Beauty

I was recently sitting with a group of family members and someone asked about the most beautiful places and things we had ever seen. I loved hearing everyone's answers about the places they had seen and the sights and experiences they would carry with them, but when it was my turn, I found myself having trouble coming up with an answer. The most beautiful place?

The valley in Vermont with mountains all around, where you can watch the fog retreating back into the clouds every morning, where everything shines in shades of green, where the words Emerald City are never far from your mind.

Flying into the Chennai airport in the middle of the night, when you can see the lights of the ships off the coast and feel like they're leading you home.

Glaciers off the coast of Alaska viewed during a midnight sunset in July from the deck of a ship.

A path on the campus of Virginia Tech, where there is a bend in the sidewalk and a sudden, unexpected patch of wildflowers that seem always to be happy to see you.

A field covered in a foot of snow with no one around and quiet as deep as the ocean.

A beach in India that's clean and empty, where you can sit and close your eyes and listen to the ocean and feel connected to everything that has ever been, will ever be.

A stretch of the Blue Ridge Parkway that's littered with tiny, trickling waterfalls and twisty roads that leave you wondering whether you should have stayed on the interstate while being simultaneously grateful that you didn't.

A coffee shop that's actually a double decker bus and is decorated with colorful bits of glass on the tables and walls.

Home at the end of a long journey. My bed at the end of a long day. My children first thing in the morning. A fire in my fireplace on a cold night. Steam rising from my morning coffee. A cardinal at the birdfeeder. The first seedlings that grow in my garden. A book and a blanket and a cup of tea. Secret, undiscovered places that make you feel like you're the first person there ever was. A sky glowing with stars that reminds you that you're not.

There's beauty everywhere. How do you decide?

 

Goats

Most of the country was watching football last weekend--good game? fun commercials?--and on any other year, that's exactly what we would have been doing, too. But this year, we went to see some baby goats. Because come on, how do you pass up newborn goats? Now see, the email that arrived from the goat farm said that new goats were being born and that the farm was planning an open barn event, but what I didn't realize is that new goats were in the actual process of BEING BORN. At the moment of the open barn. So that was...an experience. My favorite part of that experience, by the way, was this exchange:

Luke: Is that goat eating MEAT?!

McMoose: Um. It's eating its placenta.

Luke: What's a placenta?

*Every kid in the vicinity stares at McMoose as he explains what a placenta is.*

 

My takeaway from that experience is that (a) baby goats are surprisingly large and if I had to choose to be a non-human animal, I think I'd prefer to be a kangaroo or a panda, both of which have teeny tiny babies and (b) next year, we'll stick with the March open barn, by which time all the goats have been on the outside for at least a week. (And (c) I'm crossing "Farmer" off my list of potential future occupations because no.)

Hello

I've been having this conversation with myself--and usually, it's confined to my own head, but sometimes, when I'm driving, I start to actually mumble aloud and Weston says, "Mama, why are you always talking to yourself?" and then, to convince him that actually, he's having a perfectly normal childhood, I tell him, "No, I wasn't talking to myself, I was just singing. A song. From violin class! Yes, I was singing my new violin song. Didn't you recognize it?" I'm pretty sure he knows the truth, but he plays along.

Where was I? Right. Having a conversation with myself. About privacy and children growing up with all of the minutia of their lives broadcast and preserved forever and all that. You know how when a new politician comes on the scene and all of a sudden, random blogs about politics are trying to talk to that person's best friend from third grade about how, as an eight-year-old, that person was convinced that people of the opposite sex had cooties? And then, the blogs claim that clearly, that means that the politician-wanna-be is sexist and would therefore try to turn the world into a real life Handmaid's Tale? (Stay with me. I know it's hard.) So what happens when the children that we write all about on every form of social media we have grow up and want to be politicians? Or teachers? Or, I don't know, other people who have to seem/be civilized? But there on the internet are stories of the time when they ate a pine cone or went through the phase of randomly blurting out, "Poop!" at inappropriate moments. Who's going to want that kid-turned-grown-up leading their country?

And then, my conversational partner (still me) chimes in to point out that by then, it won't matter because all the kids of that generation will have embarrassing back stories that were published somewhere on the internet. In fact, adults who don't have these bizarre digital trails might be considered suspect. Maybe?

So here I am, sporadically writing barely-intelligible things once again. In the end, it's probably less damaging to the children to be written about in a minuscule corner of the internet than to have their mother mumble to herself while driving around town.

Walk in the Park

I used to consider myself not an optimist. Not a pessimist, perhaps, but a realist with pessimistic tendencies. The glass was more than half empty. Entropy wins. This, too, generally does not pass. Then, kids happened and now, the glass is more than half full, especially when it spills all over the table. Maybe the world isn't destined for increasing levels of chaos after all. And this, too, shall pass.

A year ago, I was dropping Luke off at carpool in the mornings, knowing that he wouldn't interact with another soul for the next seven hours, except during his 20-minute recess. I was driving back to the carpool lane seven hours later, fully expecting that he wouldn't be there--either because he had wandered off the parking lot or just because he was wandering the hallways of the school. (The latter happened on a weekly basis, the former, luckily, lived only in the dark corners of my imagination during the forever-long minutes when I was sitting in my car, waiting for them to locate him.) I was wishing that someone would magic away the looming choices that were staring us in the face.

This morning, after spending a couple of hours at the park, we had to leave to get Weston from preschool and Luke was grumbling because he had to leave a newly-found friend.

L: But why do we have to leave already?
Me: Because your brother likes to be picked up on time.
L: Ugh. Can we come to more park days with my new friend?
Me: ...He comes to almost every park day we go to...
L: Really? How come I've never played with him before?
Me: Because you're usually busy playing with your other friends.
L, after considering that for a minute: ...You know, I think I have the most friends of anyone in the world.

Hey, look. It passed. We made it through, after all.

So slow

We're supposed to be at Target, buying stickers and pumpkins for a halloween party that starts in an hour. Instead, the children are eating at the pace of molasses-covered snails (is that a delicacy somewhere? Idaho, perhaps?) and are asking me questions that just don't need to be asked:

-Can I plant the yucky part of the banana in the garden so banana trees will grow?
-Can I have a giant salt crystal for dessert?
-How many people are alive who are 33 years old right now? How many people are 33 years old and exactly 6 feet tall?
-If we plant every banana at the store, would our backyard be a jungle? If our backyard turned to a jungle, would animals from the jungle live there? Would the Lorax come?
-If a cobra gets hot, does it take off its hood?

I have answered exactly one of these questions and that was only because I wanted a giant salt crystal for dessert, as well.

A few weeks ago, the boys were reading about evolution and natural selection and not-so-natural (ie, human driven) selection and we came upon a documentary about dog breeds. As a result, our vocabulary of dog breeds is both rich and peculiar right now. (Aside: homeschooling leads to  some strange rabbit holes as the kids decide they want to know more about some peripheral aspect of whatever they're learning about at the moment. It's been interesting to watch.) So randomly in the car, this happened:

Weston: Elsa is a suzuki. 

Me: Ahh...like a car? Or the violinist?

W: Not any of those things. She is a dog. 

Me: Yes...

W: The kind of dog that is called a suzuki.

Me: Saluki? Like from the show we watched?

W: That's what I said. Saluki. 

Me: Ok. What makes you say that?

W: Because she looks like one and Dada showed me a picture. 

Me: Rhodesian Ridgeback. She looks like a Rhodesian Ridgeback...also called an African Lion Dog. Remember?

W: That's what I said. African lion dog. 

For the record, Elsa is a North Carolina Mutt. She does look an awful lot like a Rhodesian Ridgeback though.

Ghosts in our midst

Weston has a tendency to blame all kinds of things on an invention he has named "It-The-Ghost." Anytime he says something rude or just plain strange, he scapegoats (scapeghosts?) his imaginary pal.

Weston: Do you have froth on your tongue?
Me: Do I have--no. I do not have froth on my tongue. What a question!
Weston, chortling: It-The-Ghost told me to ask that question.
Me: That It-The-Ghost is a wild character, isn't he?
W: Yes. And silly, too.
Me: Of course: silly, too.
W: You know who else is both wild and silly?
Me: You?
W, a bit offended: No, of course. Luke-The-Ghost, in fact.
Me: Ah, yes, that old Luke-the-Ghost.
W: And Mama-Ghost and Dada-Ghost and the new Ghost-baby.
Me: So there's a new Ghost-baby, is there?
W: Actually, two. No, three new ghost babies.
Me: Those ghosts certainly have their hands full, don't they?
W: Full of babies. And tape also.
Me: Why tape?
W: They live in our tape dispensers. That's why they need so many babies. We have a lot of tape dispensers, you know.


(We do have a lot of tape dispensers, all of which are out of tape, so what good is that?)

((I find the above conversation infinitely more satisfying when read out loud in a British accent, or as close to one as you can manage. Then again, I find most things more satisfying that way. I had kept this preference hidden from McMoose for nearly a decade because while there are many offenses that can be forgiven in a person--hogging the blankets, ordering veggie burgers with bacon on top, wanting to name one's children after cities in Wisconsin, that kind of thing--I'm not entirely sure reading aloud in a foreign accent is something from which a marriage ever fully recovers. Of course, he walked into the bedroom unexpectedly one recent evening and found me reading a book about punctuation out loud to myself and my last secret suffered an instant death. I am now an open book. An open audiobook, perhaps.))

(((I do love an interesting book about punctuation. No, that isn't an oxymoron at all--why do you ask?)))