ella out of the pasture now........

Bill's Logic

Today, while further cleaning out my desk drawers, I made a big pile of papers and clutter to take to the dump in the morning (I've since decided to bag going anywhere in this storm). As I was stuffing it all into a garbage bag, I saw some of my chicken scratch on one of the sheets of paper and pulled it out to take a look.
Bill's dad and stepmom took he and Ella to Disneyworld this year between Christmas and New Years. I had to stay here, it being a holiday week and me working in the tourism industry and all..... It was a mixed bag. It would have been great to see Ella's face in discovering all of that crazy Disney shit (much as I loathe Disney) but I really did like having the house to myself for six whole days. It was filled with stoney nights, lots of writing, dancing and yoga in the living room by the light of the Christmas tree, midnight walks in the feilds out back and naps in the middle of day.... just because I could.
I guess at some point upon their return Bill and I got all engaged in some discussion about the environment and global warming. At that point, very early in January, it was still practically tropical here. Frightening, really.
What I found, in my chicken scratch, on that sheet of paper, was something Bill had said in the midst of that conversation regarding global warming. I don't know how the conversation came to creating an entirely new atmosphere, but somehow it did. And Bill's response to that possibility was, "They can make an atmosphere! If they can make Disneyland, they can make an atmosphere."
Good logic, Bill. Where's that bubbler?

SNOW DAY ~ 12 hours later

We made and have been eating chocolate covered strawberries since 3pm. Bill came home with a nice bottle of Chianti at 5pm. The jungle house pygmee is officially in bed and the snow hasn't taken even one breather. In the very a.m. the snow leveled at Ella's knees. By sundown today, it was up to her waist. When she dropped to sitting position in the yard out back, she was practically swallowed by the storm.
I called off work this morning, rationalizing that I'd go in tomorrow to make up some hours. After my third glass of Chianti, I've reasoned that the roads will not be passable tomorrow either and I should just write it off as a loss. Dana will be here by 3pm, Ella's recital's at 7pm and then she and Bill are off to New Hampshire and I've the house to myself with Dana, her two friends from Salem and the makings for a weekend of chocolate martinis. Oh, and I'm sure we'll finish off the strawberries, too.

SNOW DAY!

We're getting our first Noreaster in more than two years. It started dumping snow here after midnight and by 6am this morning every school in Vermont has been closed. The storm is supposed to run straight through till tomorrow. Right now, the house pygmee is still asleep, Bill's on his way to work and I'm sitting here bundled up and wishing I hadn't offered to do chores so he could get to work earlier. I know, though, that by the time I reach the barn door, I'll be in heaven.
Ok, the house pygmee is now in my lap, hair all ascew, and she's wrapped inside my bathrobe, her arms running down the length of it's sleeves and her hands resting on my moving fingers. She's watching letters jump onto the screen. I've talked her into bundling up and doing chores with me. The bribe of hot chocolate afterwards might have been the clincher.
SNOW DAY!!

myspace junkie

I've become a myspace junkie.


I hate to even admit it. I feel like I'm giving in to some greater force that I've always seemed to be able to sidestep. But in checking it out, I'm suddenly in touch with about a dozen people that I haven't seen since my early twenties. There were so many of us back then, travelling in packs, like a thousand circles on a pond. Now we're all spread out all over the country and everyone's story is different but I keep getting little messages throughout the day from this person or that. It's like being in a bar in your hometown during a holiday when every time you turn your head you're taken back a decade and a half. It's been a long time since I've put myself there.



There's one person still fixing Volkswagon buses. Another is working on the set of Law & Order. One beauty just performed in a local show of the Vagina Monologues. One is a DJ in New York City half the time and in San Fran the other half. Several are still playing in bands somewhere or other. One just finished her degree in Colorodo and she and her daughter, who is exactly two full moons older than mine, will be visiting the East Coast this spring.



We travelled together, she and I, the summer before we both got pregnant. I flew out to Oregon where she was living at the time and we hitchhiked up and down the coast. Spent some time with EarthFirst in the Oregon mountains, defending the madrone trees and the habitats of little creatures, digging trenches to keep the dozers out and building tripods where copters could otherwise land to kick our asses out of the forest. We walked the streets of San Fran for a week or so, drinking real Chai tea from small, hole-in-the-wall Greek restaraunts, and climbing the hills to eat real Chinese food in Chinatown. If you ever get there, check out the House of Nan King. We spent a night in the Redwoods on the Pacific coast during the absolute blackness of a new moon, exploring the magnificence with our hands and our noses.



I keep getting messages saying So and so would like to be your "friend"..... and I think to myself, honey, you have been now for some time.



If I played connect the dots with all our geographic locations now, I wonder what kind of image it might construct.

Life just gets more.....

In 1999, when we first started our search for land to buy here in Vermont, we drove up into the hills of the town we now live in. We ended up on the above hillside, which resembles something from The Sound of Music. From there we went to the town clerk to see if we could get the name of the owner and find out if they'd be at all interested in selling their land to us. Totally presumptious, I know, but we were young, wet behind the ears, and really wanted to get our hands in the dirt and start farming. We spoke with a lady, who said she owned the land with several other people, and that the other people weren't interested in selling. We moved on.

We ended up finding 32 acres about ten miles north of that hillside. We cleared an acre, built up a real bare-bones cabin and lived, with no electricity or running water, for a couple of years. The first summer there, we had four or five friends stay on the land as part of a work-trade situation. One of the couples built a tree house and stayed in that. The other couple of friends put up a tipi in the woods behind the cabin. We built an outdoor kitchen and lived this strange, communal summer through. We called it The Compound. I don't know how much work was actually done but we had a really good time.

Bill and I didn't survive cabin life. When we split I moved in with a girlfriend for a couple of years. By the time we got back together he had rented out the cabin and begun leasing the farm we live on now. Strangely enough, that Sound of Music hillside we had inquired about years ago was the adjacent land to the farm. It's the hill I've mentioned in prior posts, the one I climb at night and sometimes talk to the moon.

When Bill began leasing the farm, the owners made mention that prior renters had worked out hay contracts with the woman, Sara, who owned the land next door. She lives now in NYC and we ended up calling her again, five years later, and we're still in the processing of building up her pasture to eventually hay it. Turns out that she owns the land with her husband, father and maybe a sibling or two. I guess her father was the one who didn't want to sell the land and from what Sara has said, once he passed they were going to think more seriously about selling. She's driven up to meet us a couple of time, once with her father, a sweet old man who just wanted to come up and take a look at this land he's owned since the seventies.Her father passed away a year and a half ago. Sara knows we're still passionate about that land and this fall, we even went so far as to write her a letter, explaining that now that we had finished building the house on the land we own and it's all rented, that we're starting to actively look for land to buy. While the letter was still in the hands of the pony express, a surveyor/appraiser that she had hired came up our driveway looking for directions to that hillside. Sychronicity.

Sara called us this week to let us know that they had gotten the appraisal back and wanted to let us know first before they put it on the market. I feel like I could cry every time I think about it.... and for mixed reasons. This little river valley has become my home. As far as having a place to put my roots, it's here. Ella has become a part of this landscape just as much as I have and there have been so many times that I've sat on that hill and dreamed of calling it home. And now that might just be a possibility. What scares the bejesus out of me is the prospect of having to build another home. I'm putting my faith in the hope that the second time around would be smoother, what with having more experience and know-how and having learned from the mistakes of the first attempt. That first house is a beauty and the finished product is amazing... it's hard to believe Bill drew it, designed it and created it. But executing it was a two year long nightmare of financial, physical, emotional and relational exhaustion. Can we do that again? Would it be as hard? Would our relationship survive that kind of wear and tear again?Whether it's worth it hardly seems a question but it's scary. Plus there's the matter of the debt we've accrued in finishing this last house. It seems almost silly to go to the bank asking for another mortgage on land when we have these random credit card debts not yet paid off. Relative to most Americans, I don't think our debt is all that much but still............

So there it is. The big hub bub of life right now. There are a thousand options now and we're not quite sure what the timeline is. How soon should we put in an offer? We're half afraid that if they go to a realtor they'll be told that they could sell that land for WAY more, which they could. I'm already envisioning where the barn might go, watching the geese overhead in the spring, where I could graze some sheep, maybe a small wind turbine?

One thing at a time.
Part of me feels like I want to just bundle up in snow clothes and lay on the hill and hear what it has to say about all this. HHHmmmmmmmmm

Mountains

I drive forty five minutes to work every morning. Sometimes I listen to books on CD, sometimes I listen to music or to National Public Radio (depending on whether or not I can stomach the news that day). Every morning though, I feel like I'm some kind of active participant in the scenery. Today, looking at the mountains in the distance, rolling all over themselves, I was taken with thoughts of what water looks like when it boils, what the fabric of long skirts look like when they blow in the wind, their shadows tucked into the folds. I was taken with thoughts of ladies legs, their knees bent toward to the skies, all those mountainpeaks bent like graceful round joints.

This Week in News

So, I snatched a Newsweek from work because I couldn't help but want to read the story about the recent kidnapping discovery. From what I understand, a young boy was kidnapped four years ago and recently discovered when another boy had come up missing and they followed their leads to the kidnapper.
What I'm not real clear on is this:
Why, when an abducted child who has obviously undergone an extreme amount of trauma is discovered, do they not give the kid a bit of breathing room before they throw him to the wolves of national media attention. Why the fuck was this kid on the Oprah show within the first two weeks of his recovery and WHY are they discussing, on national television, the possibility of his sexual abuse? He's a fucking teen-ager, for Christ's sake? Give the kid some time to heal.
So many parents whose children are abducted and never found start up foundations. There is the National Missing Children's Day, the Adam Walsh Act, Megan's Law and the Amber Alert. Why have no grown ups taken into consideration the potential psychological and emotional ramifications of exposing a child so publicly so directly following their trauma. I know everyone loves a happy ending and everyone loves sensationalism but why has no one started up some kind of act or foundation to draw attention to the dire need for these kids to have some privacy? Is it really necessary to ship them off to Chicago so Oprah can stay on top of her ratings? Does this kid really need to go into the check out line of his local grocery store and find his own face plastered on the covers of half the mags in the racks?
It breaks my heart.that these kids have no time to lick their wounds. That no one, on a public scale, is taking their dignity into consideration.

Let there be songs...

A few weeks ago, a whole slew of friends rented out the town hall in my tiny, little, one-horse town and set up a projector screen on the stage, surrounded by sheets and tapestries. After a potluck between thirty + adults and about a dozen and a half kids (if not more), we turned the lights down low and started a Grateful Dead show ~ Winterland '79.

Some of the women wore their old cuordery patchwork dresses. Alot of the daughters used this as an opportunity to finally get their fingers on some of their mom's old clothes, too. From what I hear, but never actually saw, there was a jug of juice in the back kitchen, just for adults.

It wasn't until later in the night that people actually started to dance. I had looked forward to this all week, and was craving the opportunity to close my eyes and dance to the sweet refrain of familiar tunes. My memories of those years come in bits and peices and more often that not have something to do with spinning around in circles in some random hallway of some random stadium in some random city. And that was only if I was fortunate enough to score a ticket that night.

In the clutter of my day to day, the structure of packing lunches, racing to the schoolbus, getting to karate class, and meeting clients, it's not that often anymore that I remember the glory of those times. But that night, after I relaxed enough to fully lose myself to the music, Ella came running over and started spinning circles with me and the two of us spun around like little helictoper seedlings until something else caught her eye and she was off and running just as quickly as she'd come.

I had only one friend during those years who had a child and she was four and five years old those summers I went to most of my shows. I used to walk around with her on my shoulders, wanting to pretend she was my own and I would daydream about sharing those experiences one day with my own kid. My friend's daughter is fifteen years old now. Jerry died the summer of 1995 and when my friend's daughter started kindergarden that fall, she came home every week, for many weeks, with a new picture of Jerry, sometimes with angel wings and a halo ~ sometimes he was playing his guitar to Jesus (she had a religious grandma).

Ella has been more curious about those years since that night at the town hall. I think she saw something in all these grown-ups that she might not have seen before, some kind of light that got turned on. It's been fun to lay in bed at night and answer her questions, to talk about how colorful the parking lots used to be and the main strip, called Shakedown Street, where people used to sell food and clothes and goodies of all kinds. She's been sleeping in a big Grateful Dead t-shirt every night and dug up my old patchworked bag from the storage room, convincing me to allow her to wear it to school. We've been playing Grateful Dead in the kitchen while we make dinner and she'll grab my hands and we'll spin around in circles together. There's a light that's getting turned on in sharing this with her. It might not be in a hallway, in a stadium, in a random city, but I don't know if that's the most important thing. There are stories within the songs and stories that go along with those years. Stories worth telling.

The night after our little dance party, I drove by the town hall on my way home from work. All the homes in the village had smoke coming out of the chimneys and warm lights glowing from inside their kitchens. Inside the town hall, the lights were turned up bright and I could see about two dozen white and graying heads sitting at the long card tables. I could just imagine the caller calling out the bingo numbers and I smiled, thinking about the absolute contrast from one night to the next.