peevish mama

OK, deep breath. I can’t believe I’m even going to utter the C word on this blog. No, the other C word, you dirty dogs. Cougar. There. I said it, and just because I said it and just because I’m writing about it, doesn’t mean I am one, or close to being one, or preoccupied about being one. Or maybe I’m just kidding myself, depending on your definition, which is, my friends, the crux of the problem. The term “cougar” is bandied about with such frequency these days that it’s hard to avoid it – especially if you just so happen to be a woman approaching the age when such a term might apply.

Listen, I’ve had my ear to the ground and my whiskers in the air on this one. I have been paying close attention and the only thing I’ve concluded is that everyone seems to have a different definition of a cougar. Which makes it very difficult to know if one needs to be offended or flattered should one ever happen to be called or deemed a cougar.

A quick wikipedia check yields this definition: a woman over forty who sexually pursues younger men, typically more than eight years her junior. Pretty clear, no?

About a year and a half ago I emailed my brother, El Maestro de Bife, who has an exhaustive and deep knowledge of all things slightly inappropriate. I knew he was my go-to guy and asked him to distinguish between a MILF and a Cougar. MILF, of course you know, is the crass acronym for “Mother I’d Like to Fuck” – which is just a puerile male way of saying Hot Mama. While I don’t love MILF, I’ll grant you MILF. There are many many hot mamas out there and it is most definitely a distinguishable, identifiable subset of the population and therefor worthy of a name and this is the one that has seemed to have stuck. So fine, I get it.

But what about these cougars I was hearing about? El Maestro responded that while a MILF still has her cubs around her, a Cougar hunts for her fresh meat alone. Interesting! Hunts. Alone. Fresh meat. OK, so as long as I have my chitlins in my wake and as long as I’m not on the prowl, then I can’t be a cougar. In fact, barring a piano falling on top of Doctor Dash, I will most likely never be a cougar. This is part of the popular lexicon that I can daintily sidestep, demurely holding my skirt to my side so as not to be sullied.

Then Barbie turned 50 and she looks fantastic for her age. Her breasts are still half way between her shoulder and her elbow as they should be, if not a titch higher, her feet still tiny, her hair radiant, her skin as creamy as a Coppertone Vanilla milkshake. But someone comes up with Cougar Barbie, imagining Barbie’s natural trajectory (never one for subtlety, it actually would be hard to imagine Barbie growing old gracefully à la Isabella Rosselini or Lauren Bacall). If you haven’t seen it, watch it. Hilarious, no? Heh, heh, ho, ho, ho! Hilarious! The paunch, the leopard print, the Journey – oh Cougar Barbie, you are too much! Still, this does nothing to disavow me of my notion that cougars are not something I need worry my pretty little head about.

And then. And then. Because you knew there had to be a then, in June we went out to the Jersey shore to hang out with our friends Chief Big Voice and Saucy-licious Duddy. Saucy and I were grooving to a really great live band at the Princeton, minding our own business, when I was approached by a young fellow whose opener was an enthusiastic, surfer intoned “Heeeyyyyyyy, a couple a cooouuuugaaaarrrrs!” My head swiveled around, my eyes turned bright yellow, I punched him in the trachea and snarled: “Are you fucking kidding me?” Actually, I only did that last part, but it was accompanied by my most withering Catholic high school girl staredown. I was pissed. COUGAR? Me? Us? We were just having a good time, digging the music, drinking many drinks, laughing our asses off. OK, so maybe we looked super hot, but it’s not like we could help it and we certainly weren’t on the prowl or giving the impression of being on the prowl – we were simply a couple of moms, out on the town, wrapped up in our own hilarious shenanigans. Nothing more. Nothing less. Simple as pie. Rowdy but uninterested. Needing to look no further than the band, our glasses and the people we came with for all the fun we needed. And then. And then, on our way out of the bar someone called Saucy’s sister, Little J, a cougar and she’s even younger than us! 

Screeech. Hold on one sharp shootin’ high fallutin’ minute here folks. Something was afoot. My feathers were ruffled, but not ruffled enough to have missed the look of complete and utter shock on the young lad’s face when I shut him down like a noxious Jack in the Box. It was but a second, because I immediately gave him the scapula of ice, but there’s no denying it – he was surprised, perhaps even dismayed, at my reaction. Could it be? Could he possibly have meant it as . . . a compliment? 

Nooo! we railed, Saucy-licious, Little J and I – No way! We’re not out trying to snag young dudes! We’re not even old enough to be cougars, anyway! Unacceptable! Unfathomable! Unprofessional! Unpalatable! Unfreakingbelievable! Now we were all pissed! And yet. And yet. Because like a then, there’s usually a yet, I think these guys meant no ill. Quite the opposite, I think they were trying, in that broad blunt simian way of youth in bars, to be nice. Well, maybe not nice, exactly. (I may not be a cougar, but I wasn’t born yesterday.) Simply put, these guys seemed to be operating with a different definition of cougar than we were. Maybe.

You need to write about this on your blog! insisted Saucy-licious, Clear this shit up! But all I could do was shudder. No, I couldn’t possibly. To even contemplate the word, to type the word, would feel like an admission, a toe dipped into fountain of age. Peevish and Cougar simply could not be seen together. It was not right. Not yet. Not for a long time. Not for a very very long time. Shudder. Shudder.

And then. And then, because there are always more thens, my friend the Magnificent Bastard sends out a tweet a couple weeks ago asking for top 5 hollywood cougars because he needs them for “work.” His were Julianne Moore, Sharon Stone, Catherine Zeta Jones, Cate Blanchett and Sophia Loren whom he deems “extreme coug.” Then another twitter friend, KC, replies almost immediately, so it obviously didn’t take a lot of thought: Maria Bello, Sharon Stone, Marissa Tomei, Liz Hurley, Vivica Fox and more! OK, fellas, let’s just hold on one more sweet salty snitch snatch second, because these chicks are some seriously hot stuff and not at all the compadres of Cougar Barbie; in fact, I think I may need the definition re-explained to me because if that NJ guy meant anything even approaching this, then perhaps a punch in the trachea was a tad harsh. (Before you start to feel too sorry for him, just know that he was undeterred by my smack down and followed up with an equally compelling: are you Brazilian? for which he received another punch in the trachea.) So I tweet/asked and they both answered that it pretty much just boils down to hot over 40. Cubs and hunting have nothing to do with it. 

Hmmm. Well then. Much ado about nothing. Maybe. Wait, you know what? No. Even assuming you remove the desperado aspect from the term, I’m not sold. Far from it, I’m still troubled and I’ll tell you why. I think forty is a bit young for Cougarville. Forty is the new thirty. Forty year olds have babies and toddlers. Forty year olds are still figuring out what they want to do with their lives. Forty year olds like to play. Forty sounds old because we all remember our parents turning forty, but it feels young. Hell, we all feel downright adolescent half the time. (For the record, I’m not there yet, but fast approaching.) In this day and age, forty just doesn’t feel old enough to be a delineating factor, a parenthetical tacked onto the sentence: she looks good. 

Women my age deserve to be unencumbered by parentheticals for a few more years. It’s only fair. Most of us just got done wiping butts, for crying out loud! So let’s all be peaches and pals and agree to leave the fine foxy forty somethings out of this discussion and move the Cougar line to um, say, fifty. And we’ll talk again in another ten years.

Meow.

We went up north for Labor Day weekend. Hastily assembled, last minute planning yielded three days, more relaxing and action packed than I would have thought possible. Sometimes, last minute is the best way. We pulled the kids out of school on Friday and set off due north with a minivan chocked to the gills with food, fishing poles, water colors, and anything else I could think of to keep our short attention spans from unravelling into pervasive, crotchety boredom.

I needn’t have worried.

The lake. It was beautiful. Deep. Almost primordial. Its dark, velvety waters were cold enough to make swimming something for which you had to summon up courage. It was cold enough to feel curative. And it was vast, with undulating shorelines, eddies and bays, silent islands, promontories and fingers of land, beckoning or accusatory, depending on how you looked at them. There seemed to be a secret code of earth and water we had to approach with caution and respect. Dash and I had to navigate, eyes skimming the horizon and darting back to the map, to reconcile the two dimensional with the three, to keep our bearings, to find our way home. It was challenging, but it got easier. We learned something new. We grinned madly, feeling slightly less the rubes on a pontoon. We squinted into the sun, proud, almost seaworthy. 

Fish. There are fish in Lake Vermillion. All hungry for worms and willing to be caught by Saint James and Supergirl (Dash too, but with less success – I think the jerky line of a child-held rod must make those worms dance extra seductively). They fished off the docks, they fished off the boat. It was the go-to activity for three whole days. It was what filled up the hours in the sun. And Devil Baby watched and cheered, played with the worms, touched the slippery bodies of the fish, and essentially hung around doing nothing in a way I’ve never seen her do before. It was gratifying to watch them do something contemplative, something that requires patience, quiet, sustained attention with eyes trained on the water.

Kitchen. More time and less stuff, I found myself enjoying the simpler, pared down ritual of preparing meals. I found it meditative: the opening and shutting of drawers, looking for a potato peeler, a whisk, a bottle opener; stopping to take a sip of wine and gaze out the enormous kitchen windows at the lake; washing dishes by hand, keeping my workspace neat. Without the rush, meal preparation is a completely different animal and in the silence of the cabin, broken only by the occasional triumphant whoop from the nearby dock, I remembered everything I love about cooking.

Reading. I was forced to unplug. No wireless, no phone. No twitter, no blog. Just my books. I have been feeling scattered lately. Unmoored. I have been finding it hard to focus, to lose myself in a book. Perhaps it’s because there has been so much end of the summer action to attend to. Perhaps, I too am losing the power of sustained attention, giving way to the rat-like compulsion to check my email, tweet and surf every few minutes. In the quiet of the north woods, I became that mother – the reading mother. On the chaise, with her nose in a book, occasionally peering over the pages with narrowed eyes and an amused smile, luxuriating in the act of reading deeply while her family plays almost, almost, out of earshot. They fished, I read. My heart slowed down. Everyone was engaged, so I could disengage and dive into my books: Snow by Orhan Pamuk, challenging reading, testing my patience, but a book whose layers slowly unfold drawing you further and deeper. It’ll be worth it, I think. Time will tell. And Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser, a tightly wrought collection of short stories, the few I have read so far are intriguing, smart, mildly menacing – he is a beautiful writer.

Fish. Each catch was followed by a few seconds of tense hook extraction. Saint James and Supergirl would bow their heads in concentration, working against the ticking seconds and the struggling fish to get the hook out as gently and quickly as possible. They’d toss it back in the water, peer into the depths and inevitably yell “Yep, he made it!” with joy and relief. For them a fair fishing bargain involves no more than a few seconds of discomfort on the part of the fish. They are tender and respectful toward nature. I am not sure whether this is something you can teach, or whether this is something that just naturally occurs in a child.  

Kitchen. I brought everything, even my sharp knife and cilantro. But even when you bring everything, there are things you wish you had brought. As I made salads and salsas, mixing and matching my ingredients like edible Garanimals, I thought of Jumpa Lahiri’s piece in the NY Times earlier this summer. I thought of all the things I would remember next time (honey, white pepper, soy sauce, hot sauce, gin, the pickled eggplant I just made) and all the things I was so glad to have brought (my knife, sea salt, avocado, cilantro, olives, strawberries, fancy cheeses, sauvignon blanc, baby spinach, garlic, tomatoes, baguettes, Hope Creamery butter, two kinds of vinegar and olive oil).

Fire. Doctor Dash made two fires a night. One with charcoal for grilling steaks and salmon. One with wood for roasting s’mores. The fire drew the children out of the brush, away from the beach. Like young natives, they watched the flames, flicking and dancing against the darkening sky. Or maybe they were just hungry.

Fish. One morning I glanced up from my book and saw a stout fireplug of a man talking to Doctor Dash on the dock where he and the kids were fishing. Our cabin neighbor had ostensibly come out to introduce himself to Dash, but in fact needed to flip Dash’s rod right side up before showing him a picture of the 53 inch Muskie he had caught the day before. We chuckled about this the rest of the day, picturing the poor guy grimacing over his coffee mug as he looked out the window watching Dash cast with an upside down rod. He probably muttered through his pain and agitation for a good fifteen minutes before getting so exasperated he burst through his back door to save Dash from himself. Hilarious.  

Watercolors. I’m so glad I brought them. Devil Baby painted and painted. Busy, quiet, happy. Just how I like her.

Feathers. The bald eagles. They were incredible. We had no idea they all hung out in the north woods. We saw more eagles than seagulls, yet they never lost the power to startle us, to elicit a gasp, a pause in the action to watch their muscular flight, their graceful hunting, their branch shaking landing in the tops of trees. There was an island where a bunch of them seemed to perch and to hover right below them in a quiet kayak was pure magic. And then there were the loons. My kids said the cries of the loons reminded them of our neighbor, Evan’s, cry. Somewhere between a giggle and a sob, suspended between joy and loss, the loons stopped us in our tracks over and over again.

Haunting and beautiful. Just like that lake.

A couple things for starters: as I sit down to write this post I have a song running through my head. A song which none of you know unless you happen to have gone to a Catholic all-girls school in the eighties. I say this with some confidence because it is a little known fact that the Catholics are prolific song writers and drop a panoply of new, uplifting, guilt-inducing ballads every year. Trust me, they’re really good at it. When my parish went all folksy acoustic in the late seventies, I knew there was something afoot and I was not mistaken. So my song? The harvest is plenty, laborers are few, come with me into the fields . . . Ringing a bell? Susie? Yes? If not, it doesn’t matter. Completely irrelevant.

The other point I want to make is that I know I am tormenting you with this whole tomato fixation and I apologize. The only thing I can recommend is some patience. Maybe go away for a while until I get this out of my system, which will be sometime around the first frost. Anyone who has been tuning in here for a while is familiar with my little obsessions: calamity, my knee, music, bacon, my son’s hair, tequila, my knee, calamity. Usually I move on in some fashion or another. Sometimes not. Only time will tell.

Earlier this summer I ordered a big cedar planter on line and planted two measly tomato plants and a pepper plant (respectively, Joaquin, Bruce and Pepe). I got a late start (blame it on the knee and the tequila) and had meager hopes for my teensy garden. In fact, in a knee-jerk act of proactive self-defense, I pooh poohed myself here. 

Well, I needn’t have gone to the trouble, because those tomatoes pictured above in my oddly chunky looking hands are the first of my harvest and they are freaking delicious! They burst in your mouth like little ampules of summer and there are a lot more where those came from.

The ever potent and mysterious confluence of sun, rain and neglect has yielded tremendous, bodacious, GIGANTIC tomato plants. Joaquin and Bruce have completely muscled out poor Pepe, who despite a lack of sun and nutrients, has still managed to squeeze out a few lovely peppers. Joaquin and Bruce scoffed at the cages I got from Ivory Tickler and are growing out of control, every which way. They are muscular, unruly, borderline intimidating. They look like they could snatch a small rodent scuttling by, eat it and use its tiny bones to pick their teeth. They look like they might grope you, should you walk by with a short skirt on. They look like thugs, unsavory characters, major bad asses. And they are loaded, loaded with tomatoes. I am fearful, but I am proud. I love them. Come see them. Just watch your ass as you come through the gate.

Everyone is gushing about tomatoes these days. Yammering on and on about how perfect they are, heirloom this and that, just a drizzle of olive oil and some salt, dizzying profusion, vine ripened, sweet meaty flesh, panoply of colors, blah blah blah. Hell, I even rhapsodized about tomatoes about this time last year. Yes, people, tomatoes in August are amazing. I get it. There are a million ways to prepare them, but simplest is best. I get it. Eat them now or forever hold your peace. I GET IT!

You think I don’t understand? Me? The woman who would marry tomatoes if she wasn’t already married to bacon and Doctor Dash? Me? I freakin’ love tomatoes. I’m like the Mother Theresa of tomatoes. The wan, weak, mealy ones? I love those too. They’re all part of God’s plan, and if you have to throw ‘em in a low oven for some slow cookin’ caramelization to make ‘em palatable, then vaya con Dios, mis hijos, I’m in.

See the picture? That’s what I’ve had for lunch or dinner or both, every day since we went to the Mill City Farmers Market this past Saturday (which, incidentally, is my new fave market. Have you noticed a pattern? The last one I visit is my favorite. It has grown tremendously since last summer, but still maintains the cool, locavore, minimalist aesthetic of its founder Brenda Langton of Cafe Brenda and Spoonriver. Maybe it’s the backdrop of the mighty Mississippi and the brooding, cool-as-shit blue Guthrie Theater, but this market really feels like an open air temple to good, fresh, delicious food. And they have dim sum carts. And they have a delicious pig cart where you can get an egg and bacon breakfast sandwich. And they have mini donuts. And pies. And smoked trout. And live goats). I digress. I digress and I need to get back to feeling ambivalent and tortured about tomatoes.

I have been around the bend a few times and to me this shameless orgy of tomato goodness is bittersweet, although admittedly juicy and delicious. It represents the beginning of the end. Summer is waning, and tomatoes are like the glittery confetti at a New Years party. Tomatoes are the grand finale at the fireworks show. Tomatoes are the last hurrah. They are Mother Nature’s one last blast of love, of goodwill, of sweet summer warmth. She is saying good bye and like any smart woman, saving the best for last. (Fall harvest gourds and squashes don’t count, so don’t split hairs and mess with my metaphor mojo.) 

And because you, my readers, are empathetic creatures, you may be asking yourselves: Why, Peevish Mama, why, why must you be so sad? Why can’t you just enjoy the tomatoes? I would sigh a mighty sigh, my gaze fixed on an uncertain point in the middle distance, my eyes brimming with salty tears, and answer you thusly: I am enjoying the tomatoes, my little ones. They are perfection. They are poetry. They fill my heart and my belly in innumerable, indescribable ways. Tomatoes, my loves, are exquisite, yes. But so are these dwindling honeyed days of summer. And for all that fleeting beauty, I cry into my gazpacho. I cry. 

Doctor Dash can be a very wise man. There have been times in our marriage when he noticed things about the kids or put things into words in a way that made me stop, blink, and sheepishly acknowledge the lightbulb suddenly swinging above my head. I am drowning in the kids. I can’t see the forest for the trees, but he, with his hours away, sometimes brings a new perspective that is, frankly, right on.

Example: when Supergirl was about a year and a half old, she was a total wild child. She was a climber and a runner and her mission in life seemed to be to find the highest and most precarious perch from which to exhibit herself to the world. She always had a naughty smile on her face as she watched me staggering around below, trying to talk her down, ready to catch her if she ever slipped (she never did). She was (and is) a coordinated and strong little monkey with no fear of heights or speed. She was (and is) a girl in constant motion. We found ourselves gasping and clutching our chests, shaking our heads in exasperation, telling everyone who would listen what a “handful” she was. Until Dash wisely noted that if she was a boy, we would think nothing of her level of activity and risk taking, and that maybe we just needed to stop talking about it. Simply put, just because she’s a girl, doesn’t mean she doesn’t have the right to careen through life at top speeds. Of course. Of COURSE! We didn’t want to change her, wouldn’t be able to even if we tried, so what was the point of belaboring the point? No point. Right. So we stopped making such a big deal about her hair raising antics, learned to trust her as much as she trusted herself, and have come to quite enjoy having that kind of kid in our brood.

As I’ve mentioned before, we have been trying to give Saint James and Supergirl some freedom to roam our neighborhood. We want them off the couch and into the brush. We hope that by giving them a little space, they’ll gain a sense of confidence in themselves, a healthy sense of safety in their surroundings, and maybe some smarts along the way. Earlier this summer, we let them walk two blocks to Sweet Jessamine and Ivory Tickler’s house to turn on their sprinklers while they were on vacation: a chore adventure hybrid – genius. Doctor Dash made the observation that the two of them seem to get along the best when they get to go out alone on their little excursions. Normally, Saint James and Supergirl are notorious, insufferable bickerers, making the Costanzas look like swooning love birds. They have turned quarreling into an art form, refusing to agree on anything, dividing the universe of ideas in half and planting themselves firmly on either side of the line. They argue, they parse, they quote and misquote, they poke holes in reasoning, they unveil inconsistencies, they split hairs, they tit for tat, they begrudge, they demean, they scoff, they tease, they bully, they quibble, they scrap, they wrangle, they aha, they I told you so. In short, they fight. Constantly. Except, it seems, when they go off on an adventure. Yes indeed Doctor Dash, I do believe you are right! What an interesting bi-product of our little freedom experiment!

They don’t exactly walk off hand in hand, but they do go side by side and it’s as if the expanse of the world unfolding in front of their feet makes them feel less chafed by each other. Simply turning the focus away from the other to a point over the hill or down the creek allows them to coexist in peace, at least for a short time. Or maybe, when they are walking alone, they feel a bit of us against the world. They always come back happy, having seen one dead animal or another, having caught some insect or another, or, most recently, having had a relaxing little visit with neighbors. Yesterday Supergirl asked if she could walk to Red Vogue’s and Salt and Pepper Polymath’s house with Saint James, under the pretense of showing them the tie dye shirts they had made at camp. They came back about an hour later, their smiles ringed with the telltale mark of blue Gatorade. I find it amusing that they walked over to our dear neighbors’ house, accepted a little refreshment, chatted them up, (hopefully) didn’t fight with each other, (hopefully) said thank you and good bye. How civilized of them. And all NOT under my watch. It’s actually a small miracle. And another interesting bi-product of our freedom experiment.

Thank you Red Vogue and SPP, for being part of a little world that allows them to feel big. And thank you Dash for discovering one small way to curb the bickering. Their mucky water shoes are parked at the front door and if you see them touching dead things in the creek, just know that . . . I’m kind of, totally OK with that . . . as long as they’re not fighting.

I know I’m waxing annoyingly poetic about farmers markets, but I just LOVE them. I love love LOVE them. You certainly get your browsing and shopping fix, ogling all that colorful, shiny produce and snapping up bunches and baskets of beauty for but a song. You give your foodie-self a good little run around, ending up with buckets of beautiful ingredients for lovely salads and suppers. I love having a big monster bunch of scallions in the fridge, for example, and working my little chef’s brain to figure out how to use them up. You get to chat with people you know over the wholesome twangy din of a bluegrass band. You get to wear hats and sundresses and act all twee and romantic with kale and carrot tops exploding out of your woven bag. And it’s different every time. My supermarket, by contrast, is the same every time. I love farmers markets, and yesterday, I found two reasons more:

1. When is the last time you shelled peas? I can think of nothing as deeply soothing, meditative and delicious.2. If these oddly affecting carrots-in-love had come across the conveyor belt of a poorly paid worker at Dole or United Fruit Company, they surely would have been tossed in the rejects pile. Mother Nature is an artist who works loose and quick, with an abundance of joy and improvisation, wit and wonder. There is crushing beauty and soulfulness in her rare imperfections, if you are simply willing to look. 

Why do I feel like this?When all I’ve got is this?

Photographer Kevin Trageser features these haunting photographs found in an album near a flooded home in the Ninth Ward. I imagine he took pictures of the pictures, stepping in to preserve something that is visibly vanishing by virtue of moisture, heat, chemical processes. Looking at these photos, it’s as if the reverse of developing is happening. The images are receding, reverting to the primordial ooze from which we came. The members of this family, who once stood proud and still for the camera, are slowly being swallowed up by the same water that inevitably soaked and ruined life as they knew it. I am struck by the quirk in the decomposition process that rendered the couple above ironically festive in a yellow party hat and flirty teal hair ribbon. And the couple below – were they cutting their wedding cake? If you look carefully, you can see a glass of white wine at the edge of the table. Did she ever remember to pick it up after she set it down in that vanishing moment?

Disquieting. Beautiful. And so very sad. Check out the rest here. 

We all feel the sap rise in our veins when it’s spring. I know I do. I feel lusty, antsy, frothy, a little bit wicked, almost adolescent. This is a bad time of the year to be hobbled. My trusty minivan is my only ally. I cruise around, windows open, my hair dancing in wild wips, listening to Hip HopNation waaaaay too loud. Thank God for satellite radio. Slim Thug, Lil’ Wayne, T.I., Young Jeezy, Jay Z, Fiddy, Diddy, Kanye, Dre, Snoop and my girl M.I.A. I drive around, my van fulla my homeys, warm breezes and bass. Spleefs and 40’s passed around, the windshield a movie, the soundtrack our own.

Except. Except. Not.

It’s just me and the music and the wind. I pull into the driveway, my ears ringing and the yearning in my chest only slightly abated.

Damn you spring.

I promised myself I wouldn’t post again until I could post about something other than my knee, but sadly, I’ve got nothing. My knee still rules. I am its simpering bitch. I pamper it, strengthen it, bend it, medicate it, hydrate it, coddle it. Curse it behind its back.

Here in Minnesota we are breathing in the first of spring – with great inhalations of relief, we are greedy for the smell of green – sweet, sweet chlorophyll. This week has been but a string of days that feel like sun-kissed gifts from Mother Nature. I have taken to sitting in my adirondack chair in front of my house in the afternoons. I feel like a proper invalid from the olden days taking my fresh air, my sun, my constitutionals – minus the white blanket, the buxom nurse and the Swiss Alps in the foreground. I am a feeble convalescent – outside of everything – nothing more than a passive bystander as an orgy of bipedal existence flaunts itself in front of my eyes.

I sit in my chair, my crutches glinting in the grass beside me, and I watch Devil Baby ride her tricycle on the sidewalk. We amuse ourselves by creating elaborate dinners, with her riding her tricycle to the little tree to get each ingredient. Yesterday she went to the “lake” and caught some fish, which I cleaned and breaded and fried in a cast iron skillet. Then she raced off to the little tree to buy blueberries. Then back to get spinach, carrots, cream for the berries, sea salt, a baguette. She is a tireless food shopper. It’s a game – part charades, part pretend, part fetch.

As she pedals away, her little blue rain boots pushing like mechanical pistons, I slip into one of my infamous calamitizations – my reveries of doom. I imagine a rusty van stopping and someone jumping out to pluck my Devil Baby off her red tricycle. What would I do? Normally, I envision leaping out of my chair and running like the bionic woman until I catch the van – my reflexes so cat-like that they wouldn’t have gotten far. I lunge and grab hold of the side of the van, working my arms into an open window while the culprit tries to shake me off, thwacking my legs against the side of the van like a rag doll. I rip off the rear view mirror and bludgeon the driver in the face until he swerves, swearing and crying, and hits a tree. I am thrown from the van, but I jump up and grab Devil Baby from the floor of the back seat, collapsing into the grass. I cradle her, a trickle of blood snaking down my temple, as the camera zooms out and the music swells. Cue the distant sirens.

But now, NOW, I’m on crutches and I won’t be able to leap out of my chair and put the smack down. Now, I must rely on my wits, my keen eyesight. I, who couldn’t tell you the make of most of my friends’ cars if you offered me a million dollars, will have to get my shit together and start to identify all those amorphous sedans and suvs with the precision of a trained detective. 1997 Buick Lesabre. Sage-mist metalic. The brake rotors are shot, passenger side wiper stuck at 30 degrees, I will rattle off through gritted teeth. Crucial, above all, I must memorize the license plate number. Gotta get those plates. Suddenly, it feels irresponsible to be sitting outside alone with Devil Baby and no cell phone. So exposed, helpless. I know every second is critical.

Tick. Tick.

I decide to practice.

Devil Baby is buying a peach pie at the little tree. A maroon minivan snakes by, a bit too slowly for my taste. Downright predatory. Soccer ball decal in the window. Check. I squint into the sun and – Mother Mary – I can’t make out the license plate! I can’t even read it, let alone memorize it, let alone make a lightening quick phone call to alert the authorities so they put out an APB and smack a tail on that van faster than you can say crazy.

So I put my head back and close my eyes, the sun thumbing dancing sparks against my eyelids. I take a deep breath and wait for my peach pie.

So I’m reading a book and it’s rocking my world.  Not necessarily in a good way.  It’s making me stressed and anxious – it leaves me fretting and wringing my hands.  My mantra:  we are so fucked – so so so so fucked.

I’m reading Hot, Flat, and Crowded by Thomas Friedman and if all of our problems were embodied by a wild boar erratically and voraciously wreaking havoc in our backyard, then Friedman deftly succeeds in cornering, subduing, slaughtering, trussing, dressing, and turning the beast into bite size pieces of wild boar sausage.  In short, he tackles the morass of issues our planet is facing right now and breaks it down in a really compelling, common sensical, and terrifying way.  Sometimes I turn to Dash, wild eyed with panic, my nails white from clutching the book so tightly and he calmly urges me to read on. “The second half is all about the solutions,” he intones, his eyes like slits – a Yoda in my bed.  Solutions?  SOLUTIONS? WHAT SOLUTIONS?  WE’RE SO FUCKED!  SO SO SO SO FUCKED!!!

Basically, Friedman posits that our planet is becoming hot(global warming), flat (because of globalization, technology and the internet, more and more people are able to rise out of poverty, see how “the other half” lives, strive for and attain a middle class lifestyle), and crowded (rising birthrates and life expectancies).  This trifecta of stressors is taking a huge, soon to be irreversible toll on our physical and political planet because of the paradigm that we Americans established for how to live and thrive on this earth: one that is based on the consumption of massive amounts of fossil fuels.  Friedman writes: “In particular, the convergence of hot, flat, and crowded is tightening energy supplies, intensifying the extinction of plants and animals, deepening energy poverty, strengthening petrodictatorships, and accelerating climate change.”  Ay, mamasita!

As always, the devil is in the details and he is able to illustrate each of these problems with such life and color that one is left chilled to the bone.  The tentacles of this energy crisis not only wrap around issues of climate change, loss of biodiversity and global politics – but women’s rights, education, healthcare.  Friedman isn’t an alarmist, though.  This isn’t simply shrill hysteria and hyperbole.  His arguments wouldn’t resonate as much as they do if he wasn’t able to build his case, piece by piece, in the cool (for now) light of day.  I haven’t gotten to the solutions yet, but I suppose there is some small comfort in understanding the scope and details of the problem.  The way it is far better to know it’s a wild boar in your backyard than to just hear mysterious and grotesque squealing and grunting in the night, waking up to wreckage and destruction.  It doesn’t make it any better.  You still have a big problem.  But at least you know what it is.  

Friedman asserts that America needs to take the lead in creating the technologies, the ethics and the systems to mitigate the fact that our world is becoming hot, flat and crowded and lead the way to a cleaner and more sustainable way of living and growing.  It’s the least we can do, considering we are largely responsible for our current predicament.  It would hardly be fair for us to turn to China and India and tell them not to do what we just did.  And it would go a long way toward making us one of the popular kids again.

There is so much information in this book.  It is so important and I so want to understand and get it right.  Aside from: 1.we’re so fucked and 2. at least I know how and why we are so fucked, I am left with my hands clutched at my heart, praying for the one man whose slender shoulders will bear the brunt of this call for change.  It’s beyond words, and I wish it wasn’t so, but you are it, Barack.  It all depends on you.

I won’t even get into the missed opportunities for change and betterment that slipped by in the weeks and months after September 11.  It’s all part if the very intricate jigsaw puzzle set forth in this book.  I cannot recommend it highly enough.  It is horrifying and fascinating.  It should be required reading for high school seniors – and the rest of us.  Give it to someone for Christmas, then borrow it back.  You won’t be sorry.  Or maybe you will.

Today Mother Nature awakens. Her eyes flicker ice blue and she hisses “BASTA!”  She sweeps her arm in a wide swath over her bedclothes sending red and golden leaves spinning and spiraling into the air – skittering away from her angry gesture before landing on the soft floor of her chambers.  She rises and throws open the heavy wooden doors to her armoire. She glimpses herself in a reflecting pool therein and her breath catches for a moment.  When did this happen to me? she wonders desolately.  There is a fawn bending to sip of the pool.  As she steps into her infinite closet, he startles and bounds away.  She walks quickly to the steamer trunk nestled behind a delicate birch tree, falls to her knees and steels herself for the cold.  She opens the trunk and a blast of chilly air roils over her bare shoulders as she rummages deep within.  She slams the lid and sits on the trunk, clutching a sapphire blue silk dress to her chest.  Her heart beats wildly through the fabric against the most tender part of her wrist.  She holds up a dove gray opera glove and slowly pulls it over her pale arm.  She touches the fingers of the other glove lying lifeless in her lap and collapses back against the birch tree.  She is so very tired.

My pulse quickens at the thought.  And not in a good way.  Summer is almost over and I’m not ready.  It’s 8:30 in the morning and I’m on my sunporch in a sweatshirt.  Normally, I love busting out my jeans and sweaters, saying goodbye to the searing sun, the cloying humidity.  I used to love back to school: new shoes, new lunchbox, new Trapper Keeper, sharp pencils, unbroken crayons . . .  

This year, though, I feel like some masked bandit ran off with my summer.  With selling the house and all the bullshit that went with it, my summer was not nearly long enough, not nearly lazy enough.  We didn’t do enough reading.  We didn’t do enough mucking around or hiking or swimming in lakes.  We didn’t watch enough sunsets or bats flicking around the night sky.  Too much fretting and cleaning.  Not enough lounging and boredom. 

Three more days and Saint James starts third grade.  Five more days and Supergirl starts kindergarten – Devil Baby starts preschool.  The simple flick of the calendar page will release an avalanche of busy-ness: lunches, homework, piano, soccer, playdates, and all the appointments I’ve blown off this summer: haircuts, teeth cleanings, pediatricians, oil changes.  

I need two more weeks.  That’s it.  Take me back to the beginning of August.  No?  

These photos were taken at our friend’s cabin on the Wisconsin River.  I’ll call him Pipes because he’s got a great voice and a way with plumbing.  On our way back from Michigan we stopped for a night to visit Pipes and his two wonderful daughters.  We drank beers by the water, ate steaks and corn on the cob and made s’mores.  The kids scampered around barefoot and collected wild turkey feathers, threw rocks in the river and grasped at quick and slippery crayfish.  We swam and stopped for soft serve ice cream on the way home.  It was like a crash course in summer.  Thank you, dear friends, for sharing your heavenly spot with us.  

A storm is brewing.  Could there be anything more delicious in the dog days of summer than a wicked, knock down, drag out thunder storm?  There’s the relief from the wet-dog-fur-coat humidity implicit in a good storm.  There’s the forced nesting – something we have too much of in the winter, but not nearly enough of in the summer.  I have a compulsion for being outside when the sun is shining.  If I’m inside, I feel guilty, like I’m frittering away a precious commodity.  We have all the windows open and the lights off.  Devil Baby is scampering about naked.  The wind is picking up and the trees are whispering in agitated voices.  The drumbeats are starting up in the distance, a portent of the tempest fast approaching.  Baby, it’s time for a show.

Today I got to work on my window boxes, something I love, love, love to do.  I have a moderately green thumb, but I have pretty much kept myself satisfied with indoor plants, window boxes and a few big pots of flowers and herbs.  I love to imagine myself shuffling along rows of carefully tended perennials and annuals, cooing the latin names of my babies, moving things around, thinning, deadheading, pruning, etc. -  whatever it is “gardeners” do.  Of course, I would look very garden chic in a wide brimmed sun hat, a light weight cotton blouson in white, khaki clamdiggers and clogs . . . the wooden kind . . . from Holland.  But as of yet, I have no such garden, no such skills and no such wardrobe.  I have, however, figured out a pretty good combo for my shady window boxes – lots of coleus and trailing sweet potato vines . . . dark purples, blood reds and bitchin’ chartreuse greens . . . I likeeee very much.

It was a perfect day for planting – overcast and sprinkling.  I doused myself in bug dope and enjoyed the rain on my back as I crouched in the grass with my new posse of flora, figuring out who should sit next to whom.

But as luck would have it, I ended up tangling with one  formidable mama, giving me great pause during my summertime idyll.  In the window box to the left of our door lives a big spider.  Gigantic.  As my mother would say, “tiene cara de mala!” Translation: she has a mean face.  Which is to say, she is no blondie daddy long leg – which is to say if she looks mean, she probably is mean.  She’s big, she’s thick, she’s dark and nasty looking and she spins some unearthly webs – webs so dense and luxurious they could be used for hammocks for a harem.  I have watched her scuttle behind my primroses.  I have watched her watch me.  I have even watched her jump.  This crazy bitch JUMPS!!!  But for some reason, I haven’t felt compelled to smoosh my resident Arachne.  I just give the lady wide berth, hoping she’ll feast on some of the mosquitos that plague me and Supergirl.  Today, after casting a wary glance around the window box, I removed the plastic liner to find a big spider papoose – a white woven bassinet full of her spawn.  What to do . . . what to do . . . well what I did was grab a stick and rub that thing right into the garbage.  I could almost feel her watching me from her darkened crevice with her eight sparkling eyes.  

I’m so very sorry Ms. Spider, but I’m sure you understand.  It was your babies or mine.  I just can’t have hundreds of little cara de mala spiders running around on my front porch.  Best of luck and enjoy the coleus . . . and please, don’t jump on me.