The Caterpillar

Tonight the little person and I are learning about proportions and measuring and chemical reactions via the wide and wonderful world of baking. Sort of, kind of. Really we just cut up some break and bake cookies and popped them into the oven. While we waited we whipped up the second batch of home made pretzels of the week. If I’m honest, the babe was much more interested in lining the measuring spoons up from biggest to smallest, explaining to me that one was the mommy, the daddy, the sister, the cousin, the grandma, the grandpa, the granny, the Ty Ty, than he was in the science behind the yeast in the dough fermenting to cause it to rise. He used the spoons to carve little faces and canyons into the dough and to make it into volcanoes. I rolled the dough between my finger tips and wrapped it into pretzel shapes while the bitty person dug through the utensils drawer to find the pointiest items to wave in front of his face and terrify me with.

This night of baking felt so much like all my other nights and days and weeks and years now of parenting. I always have this master plan of perfect parenthood, and always the little person decides what’s more fun and does that along with the master plan and beside the master plan and on top of it too. If I’m honest, it makes it more fun. If I’m honest his independence and creativity fills me with this feeling that is kind of like pride and kind of like terror. Parenting, right?

We also spent the weekend over at Lucas Nursery, I had the idea that we could purchase one of the caterpillars they have there, take him home, and Jude could watch it turn into a butterfly. Biology! When we got there, Jude in true fashion spent most of his time collecting gravel and putting it into a can to shake and terrorize the other horitculture shoppers while he ran in circles around the citrus trees. The nursery turned out to have zero caterpillars, all sold out to other mothers and teachers in gleeful anticipation of the painted lady butterflies that they would harbor. Luckily, we spotted a juicy green guy on the tomato plants upon entering, and in desperation clipped the stalk that he was on, along with a tomato or two, and high-tailed it to the car.

It turns out that this caterpillar is called a tomato hornworm. It also turns out that this guy turns into a marvelous moth, about as juicy as the pupa stage, and is commonly called the “hawkmoth”. Fancy that. I admit that I was disappointed at this discovery. I looked at the pillar differently. I scowled at it. Maybe it was some innate human repulsion over the night winged beast, maybe it was disappointment that the hawkmoth’s beauty lies in it’s thick body, that looks almost as if it’s covered by birds feathers, rather than the ornate and flashy colors of the butterfly, maybe it’s society. I don’t know. Now the green beast circles it’s enclosure in some strange gut sloshing dance and I watch it with a kind of horrified awe. I can only hope that the small person finds glee in his transformation and is not disappointed in his lack of pomp.

A weekend full

This weekend was filled nearly to bursting. My first stop was a trip to Cocoa beach with my lovely Jessie to spend a day and a night with my Aunt and my sweet cousin. We drove for an hour and a half, over thin bridges that seemed to stretch up and up and up, unending, where the water was deep and dark below. When I was little I used to dream that I was in the car with my parents and as we crossed the bridge it would spiral upwards and dump us out of the car so that I would have to grasp the concrete with my fingertips to keep from falling. My father had the same ones, and when we would drive over in waking life I would close my eyes and he would hold his breath. This time I looked out over the horizon and into the clouds and mostly straight ahead until we hit even ground. The babe fell asleep on the way, and when we emerged we were all covered in a thin, or not so thin, sheen of sweat from riding in my 1990 volvo, which lacks air conditioning or a speedometer or a gas gauge. I pulled the sleepy guy from the back like a butterball turkey, or like I was a doctor pulling him into life, or like I was a mom pulling a very sweaty toddler from the back seat of a packed sedan, and side saddled him to trot over the boardwalk and to the water. I think we were all pretty relieved to sink our toes into the sand, and to make a silly dolphin, and even to sit in the water and let it wash over our legs.

We held hands.

I also got to spend time with my cousin, who I don’t see nearly enough. She reminded me that even though she’s a small girl and her age gives her almost no voice in society, that inside of her lives someone that is brave and beautiful and creative. Her middle school is nothing like my middle school, and her experiences aren’t the same ones I had, but it still made me smile and cry a little to remember what that time of life felt like. I don’t think I mentioned it here, but the past four months I’ve spent working with middle school students on writing workshops. I’ll write some more about that later, but I want to tell these kids the same things I want to tell my cousin: That people will say you’re too young to matter, that you are too young to have an opinion or know what you want, but that’s not true. What is true is that you are young and strong and full of opportunity and hope. 11 to 15 is hard, probably some of the hardest years that life will bring you and peers are harsh and adults are harsh and your body is harsh, but the age is beautiful as well. It’s where you start to find out what it means to fall in love, and what it means to hate, and to find beauty in places that you didn’t expect it. It’s a time where you can discover a body that was hidden under years and years of someone elses care, and a time where you can take charge of you, to smile, to take the time to be in those “awkward teen years”.

We headed back early on Sunday. The sister friend had a brunch to attend, and I went to be with the baby’s daddy to mourn and celebrate the life of his sister. This part was about as nice and as heartbreaking as I thought it would be. The baby’s daddy’s whole family came in, minus two, which is still a whole lot. He’s the youngest of eight and they’re all sort of spread out, so when they get together it’s a kind of wonderful affair. They’re all funny, beautiful, full of laughter. None of them seem to take themselves or life even, too seriously. The baby’s daddy seemed happy around them, and it was funny to see him there, because he was the quietest and the biggest of them all. The memorial itself was beautiful. It took place in a secret A-line church that overlooked a lake. The sunlight shone in through the stained glass and made rainbows on the floor that the sweet babe made sure to grasp at and stomp on. The memorial meant more than a memorial to me, and I’m not sure how to put it into words, but it was something more, something like a call to go outside and to dance and to hold hands again. Something like that.

Beautiful kindness.

Last night I got a text around ten about roses and redness and violets and how one of those pretty little roses was left out on my front stoop for me to find. The number was one that I didn’t recognize, and I thought it was some kind of a silly hoax, or maybe something that would lead me to a page to sign up for some kind of sweepstakes that required my social security number and banking info. But, curiosity got me, so I cracked open the front door and peeked out. There, on my front step was a pretty little red rose, nestled in a Blue Moon beer bottle. I peeked around, searching for signs of big men and mean spirits hiding in the darkness, then snatched the bottle up and brought it inside, locking all of the doors behind me. All last night and into the this morning I’ve been pondering my mystery gifter. The label of the beer bottle is in pristine condition, the corners unpeeled and unsmudged by dirty fingers, it’s not even bubbled where clinging perspiration would have distorted the peel. This person was a fast and thorough drinker. They keep their hands clean. The rose itself is pretty and simple and a bright red that calls attention to itself in nature. I love it. It made me smile and made me think of kindness and serial killers, because it seems like the two seem to co-exist in this world, and that a single flawless rose left on the front stoop is the sign of both.

In the same line, this weekend I was met with some of the most beautiful kindness. The babe’s daddy lost his oldest sister to a two year long battle with cancer. The past couple of weeks babe’s daddy has been distant and cold, almost to the point of meanness, and in those moments I grew to resent him. I resented the fact that he wouldn’t talk when I was near, that when the babe smiled and played he smiled back and then looked away and got lost somewhere that I had been before. I didn’t take into account all of the things that existed in his silence, or I did and didn’t want to admit it. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to share with him the words that he needed and that all of it would be just too close to what I’ve been through. But, when the time came the babe’s daddy was sad and kind, like with the release of his sister he had released all of the anger and pain at the situation. We were able to talk about what it meant to let someone go, what it meant to love them even if they weren’t there to love in the way we have learned how. How to love in a different way. We walked along the lake together, with the babe and with a cousin in tow, and picked boysenberries off the tree to stuff into our mouths. We enjoyed the too early tartness of the fruit and handed babe the biggest and juiciest from the highest branches to enjoy, while we fed the ducks and searched for gators that hid in the muck. We hugged for a long time. In him and in his family I experienced a kind of beauty and kindness in watching them grieve, in being there, and in smiling with them. Their honesty and their faith in her existence in Heaven was genuine and wonderful, and it turned an occasion that is difficult into something more, something like a celebration, the way that it should be.

 

 

Production

I had three days of production. The babe and I tilled up our little garden in the back and put on our gloves and pulled up the weeds. We then took some seeds that we bought at the dollar store (4 for a dollar! We got green beans, carrots, pumpkins and spinach), and sewed ‘em in along with our yummy stinky compost. That goopy black mix smells heavily of decomposition and usually has a fly or two or ten buzzing around it, but the plants sprout up inside of it and drink it all in. Today we squatted down close to the soil and caught our first glimpses of little newborn sprouts. I didn’t put the markers in the plants this time. It was actually because I forgot and was too lazy to go out and do it later, but we’ll say that it was because I look forward to the surprise of my bounty.

Other than the garden, I spent Saturday at the Winter Park festival for the arts. It was Mama, the babe, my wonderful beautiful friend Jessie, and my marvelous insightful friend Philip. I’ve been to the art festival for the past three years in a row, and other than the times before that when sister and I would meander out there to spot our artwork in the high school tents, this was by far the best show I’ve ever been to. It wasn’t the art, and the crowds were thick and full of people with opinions and thoughts and lives that had nothing to do with me or mine, but the company I kept was cheerful, and full of ideas that intermingled and bounced off of each other. That, and the babe was old enough this year to like the artwork. The high school tents were his favorite and he napped in the sunshine while we strolled down the walk.

Yesterday we went and spent the whole day at Disney. THE. WHOLE. DAY. The babe was both overwhelmed and in love. Much like myself.

And so, today is spent vegging out. I’ve sat in front of the the television, I washed the dog, I smelled my two days worth of trotting around in the Florida sun and decided that at some point a shower was in order, and I’ve eaten two gluten free oatmeal raisin cookies slathered with real butter. Sometimes we just have to take a breath, ya know?

No progress on the book. Maybe soon I’ll pick it up. It’s been waiting for me.

How has the weekend been spent for you?

Hahaha. Intense space Invasion.

On the Ferry Over!

Back

Alright alright, I’ll admit it, I haven’t been around these parts in quite some time. I have no excuses. I graduated in December and since then I’ve enjoyed the wide open world of semi-unemployment. Not that I’ve been doing nothing, I do work off and on when my employer calls me in to listen to and edit stories of his youth. Most of them involve some form of extreme alcohol consumption and beautiful women. Almost the entire time I spend “working”, my boss is telling me his stories, and as he tells them his eyes get even more crinkled around the edges and the corners of his mouth curl up, the residue of coffee still thick in the creases. It makes me smile. We have slowly and steadily been putting together his stories to try to make something like a book, or a life history, or just a time to sit and remember what it felt like to be young.

I’m starting to feel nervous that I’m not going to have those stories. These days I feel like I spend most of my time trying to think of interesting and fun things to do with the little mister babe, but actually watching cartoons and walking slowly around the pool and browsing the internet for pointless websites. I’m not sure if I have put my life on standstill, or if I have suddenly felt this urge to do more and be more and accomplish accomplish accomplish, when before I was content with simple existence. I think the year of twenty five has instilled some kind of ever-present anxiety inside of me that ticks and ticks and ticks, insisting that I’m never going to get any of it done. As a result, I never get any of it done.

Case in point: I’m writing a book. I know exactly who the characters are, where they go, their histories and the beginning, middle, and end, but I’m stuck at page 35. I just can’t force myself on. Maybe I need to, or maybe that’s the point, maybe I need to let it just happen.

Maybe I need to stop with the forcing, and just let go a little bit. Let go and hang out with the babe. Maybe it’s okay if every day is not spent going on fantastic adventures where we discover hidden places, maybe it’s better to just hold on here and be happy drawing pictures together, or playing hide and go seek, or doing the laundry or moping the floors or playing with clay. I guess I just need to tell myself that that stuff is okay, and instead of becoming exhausted thinking of what we’re not doing, to just do, and to just have fun.

In other news, my entire household has come down with the stomach flu, that is, except for me and my cuzin who are hoping we have ridden out the storm. I know my sweet babe has felt terrible, but it’s almost a comforting feeling to have my little fire-cracker curl up beside me to have me rub his tummy. After a week, I think we’re about ready to head out and remember life again.

Who else has some ways to encourage one to get up and go? I could sure use them.

After Christmas

So, about a week after Christmas it seems appropriate to do my Christmas post!

We had a beautiful time. It was different than years past, and on the edges there were tinges of sorrow and a stomach flu that kept me away from all the rich and wonderful foods, but there were more smiles this year than the past three years combined.

We were up before dawn with squeals of, “Christmas! Christmas!” and the mad dash to wake up all the other sleepers of the house insued. We were then down the stairs and into the family room where the tree still glowed and the presents were lined up happily and waiting the little one’s twitching fingers. The babe, of course, received a store full of toys and candy and paints. We even spaced the gift opening out, and he finished opening his last present this morning. Even so, he opened each with gusto. He yelled upon each new discovery, “Oh my gosh! A (car truck fingerpaint toy train etc.). I LOVE THIS!”, and everyone was more than pleased to offer up their gifts. He was the perfect receiver and he genuinely enjoys each one.

My brother got the chance to take leave from his base in Kentucky and spend some time with us, which has been fun and has made the family feel sort of kind of whole again. He picks on the babe and the babe picks on him. He has taught him some army wrestling moves and the babe has taught him how to translate toddler speak. It’s a symbiotic relationship.

I still look forward to the rest of the season. New years where I’ll sip sparkling grape juice, the days I plan to spend with my grandmother, days and days and days with the babe.

Of course, I still long for some. Every day I do, but always at the holidays. Isn’t it funny how when you miss someone you remember distinctly pieces of them? The rough spot inside of their palms, the way a nose curves, a gap between teeth. This season I missed the soft brush of a cheek against mine. I remembered the soft baby hairs that fell across the skin and the way her face felt soft when it pressed against mine, and the way I could smell her hair and the lotion she used when I leaned up against her. I missed our night time giggling, our comparison of gifts. But, I told myself it was okay to miss and it was okay to be happy. And I was, and I am. Happy still

 

What’s this all about?

So, how do you all feel about this season?

I’m pretty conflicted about it. The babe is going to be bombarded with piles of stuff stuff stuff. I can’t help myself. This is the first year that I know he’ll be excited about Christmas, about presents, and I want to feel excited too. It’s selfish, I know that, but I don’t mind. It’s so hard for me to hold on to something happy about Christmas that I’m not going to let this go. It took me so long to let myself feel happy, to tell myself that happy is okay, that I don’t really want to admit that I’m spending money that I can’t really spend to give the babe things that maybe possibly he doesn’t even want. All because I want the smile. The squeals of joy. The, “Christmas! Presents!”, that will come when he wakes up.

Three years ago sister and I went from store to store scouting out unique gifts. We made plans, we split the cost, and we wrote both our names on the package. It’s hard for me now to write just mine, and so on every gift I write, “From Jude.”

The gifts may not be healthy. I know it’s not a tradition I want to start with the babe, piles of meaningless things that I bought. But I know too that a lot of them will be fun for us both to play with, a lot of them will encourage outdoor play, and a lot of them will be tossed to the side. I wish that I had spent time making them. I wanted to make puppets and a puppet house and a cardboard kingdom. I guess it’s okay though. Christmas doesn’t have to be the only time for gifts and fun.

We spent yesterday at the plant nursery looking for herbs and playing in the “Jungle”. We looked for lions and the babe swam in the gravel.

The babe with his can full of gravel

Passion Fruit blossom

What's that over there?

A lovely green anole, deceased at the park

I know my pictures kind of stink, they’re blurry and out of the phone (not even an Iphone at that!), but I like to look at them and I hope you do too

I look forward to the rest of this season and the rest of the year. I look forward to Christmas and presents and cookies and I feel happy. Happy. I hope all of you out there do too.