The Girl made treats for everyone today, with some help from K.
The Boy was especially excited.
the boy
Infinity
Driving home from Mass today, the Boy and I somehow got into a discussion about infinity. I can’t remember how it came up or even who brought it up, but there we were, discussing one of the great paradoxes of life and math.
To try to explain it to him, I talked about numbers: “You can count on and on and on and on,” I said. But this didn’t seem to support what I said earlier, about infinity having no beginning or ending.
“But it does have a beginning,” he protested from the back. “When I count, I say, ‘1, 2, 3, 4, 5.’ You start at one.”
I tried dipping into the topic of negative numbers to show him that we really could start anywhere.
“Negative numbers? Like 5, 4, 3, 2, 1?”
Throwing Away
It's much simpler to dump now and then sort later. Much later. That is what E has been doing with his toys -- cars, action figures, blocks, and the like -- for some time now, until all four of his main toy bins are hopelessly mixed. Last night, we decided that we had to get things under control, organized. I suggested it while putting the Boy to bed; he readily agreed.
This morning, then, we got to work by dumping all the bins into a pile.
"That sure is a lot of toys!" said the Boy.
"Perhaps too many," I suggested.
"Yeah, maybe too many."
We began sorting, making little piles of action figures, cars, train tracks, blocks, and more, and I suggested that we might want to get rid of some of the toys.
"Yeah, maybe the broken ones."
We made a deal with the cars: for every one car he gets rid of, he gets to keep three cars. That of course means he cuts his cars by twenty-five percent, which would be significant. I didn't think he'd agree. I thought he'd fuss about the suggestion, but instead, he went along with it quite willingly. He selected trailers for which there were no longer trucks, cars that were, in his words, for babies, and a few cars that just looked like they'd seen their best days. He was thoughtful as he culled his toys and surprisingly mature about the whole process.
Perhaps not so surprisingly: he's always imitating L, K, or me, always trying to be older than he is, always talking so seriously about such things as he sees K and me discussing important matters. He wants to grow up. He wants to be a man. The worst insult I can give him is to suggest, when he's fussing and crying over some trifle or other, that he's acting like a baby.
"I'm not a baby!" he protests.
"Then why are you fussing like one?"
The answer is always the same: "I don't know."
In the end, we got rid of two bags of toys. Broken cars, trailers with cars missing, mysteries (What is that? And what did it go to?) all got dumped into the trash bin. The rest we took to Goodwill.
It was a proud little moment for K and me, to see our little man realizing that he'd outgrown some toys, that he had more than he really needed, that he could live without them.
Growing with the Pup
Having a puppy is like having a newborn in the house -- that's what we'd heard. There is a certain amount of truth in this: Clover requires a lot of time and attention. And like a baby, she can't be just left unattended. But the attention is easy to give: she's such a sweet puppy, always eager to get a belly rub or a scratch behind the ear. Eager to please. Genuinely remorseful-looking when corrected. Or is she just playing us? Probably a bit of both.
And she's so curious. Those two things combine to torture our cats. Bida tends just to hiss. It's all it takes after a snoutful of claws a couple of times. But Elsa runs, and so what does Clover do? Chase her, of course. Isn't she just trying to play? It's not just Elsa and Bida, and that's a little worrying. There's a little black cat that comes around often enough, and Clover tried to make friends with her, to no avail.
She remembers the encounter with Bida that left her with a slightly bloody ear, so she kept her distance.
The Boy is having a bit of trouble with her, too. She's still trying to herd him, and the herding is getting more intense. She nips at his shoes, chases him when he walks in the room -- the tail is always wagging, but like Elsa, the Boy is starting just to avoid her at times.
Unless there's a toy to play with, like a stick.
Still, despite it all, we're all pretty much wrapped around her paw.
How could we not be?
Learning
The kids are learning how to clean. The dog is learning how to walk on a leash. I’m learning to take a break from this.
Too Big
Clover is a Border Collie, which means that chasing and herding are as instinctual to her as barking and tail wagging. That dog will herd anything as long as it's only slightly bigger than she. She chases the Boy around the yard, nipping at his ankles, then crouching down in front of him as soon as he stops.
Apparently, it's the same with basketballs and soccer balls.
Clover
It took them a while, but eventually they wore me down. I knew they would. When everyone in your family wants a dog but you, you realize that you can only resist for so long. I had one criterion: it must be a smart dog. A really smart dog. That, for me, ruled out mutts: there's no telling what kind of genes they've got. So if you're going to get a dog with the criterion of it being smart, why not just move to the top of the hierarchy and get a Border Collie?
K began the process while the kids and I were still in Poland. She looked about on Craig's List for something, and while she was able to find Pit bulls by the dozen, BCs were almost non-existent. A colleague at work has BCs and put K in contact with the woman from whom she'd gotten her dogs.
"Do you happen to have a litter now?"
As a matter of fact, five puppies were available. Then four. Then three. So yesterday we drove three hours to meet the BC lady and her husband and picked out a lovely little girl with an asymmetrical strip down her face and the sweetest eyes ever seen on a dog.
Bringing her home was like bringing home E or L as a newborn: there was not a lot of sleeping in the house. Clover -- and it's a minor miracle we all agreed on a name -- was traumatized, having lost her mother and all her siblings as well as her known, comfortable environment and owners in one instant. There was a lot of whimpering and cowering. But the sun eventually rose and we were soon all outside with the dog, laughing at her silliness.
The changes in the last twenty-four hours have been more significant than I would have ever expected. I, for one, have gone from being a lukewarm participant in the process to an enthusiastic dog owner willing to show off our little darling to whomever we can. The Girl got up at six on a Sunday morning in order to take Clover out.
And our house is developing the unmistakable scent of dog.
A Last Long Ride and Walk
The first fall was nothing to worry about -- a simple matter of losing momentum in an area where it's challenging to regain it. Tall grass, a bit of an incline. I'm not surprised he fell. He cried just a little bit, but he managed to calm himself and ride on anyway.
The second fall was more serious. We were riding in one of the two wide tracks a tractor leaves in the fields of grass when he suddenly hit a small clump of grass that didn't give way but instead insisted on twisting his front wheel violently to the right. His bike stopped without warning, and his little belly slammed into the stem. This time, there was quite a bit of crying. Still, I managed to calm him with our deep-breath methods.
"Take a deep breath," I say, and he breathes in through his mouth with a quivering breath, then lets it out. Two or three times and he's usually calm, usually past the crying.
My question was simple: will he continue riding. We'd already made it to the river and were heading, against his initial wishes, to the small concrete bridge just a bit further up the trail. Here he was, hurt, scared, crying. Would he continue?
He did. He accepted my advice to slow down just a bit and continued on.
"I'm proud of you," I said, and trying to reorient it to his own point of view, rephrased it, "And you should be proud of yourself."
The third fall was a bit more serious. We'd made it to a part of the path that was particularly challenging: low-hanging branches, deep ruts filled with mud. I walked my bike across and suggested he do the same. I was both worried and proud when he decided that he would try to ride through the pass.
He made it through the mud, but just barely. He came to a sudden and unexpected halt beside my bike, them promptly fell toward my bike. His upper arm landed perfectly on the largest cog of my crankset. It could have been a lot worse: in the end, he had a little scratch where his arm slid off the crankset with a long streak of grease on his arm -- I haven't exactly cleaned my chain adequately since arriving -- and a long crying session.
What impressed me most was that in each and every situation, he got back on the bike and continued riding. Nevermind that the bike is a piece of junk we bought for him used at the jarmark. Nevermind that he was in real pain a couple of times. Never mind that he's only five years old. He kept on going, knowing the challenges ahead of him (for this was the second time we rode this path) and fully aware of the pain he was experiencing.
In the evening, I took a walk back up to the high fields to the north of Jablonka. I've ridden my bike there a couple of times -- and there is a passage that I had to walk due to the steep slope and the size of the gravel (or should I say boulders) that made up the path -- but that was always without a real camera. The clouds were just right, and I thought I'd give it a try.
The sun was still too high for soft, embracing light, but I took what I could get.
I reached the summit and noticed in the direction of Lipnica an enormous amount of smoke. Perhaps someone burning the fields? It's illegal, but people still do it. But in late July? Unlikely.
As I walked toward the smoke, hoping with my super-zoom to figure something out, the siren at the Jablonka fire department began wailing. Shortly after that, the rescue truck seemed to crawl toward Lipnica, and for a moment, I considered jumping in our borrowed car to see what it could be. It wasn't fields, but the smoke was so white that I wondered what it could be.
On my way back home -- which led by a house I'd noticed a couple of weeks ago, with a fountain in the front yard that reminded me of the conclusion of Analyze This -- I saw several over the firefighters standing in front of the station. I thought about stopping to ask what had been the emergency, but in the end, I just walked on. After all, the Boy as waiting for a promised game of soccer.
Chapter 29, In Which the Girls Arrive
For a couple of days and the night between, we have a house full of girls. Four girls, five if we count Babcia, who's always going to be a girl at heart, I think.
At first, it starts out as something of a perfect storm of a day. It's freezing cold -- 12 celsius, 53 Fahrenheit -- and raining. The girls, it appears, will have to find entertainment indoors. First entertainment: dish washing. Eight hands, one sink, though -- it won't work for everyone. Division of labor: the older girls wash, the younger girls, well, play.
"That's not fair." My own kids can almost immediately predict my response: life seldom is. As for the others -- they reply similarly. Must be a parenting thing.
Finally it warms up a bit and, more importantly, the sun comes out.
We all head out for some fun.
L gets busy trying to make the arrows K bought for her at odpust useable. They mysteriously have a dangerously sharp arrowhead but completely lack any nock. The girls get the sharp arrowheads taken care of but have a bit of difficulty adding the nocks. In the end, they test fire one, decide it's not worth it, and go off to look for other things to entertain them.
They find it soon enough.
An enormous dragonfly. We immediately get into a discussion as to whether dragonflies can bite or sting or not.
One thing that can sting, of late, is E's soccer kick. He's really grown to love the sport while here in Poland -- he sees all the boys playing it everywhere and he's decided to give soccer another chance in the autumn. Babcia's kick is nothing to joke about either. At one point she kicks it powerfully into the bottom of the balcony and sends bits of plaster flying.
After dinner, a walk into areas of Jablonka I'd never been to until recently. They're certainly not new areas: some of the houses have the evidence of the village's growth: old house numbers when it was enough to write "Jablonka" and a number on an envelope to get mail to a resident.
And like every village, I would imagine, mysteries, like a gate without a fence. Did it fall? was it simply the wire fence just behind it?
And there are other mysteries, but more in the sense that the Catholic Church uses the word: things that seem impossible and are in fact reality even though the exact mechanisms might not be known. For example, an abandoned barn in the middle of a field.
One corner of the foundation was surrendering, letting the whole structure sag toward that weakened point. Yet it's likely not as old as one might think. The shingles are the same asbestos-based shingles that Babcia and Dziadek had on their house, built in the eighties, until just a few years ago.
Finally, a modern rural Polish mystery -- again, in the Catholic sense. Here's a building that's erected just in front of the old barn. In the front half, there's a clothing store called Ela, which is a "fashion and style" shop. In the back half, a shop selling "windows, doors, gates, and blinds." The owner of the barn opened two shops? Opened one shop? Built the building and rented the space?
It's probably only a mystery to me, an outsider.
Raspberries and a Bike Ride
The Girl is in Spytkowice, a village about twenty minutes up the road. (That's the American in me, giving distances in time and not kilometers, in this case.) That means no jarmark unless the Boy and I want to go. And we really don't want to go. We want to sleep. Since K has headed back home, he's been sleeping in my bed. "He kicks all night!" L explained many times and then begged me to take over the evening duties. So now he sleeps with me. And that somehow that helps him sleep a bit longer than he might normally.
When we get up about half an hour later than usual, it's time to help Babcia gather the raspberries in the garden. The Boy willingly wiggles into the spots that are just his size.
Afterward, we take a ride to the river. We've walked there many times, during this visit and past visits, but we've spoken several times about riding our bikes there, but it was only today that we manage it. In the end, we ride a little over five kilometers and get some fantastic views along the way.
But riding with the Boy, no matter how much I enjoy it, is not much exercise, so when we get back to Babcia's house, I head out for another ride. This time, I head back to the Lipnica area, cutting through fields and following the ruts worn by years of tractor traffic.
There are a few impressive views along this ride, too. So much has changed, though, and yet nothing has changed. I make my way up Lipnica Mala at a leisurely 22 kilometers per hour. Years ago, I used to roll up the same road at around 28 kilometers per hour. Or at least I think so. It sounds good at least to say that.
