Day 41: Cleaning
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Day 40: In the Creek
Day 39: Rain
It rained today. Almost the entire day. Being stuck at home is not that bad when we can go outside, but being stuck in the house makes for a long day. In the grand scheme of things, that’s a petty issue, I realize. But such was our reality today.
What’s more, E swears he’s tired of all the games. Sorry? “No!” Monopoly? “No!” Uno? “No!” He was up for chess, but one can hardly play three-person chess.
Well, it exists, but I’ve never played it, and we don’t have a board.
Day 38: Hybrid Walk
This evening’s walk was a hybrid: the kids wanted to go exploring; we wanted just a normal walk. So we began in the woods, then emerged in the adjacent neighborhood and headed back to the house the long way.
The Boy snapped pictures most of the way. And, somewhat predictably, the Girl, seeing E having all the fun, wanted to take a few pictures herself. Well, that sounds a little too cynical: she has expressed a slight interest in photography, but there is always that thirteen-year-old aspect to her that, well, I don’t know. She’s thirteen. That’s really all we need to say.
On the way back, so much silliness. I can’t remember the last time L, E, and K were so silly with each other, laughing at nonsense, making more nonsense just to make everyone laugh all the harder.
And Clover and I the only ones keeping things serious. Sort of.
We got back with time to spare before I had to start getting the Boy ready for bed. For our reading, we continued with what we’ve been slogging through for some time now: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. It’s not that it’s a bad book: E insists that Verne is a master of cliffhangers. But he does seem to get a little carried away with himself. For example, one chapter begins thusly:
The Mediterranean, the blue sea par excellence, “the great sea” of the Hebrews, “the sea” of the Greeks, the “mare nostrum” of the Romans, bordered by orange-trees, aloes, cacti, and sea-pines; embalmed with the perfume of the myrtle, surrounded by rude mountains, saturated with pure and transparent air, but incessantly worked by underground fires; a perfect battlefield in which Neptune and Pluto still dispute the empire of the world!
It’s not a passage for a seven-year-old. “What’s ‘par excellence mean?” “Who were the Hebrews?” “What are Greeks?” “‘Mare nostrum’ — what’s that?” “What does ’embalmed’ mean?”
The next chapter — the very next chapter — begins thusly:
The Atlantic! a vast sheet of water whose superficial area covers twenty-five millions of square miles, the length of which is nine thousand miles, with a mean breadth of two thousand seven hundred—an ocean whose parallel winding shores embrace an immense circumference, watered by the largest rivers of the world, the St. Lawrence, the Mississippi, the Amazon, the Plata, the Orinoco, the Niger, the Senegal, the Elbe, the Loire, and the Rhine, which carry water from the most civilised, as well as from the most savage, countries! Magnificent field of water, incessantly ploughed by vessels of every nation, sheltered by the flags of every nation, and which terminates in those two terrible points so dreaded by mariners, Cape Horn and the Cape of Tempests.
“Jules, you’re killing me!” I wanted to yell. But it did give us some laughs.
In truth, though, I’ve been skipping — sometimes rather liberally. Take this passage from tonight’s chapter, for example:
Two hours after quitting the Nautilus we had crossed the line of trees, and a hundred feet above our heads rose the top of the mountain, which cast a shadow on the brilliant irradiation of the opposite slope. Some petrified shrubs ran fantastically here and there. Fishes got up under our feet like birds in the long grass. The massive rocks were rent with impenetrable fractures, deep grottos, and unfathomable holes, at the bottom of which formidable creatures might be heard moving. My blood curdled when I saw enormous antennae blocking my road, or some frightful claw closing with a noise in the shadow of some cavity. Millions of luminous spots shone brightly in the midst of the darkness. They were the eyes of giant crustacea crouched in their holes; giant lobsters setting themselves up like halberdiers, and moving their claws with the clicking sound of pincers; titanic crabs, pointed like a gun on its carriage; and frightful-looking poulps, interweaving their tentacles like a living nest of serpents.
That got cut to this:
Two hours after quitting the Nautilus we had crossed the line of trees, and a hundred feet above our heads rose the top of the mountain, which cast a shadow on the brilliant irradiation of the opposite slope. Some petrified shrubs ran fantastically here and there. Fishes got up under our feet like birds in the long grass.
I’ve determined that I’m not a fan of such novels, which seem to be nothing but a litany of adventures leading to — to what? Aronnax, Ned Land, and Conseil want to escape, but thus far, there’s been precious little talk of it and a lot of chatter about all the marvels Nemo is showing them.
Fortunately, the Boy agrees in part: we can do without all the descriptive flourishes — let’s get to the action. And through it so we can read something else. Perhaps Tom Sawyer?
Day 37: Tuesday
The Boy was at it again today — 177 photos spread through the day, from morning to evening.
Today, he got some really good shots. Part of that came from experimentation: I let him use a telephoto zoom, which helped him fill the frame more that he’s done the last two days. He liked it, but in the end, he preferred the little prime lens he’d been using. “It’s so much less bulky!” he exclaimed.
He also learned a little lesson: not everyone whats to be photographed all the time. The Girl, for example, appears less frequently in here because she’s increasingly resistant to photographs. (What 13-year-old wants dad writing blog posts about her?) During dinner, then, he asked everyone who’s willing to let him photograph them. Only L opted out.
But he still snuck a few shots, much to her frustration.
“If you’re a spy, it’s okay to take pictures without permission. Otherwise, it’s not a good idea,” I said.
Excitedly, he heard what he wanted: “If I were a spy I could…”
“But you’re not.” I could envision him redefining that word to suit his own purposes.
I’m afraid, though, that I might have encouraged it the other day.
“What do you like taking pictures of, Daddy? What’s your favorite thing?”
“I like taking pictures that show people just being, just doing what they do every day without thinking about it.” If I had more guts, I might be able to parley that into a gig as a street photographer, which in its own way is a certain kind of spy.
There was a little photo session after dinner, with the Boy getting a few poses out of K. He walked over to her and manipulated her arms into the position he wanted — something like a dab — and then took his position. “Perfect.”
Day 36: The Photographer!
The Boy is hooked — for now. But still, hooked. I gave him our old Nikon D70s (older than L) and a 35mm lens, which on a crop sensor like the D70 is like a 50mm lens on a film camera (in other words, what all of us who learned to shoot with film started with), and told him to look for two things: interesting light and interesting lines.
He didn’t always take that advice — he did what everyone fascinated with photograph does in the beginning. He took pictures like crazy. 266 pictures, to be exact. I chose eight from them, chose a preset for each one in Lightroom and did no other editing.
This is probably the only post I’ve had here without a single one of my own pictures…
Day 35: The Photographer?
The Boy has been showing an interest in photography from time to time. It’s not an everyday thing, but he enjoys it when I give him the little Fuji to shoot with.
This afternoon, we went out on a photo walk, and he asked me if it would be possible for him to edit some of the photos in Paint.net, a free editing program that I use for quick things like cropping screenshots and the like. I’d taught him how to do gradient overlays with it, and he loved the idea of editing photos like that.
“Do you use Paint.net for your photos?” he asked.
“No, I use Lightroom.”
“Can you put gradients on pictures in Lightroom?”
Technically, yes, I thought, but not the way he was thinking. “Not really, but you can in Photoshop.”
“Can you teach me how to do it in Photoshop?” The Boy loves to learn if it’s something he’s interested in — but then, doesn’t that describe us all?
“Well, for what you were doing, it’s probably best just to keep using Paint.net.”
“Can you teach me to use Lightroom?” he pressed.
And I thought, sure. That’s entirely possible. There’s a lot less to overwhelm initially on Lightroom, and to be honest, it’s a less powerful program in a lot of ways: there’s nothing you can do in Lightroom that you can’t do in Photoshop, but there’s tons you can do in Photoshop that you can’t do in Lightroom. Still, for most photo editing, bringing Photoshop into the picture is like using a backhoe for gardening.
So when we go home, I installed Lightroom on the computer we have upstairs, and we’ll start editing tomorrow.
Will he love it? At first, most definitely. I look forward to sharing some of his edited images.
Will he stick with it? We’ll see. But seeing how much he loves trying to copy me, I think there’s a good chance we might begin something long-lasting tomorrow.
Editing isn’t the only thing we’ll be starting tomorrow. Spring break is now over, so we’ll all head back “to school.” I have real reservations about the ultimate efficacy of what I’m doing with students. Are they learning? I doubt it. Are they slipping? I hope not — that’s really the only hope most of us educators have.
Day 34: The Edge
I read somewhere recently that sanitation workers are struggling to keep up with the amount of trash people are putting out during the quarantine. We’re all cleaning out our houses, I guess, because what else are we going to do with so much time on our hands?
We’ve been doing a little in the house but mostly in the yard. Today, for instance, I used the edger (we have an edger now — like a router, one tool I’ve always wanted to have) to clean up the stepping stones in our front yard.
Why?
Well, I woke up this morning and thought, “What can I do in the yard today? It’s an April Saturday — one must work in the yard.” But I’d already mowed for the week. And I’d already moved the composter. And I’d already cleaned out the weeds in our jasmine. And I’d already cleaned out the briars in the corner of our lot. And I’d already moved the elderberry bushes. And I’d already enlarged our mulched flower garden. And I’d already mulched everything. “What can I do?”
Saturday has its own rhythm, and even in these strange times, K and I try to keep all our rhythms and rituals as sustained as possible. We’ve introduced some new rituals (our almost-nightly family walks, lots more family board and card game playing, more family movies), but Saturday is Saturday — it must be spent outside.
By the time I was finished working on the stepping stones, each had a clean edge cut around it, several of the stones that had settled were elevated with a bit of gravel under them, and the last few stones that weren’t in line with the rest of them were shifted back into place.
As I worked, I listened to podcasts on cults: Heaven’s Gate, the Manson Family, the Branch Davidians, a couple I’d never heard of. They all make the little sect I grew up in seem fairly tame in comparison, but they all have one thing in common: a narcissistic man at the helm whom everyone views as being somehow a step above the rest of humanity.
Then there are the members and the obvious question: how do people allow themselves to be sucked into such groups? Take Heaven’s Gate, for example: their beliefs were so morbidly ridiculous that it’s difficult to imagine anyone taking them seriously. And members of that cult (and many others) left families behind in order to join them. They gave up everything for beliefs that sound like some sixth-grader’s science fiction story for his fifth-period creative writing class. Yet all religions have their little absurdities: Islam has Mohammed flying off on a magic stallion into heaven. Judaism has talking snakes and donkeys and a man surviving in the digestive system of a marine creature. Christianity has zombies immediately after Jesus’s death on the cross:
And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit. At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people. When the centurion and those with him who were guarding Jesus saw the earthquake and all that had happened, they were terrified, and exclaimed, “Surely he was the Son of God!” (Matthew 27.50-54)
Hinduism has Hanuman the monkey god — all religions have elements that just seem silly. The difference, comedian Bill Burr points out, is that most of us grew up with those more traditional religious stories and heard them all our lives: they’re party of the fabric of our childhood. These cults, though, we encounter as adults, more capable of critical thinking.
In the past, I’d probably write next that I found myself thinking about these things when I put the Boy to bed, thinking about possible lives we could have given him if we believed this or that, but I didn’t. I didn’t even think about it until now. Don’t know what to make of that, if anything.
Day 33: Celebration and Smothered
Celebration
Today is Papa’s birthday. Seventy-nine. I remember when he turned forty. I was only eight then, and because of various religious interpretations, we didn’t actually celebrate birthdays, but I knew it was significant. He’s stayed forty or fifty in my mind’s eye ever since.
Sixty just seemed like an extension — a little older, maybe a little slower, but basically the same. Seventy? Now nearly eighty.
You know what’s coming — “Soon I’ll find myself almost eighty, wondering where the time went…”
This was a bitter-sweet birthday, though: the first one without Nana. A few days ago, K asked him what he’d like for his birthday dinner. He thought about it for quite a while and asked if we had Nana’s Chinese casserole recipe.
“Nope, but I’m sure we could find it.”
When was the last time we had that? It must have been twenty-five to thirty years since I’d had that. Still, I knew what the recipe must look like: I found something seemingly identical and K tried to fix it while I was pulling up the mass of briars that had grown where our composter used to be. Neither one of us are experienced casserole makers, so it turned out a little, well, moist. But it tasted just like Papa and I remembered.
“Brings back some memories, doesn’t it Pop?” I asked. (I don’t know why, but I’ve taken to calling him Pop again. I used to call him that when I was in high school, but since L was born, he’s just been Papa.)
“Sure does.”
Smothered
I used to say I could play chess when I really couldn’t. I could move the pieces around, sure, but I really had no deeper understanding of the game, and I didn’t even really know some of the basics. Give me a rook and the king against the opponents lone king and I would have had no idea how to mate.
Even now, there’s one mate I can only barely understand and probably couldn’t pull off: mate with one knight, one bishop, and the king. Here’s a good intro:
Yet there’s one mate that’s in the realm of mortals. “Probably the most popular checkmate pattern, the Smothered Mate often fascinates new chess players and retains its popularity even after one becomes proficient.” So says Chess End Games, and that’s no exaggeration. Every time I’ve taught someone the smothered mate pattern, I’ve gotten looks of amazed awe. The knight pops into a square and mates the king from a distance — beautiful
But Chess End Games is selling it short. There are several ways to achieve a smothered mate in chess, but the most satisfying is with a queen sacrifice. Any win involving a queen sac (chess-speak there) is satisfying because, well, you’re sacrificing your queen, the most powerful piece on the board — until it isn’t. Queen sac smothered mates are rare, though, because most decent players see it coming and resign beforehand.
In fact, I’ve only done it once — last night.
It was a wild game, and I had taken a gamble that wasn’t paying off. In fact, not just down an exchange but down an entire rook, I felt sure mate was coming. My opponent sacrificed the exchange, though, taking my knight on f4.
I took with the pawn thinking that I might be able to slide the rook over to g2 to put pressure on g7. It would have been easily mitigated with a pawn move g6, but it was the only thing I saw.
Black took my undefended d4 pawn, threatening my rook. My first instinct was to continue with my plan and move my rook to g2, but then I saw it: my queen and knight were perfectly placed, and with black’s rook pair gone, it looked perfect.
Queen took on e6 with check. From here, mate was almost inevitable. Almost. I thought black might resign or bock with his rook, which would have led to mate with black’s king on h8 and white’s queen on f8 or d8 after having taken the double-attacked rook.
But black moved the king to h8 and my heart went pitter-patter. Could I get the smothered mate or would black resign?
The first move was to pop the knight in for a check. If black took with the rook, I was in trouble: my next move would have been to take with the queen, then black’s queen would deliver a nearly-fatal check on f2 and mate would have been coming. But black didn’t see it.
King to g8. “It’s going to happen!” I thought.
Knight to h6 gave a double check, so black cannot take the knight or simply block the queen,
Black had to move back to h8 — or resign. “Oh, please don’t resign!
No resignation! Next came the most seemingly crazy move ever: the queen slid into g7 for check. Black could not take with the king because the knight defended the queen; black had to take with the rook.
The only problem is, in doing so, black took away the king’s only remaining flight square. The king was boxed in completely.
Knight to f7 for mate.
I can’t remember the last time I smiled so after a simple chess game.
Day 32: Changes
We pulled out that hideously overgrown ornamental tree by our front door earlier this week (or technically last week, I guess, but everything’s mushing together like a cheap blended scotch), so we had to replace it with something. Well, K felt we had to replace it with something. I was rather okay with just leaving it, but I was also okay with replacing it — I was just okay with it. Today, I headed out to get the replacement and a few flowers.
The plan was simple: go to Home Depot for the replacement battery for my drill and a few other things, then head over to South Pleasantburg Nursery for the tree.
“Take a picture of what’s there and show the man what was there,” K said. “He’ll help you pick something out that will fill that space.”
L went with me. “Take L — she’ll pick out nice flowers,” K suggested.
Home Depot took much longer than expected. Ridiculously long.
Then we head over to the nursery only to discover it’s closed: order-by-phone only. So it was back to Home Depot.
Their tree selection is not stellar, let me tell you.
We decided on a relatively mature Japanese maple, but there was no price tag, only a bar code. The Home Depot app, hastily installed, couldn’t find the price, so I photographed the bar code and went into buy it. “How much could it cost?” I asked myself.
The answer: $170.
“Um, no, I don’t think we want that tree,” I managed to stammer out. We went back and found a less mature specimen that was only $95.
The question is, why does a tree cost $170? Or $95? Or any given price? I understand Home Depot’s mark up is fairly predictable, but what about their purchase price?
K and I talked about it this evening. Somehow that price must take into account the salaries of the nursery employees, the resources (food, water, electricity) applied to the sapling or necessary for the nursery itself, the taxes and other expenses the nursery pays — all that compounded over the amount of time necessary for the sapling to reach its desired height and divided by the number of saplings that reach that marketable state at the same time.
“Whatever the expenses, it’s a rip-off,” K laughed in conclusion.
Back home, K planted the tree while I embarked on a second project: moving the composter we got for free when friends moved north. It’s current location was much closer to the house, but the barrel had somehow gotten off the gears that turn the whole contraption, and that was simply because it was no longer level, thanks in large part, I think, to the dog’s digging.
Day 31: The Walk
I’ve been reading Faulkner and thought it might be fun to emulate him. Forgive me.
Having cleaned up after dinner, a process that entails both the obvious cycling of dishes back to the dishwasher only hours after having taken them out to hide them neatly in stacks concealed behind cabinet doors only to place them on the table yet again in and endless cycle that is the bane of our children’s existence and the not so obvious assisting Papa in his regimen of oral hygiene procedures foisted on him by childhood dental neglect, a regimen that has become a comforting habit rather than a chore, we head out for our evening walk, a Covid-19-induced habit that might be the best outcome of a worst-case scenario. Tired of the usual routes, we’ve taken to walking a circuit that runs through the neighborhood just across from ours, a newer neighborhood without power lines snaked between crooked power poles but not so new as to have sidewalks, a neighborhood with a slightly more eclectic mix of architecture. For about a year now this has been our favorite route, in part because K likes the feel of the neighborhood more than others, in part because of its distance — almost exactly a mile — and in part because of the long, straight, flat stretch that it includes where the kids, L on her rollerblades and E on his bike, play a strangely frustrating version of tag that includes time outs and random rules that E is convinced — and I am likely to agree — are L’s on-the-spot inventions intended to keep her from being tagged.
Enough — how that man could write like that, though what I did was just a pale imitation, lacking the lugubrious flourish he put into every sentence as if it were the habit of a card cheat. See? Once you start writing like that, start thinking like that, once you start piling phrase upon phrase, clause upon clause, it’s almost impossible to stop, so maybe that’s how he did it: just a big push and off he went, heedless of periods, question marks, semicolons, and anything else resembling in its vaguest form something that someone could accuse of being an ending, a final mark on the paper to suggest “Stop.” The result, in all seriousness, is nothing short of breathtaking. His greatest achievement, Absalom, Absalom!, just sings right from the opening sentences.
From a little after two o’clock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that-a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them. There was a wistaria vine blooming for the second time that summer on a wooden trellis before one window, into which sparrows came now and then in random gusts, making a dry vivid dusty sound before going away: and opposite Quentin, Miss Coldfield in the eternal black which she had worn for forty- three years now, whether for sister, father, or nothusband none knew, sitting so bolt upright in the straight hard chair that was so tall for her that her legs hung straight and rigid as if she had iron shinbones and ankles, clear of the floor with that air of impotent and static rage like children’s feet, and talking in that grim haggard amazed voice until at last listening would renege and hearing-sense self-confound and the long-dead object of her impotent yet indomitable frustration would appear, as though by outraged recapitulation evoked, quiet inattentive and harmless, out of the biding and dreamy and victorious dust. Her voice would not cease, it would just vanish. There would be the dim coffin-smelling gloom sweet and oversweet with the twice-bloomed wistaria against the outer wall by the savage quiet September sun impacted distilled and hyperdistilled, into which came now and then the loud cloudy flutter of the sparrows like a flat limber stick whipped by an idle boy, and the rank smell of female old flesh long embattled in virginity while the wan haggard face watched him above the faint triangle of lace at wrists and throat from the too tall chair in which she resembled a crucified child; and the voice not ceasing but vanishing into and then out of the long intervals like a stream, a trickle running from patch to patch of dried sand, and the ghost mused with shadowy docility as if it were the voice which he haunted where a more fortunate one would have had a house.
Four sentences weighing in at just a little over 400 words, with three of the sentences doing most of the work: that third sentence is so perfectly short (“Her voice would not cease, it would just vanish.”) that it creates the perfect rhythm, a little pause in the thinking that gives both authenticity to the voice and rest to the reader.
I’m reading Absalom now, probably for the tenth or twelfth time, and each time I read it, I notice a little something that had escaped my attention previously: some little piece to the puzzle (for the book is, at its heart, a puzzle to match the puzzle that is living itself), some lovely phrase, some little something. I don’t think I will ever tire of that book, and every time I finish it, I look forward eventually to starting it again: “From a little after two o’clock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office…”
Day 30: Uno
Uno, of late, has taken over Sorry as the game of choice, which in turn displaced Monopoly from the top spot. I don’t know how long Uno will last, but it’s been going strong since the weekend. It has certain advantages over other games — well, one big advantage that I see: Papa willing plays with them. Sorry is just not his game, and I think he dislikes Monopoly more than I do. With those two games, he generally just watched and cheered on the kids; with Uno, he plays from time to time.
But not when the kids get crazy ideas like dealing out 50 cards each. And when the kids play games like this, they have to adapt the rules. After all, they’ve essentially divided the deck between them: what sense does a “Draw 2” card make when there are no cards to draw from? (Simple: just draw from the discard deck.)
How can you possibly manage to organize so many cards? Well, when there are two playing the “Reverse” and “Skip” cards essentially mean the player gets to play again. So just line up all those cards and play them one after another. (Never mind that “Reverse” wouldn’t work that way and would simply have no effect. They’re not worried about logic, just about having some fun. And thinning the herd somewhat.)
Day 29: Delay
It was rainy and cold yesterday, so we didn’t end up having the easter egg hunt that we were planning, that the kids were looking forward to. So we had it today. Not much else for the day.
Day 28: Easter 2020
Day 27: Holy Saturday 2020
For everyone in the local Polish community, Holy Saturday has meant one thing: a visible continuation of traditions from the Old Country — the blessing of the Easter baskets. When we began the tradition, the parish pastor had no idea what it was. He quickly learned and just as quickly fell in love with the tradition.
This year, then, was the first Holy Saturday in a decade that we didn’t have a basket blessing here in Greenville. In some ways, that made Holy Saturday wholly different. But some things were the same.
That tree in the front yard that I wanted to cut down yesterday? It’s now gone, along with my back.
More similarities: there was baking, baking, baking. For whom? For our family. For friends. For our neighbors. For anyone who wanted it, I guess. The difference? The Girl was involved — not just involved, but insisting on seeing the whole process through to the end alone. Well, almost alone — moving it to the cake stand was a bit too scary for her.
What else was the same? The kitchen was a disaster area for most of the day.
An artist at work always leaves behind a mess. And one of our culinary artists is better at cleaning up the mess she leaves behind than the other, and I’m much more likely to jump in and help clean with one of the artists than I am with the other. Lessons to learn.
Previous Years
Basket Blessing 2019
Basket Blessing 2018
Baskets 2015
Blessing the Baskets
Day 26: Good Friday
Good Friday is always a work-filled day among Poles, which I’ve always found somewhat ironic. In some ways, it’s the most solemn day of the Catholic calendar, and you would think that devout Catholics — of which in Poland, particularly rural Poland — would spend the day in prayer. In my experience, they usually spend the day cleaning and cooking (often things they don’t eat because it’s a fast day, though Catholic fasting is hardly a discipline compared to some forms of fasting).
Today’s job for me: take care of the leaves in the backyard. “After all, it is April,” K smiled at breakfast. I wanted to cut down a topiary tree in the front yard that we’ve decided is dying and needs to come down. I’ve wanted to take it down for years, but I guess that’s for tomorrow.
Day 25: Chores, a Trip, and an Old Friend
Chores
The kids have one chore that they do together. They have other chores, but one is a co-chore: emptying the dishwasher. If we tell L to start emptying the dishwasher, she will fuss if E is not there to help immediately; if we tell E to start emptying the dishwasher, he will fuss if L is not there to help immediately.
And yet there are things that one would think should be a chore but are a joy — at least to the Boy. That’s right: the weed eating obsession continues.
He has trimmed every inch of the backyard and is ready to go back to the front to start again.
A Trip
We are finally allowed to go back into the school building. That’s not to say school has resumed, but if we need anything from our rooms, we can head back and pick up whatever we need.
Today, I decided I would head over to the school, not for professional reasons (I have everything I need for remote teaching) but for personal reasons: the Girl has run out of reading materials. With the library system closed for about as long as the school system, there’s no chance of getting a new book through the usual channels.
But when you’re an English teacher, and an eighth-grade English teacher at that, you have quite a substantial classroom library to choose from.
I offered to take the kids, thinking that when they heard that they would have to stay in the car that they would be reluctant to go. Not so. They were thrilled just to get out of the house.
Old Friend
A few years before we turned the carport into Papa’s room K discovered a little turtle in the laundry room. “It’s a snapping turtle,” I confirmed. It was probably four or five inches in diameter, and I reasoned it must live in the creek behind our house.
Some time ago, we discovered an enormous snapping turtle living in the creek. It looked to be at least a foot in diameter. Most of the creek is a couple of inches deep, with a few spots probably getting to a couple of feet, so I found myself wondering how in the world a snapping turtle that large could survive in such an environment. What could it possibly be eating?
The same turtle? I don’t really know. I don’t know how quickly snappers grow. According to turtleowners.com,
The growth rate of a Snapping turtle is influenced by a lot of things like genetics, diet, and environmental conditions. But in general, they will grow around 4 inches during its first year, and then around 1 or 2 inches per year.
So I guess it could have been the same turtle. After all, my measurements are guess-timates: I didn’t exactly jump down into the water with a tape measure to determine the size of a turtle that, whatever the exact dimensions, was big enough to separate me from one of my digits.
Today, as we were in one of our exploring modes, the Boy just about stepped on the snapping turtle as it sat on the bank.
“Dad, come here!” I heard. I was snapping a picture of one of the little waterfalls, trying to smooth the water with a slow shutter speed without a tripod — a balancing act, literally and figuratively.
I walked over and there she was, sitting motionless after having climbed out of the creek at a point where the bank seemed prohibitively steep. I took a stick, turned her around, and encouraged her back to the water.
She swam off into a deep part of the creek where the bank had washed out, leaving a tree’s roots exposed and stretching into the water.
“The perfect place for her,” L exclaimed.
On the way back, we stopped for some rocks for the Boy. He’s been collecting rocks and minerals. We’re not sure why.
We’re happy to help.
The day ends with the Boy and me cuddled in the hammock, making each other laugh with silly jokes.
“I love when we do this,” the Boy admitted.
“I do, too, buddy. I do too.”
Day 24: Legos and “Weeds”
The Boy got a fair amount of money from Babcia for a) his first communion and b) his birthday. Both are over a month away; the latter is sure to happen, the former, not so much. But Babcia sent the money early because she wanted to be sure it got here in time.
“I’m rich!” he squealed and began plotting how to spend the money.
“Not so fast!” K jumped in. The money for first communion must go toward something, well, churchy. “Do you know what Ciocia Z bought me for my first communion?” K asked E. “The image of Saint K that’s over our bed.”
“In your bedroom?”
“Yes.”
“You still have it?” We tried to explain that yes, that is the point.
As for his birthday money, well, that’s his to spend as he wishes. Within reason. “You’re not spending it all on Pokemon cards!” K and I said in chorus — or if we didn’t, we at least thought it at the same time. Roughly.
There is, of course, one thing we’re always willing to let him buy: Legos. Anything that simultaneously builds, I don’t know, the ability to follow technical directions (when building the sets) and encourages creativity (when building everything else after the set has been demolished and all the blocks added to the growing collection) is to be valued.
“Daddy, I’m going to take my time with this set!” he proclaimed as he opened all the numbered bags and carefully poured them into bowls (that’s where they are, K, when you’re looking for them).
With all the free time he has now, that’s a good idea. But even if it goes faster than he planned, there’s always some trimming to do.
Day 23: Conferencing and Apologizing
Conferencing
We had a chat in English I today about the mad dog scene.
I was helping the kids see the significance of this seemingly out-of-nowhere scene. Students’ reaction to the chapter was fairly unified:
S1: It opened up a lot of questions to me about Atticus; what was his past life? How did he have the knowledge to shoot, and how did he shoot so well?
S2: I was in shock, mostly because of how I was pondering it’s relevance to the book. The act it’s self didn’t perturb me but it did show how close the community is.
Once I got the kids to see that the scene is there to set up one way that Atticus has, contrary to his children’s view, hero qualities in the traditional sense (read: macho sense), we’re ready for them to understand why he kept it under wraps for so long. (The Mrs. Dubose scene is critical for that.)
At the end of the conversation, one student asked me about our dog. (When experimenting with Flipgrid, I made a video for the kids, and in it, I showed them our dog.) There was a bit of a misunderstanding in our conversation today, though:
S1: How’s your dog?
Mr. Scott: She’s in heaven
S1: Wait, did she die???
Mr. Scott: She’s never had so much attention or gone on so many walks
S1: OH
S2: I was worried.
S3: I thought she died too-
S4: O I thought you meant she died
It struck me as odd that they thought I might use a phrase like “She’s in heaven” to tell them the dog had died.
Apologizing
We go on a walk just about every single evening these days, and when we come back, if we have time, the kids want to play a game. Monopoly has held a monopoly lately, but today, the Girl talked E into trying Sorry again.
She was probably sorry she did.
E jumped into the lead and before almost any of us had more than one pawn in the “Home” circle, he had three. And his remaining pawn was stuck at “Start.” Forever. And ever. So long that we all caught up to him.
I have to admit, I was really rooting for him. When I drew I “One,” which would have allowed him to start moving, I wished I could slip it back in the deck for him. He’s so frustrated with board games because he never seems to win.
I wasn’t exactly helping L, though. I Sorry’ed her a couple of times, and at least once, when I drew the “Move forward ten or back one” card, I moved back one just to knock her back to start. Part of it was to see how she dealt with frustration. She did admirably well — that girl is growing up. (Slowly, but I guess we wouldn’t have it any other way. Well, about most aspects.)
The game kept going until it was a four-way tie: all four of us had three of our four pawns in the “Home” circle and the other pawn three or four moves away from victory. K stole the win from E, which is fair in a sense: in Monopoly, we’ve taken to calling her “slum lord” because of her property choices and indebtedness. She deserved a win. (Though she did come out fairly strong on the last time we played Monopoly…)
“Can we play for second?” L asked.
I somehow managed to get second place, which I really didn’t want. Again, hoping for the Boy to get a little bit of an upset.
“Can we play for third?” the Girl asked.
And the Boy swooped in to steal third.
Day 22: Time, Organization, and Aim
Time
“How long have you been home from school?” K asked as we took our now-nightly, post-dinner family walk. “Is this the second or the third week?”
Not willing to pull out our phones mid-walk, we couldn’t figure it out. Such are our days now: one day blends into another as effortlessly as — as what? I can’t remember a time when time itself seemed so free, so floating, so held down by so little. With the only thing to distinguish a school day from a non-school day being how the kids spend their mornings, the days are a blur now, a smear of time and virus.
How long have we been worrying about this? How long have these precautions been in place? The powers that be suggest that we’re not even at the halfway point, but it already feels as if this has been our reality for as long as we can remember.
It’s not that I’m complaining. We all understand why we’re doing it. We simply didn’t realize how quickly this would be how we define “normal.”
Organization
Today, L started a project with Papa to rearrange and reorganize all his file folders. Nana was a thorough bookkeeper, and she kept track of just about every significant (and many less-than-significant) documents that came through their house. Take receipts, for example: in case of audit, they’d kept tax records for years, including receipts. Every month’s receipts in separate monthly envelopes, all envelopes for a given year in a box for the year. We still haven’t burned all those. So that gives an idea of the granularity of their record-keeping.
Papa has decided he doesn’t need all the other records as well, so he’s thinning everything and reorganizing it. That’s where L’s responsibility begins: she is a fastidious organizer. She likes for us to sit in order of decreasing age at the table for dinner. You can see it in this picture, minus me. Some — namely I — might suggest that this is a bit much, a bit obsessive-compulsive. But when it comes to reorganizing, that’s just the mentality you want.
Aim
The Boy and I have been shooting his bb gun quite a bit these last few weeks. We have a few standard targets in the backyard: L’s archery target, a clump of trees backed by a forest of bamboo behind our neighbors’ lot (it’s possible to see the flight of the bb as it moves toward that clump of darkness), Clover’s ball (if she’s not out; if she’s out, we have to keep her away by kicking the ball to the opposite side of the yard where we’re shooting, always keeping an eye on her), the Boy’s basketball — a lot of targets. Lately, a favorite has been the Boy’s basketball, as it sits at the bottom of the hill and we stand on our deck. Google measures that distance at 69 feet. That’s a fairly impressive range for a seven-year-old to hit a basketball, but once I taught him to compensate for the effect of gravity on such a long shot (“Aim high, really high” I told him), he’s done it fairly consistently
In the late afternoon, when the sun had moved to the front of the house enough to provide some shade to the back deck, E sat with Papa on the back deck. They were shooting E’s bb gun at one of the small plastic cups (perhaps a little bigger than a shot glass) into which we put Papa’s meds every day. Papa took a couple of shots and missed; E took a couple of shots and nailed the cup; Papa missed another shot. “Do you want me to go get a bigger cup?” the Boy asked.