When your medium is chalk, the world is your canvas.
When your family includes a rambunctious five-year-old, escape is your standard.
Canvas
the girl
Bike
We’ve been working on it for some time now: riding a bike. It’s something K and I take for granted, one of the shared interests that helped in its own little way to solidify our relationship years ago.
The Girl didn’t take to it immediately. She was scared of everything: going up hill; going down hill; turning; going straight; starting; stopping. It all scared her. “I was beginning to think she’d be like Babcia,” K remarked today.
It’s been a long time coming…
http://www.flickr.com/apps/video/stewart.swf?v=109786
Keeping and Surrendering
“Hey L, come help me take out the trash and recycling,” I call as we finish up playing tag in the front yard, our new daily tradition. I pull into the laundry room the wicker basket we put our paper recycling in during the week and have her help me transfer the paper from it to the tub we’ll take out to the street. And then she sees it: one of her drawings. There. In the recycling.
She gasps.
“What’s this doing here?!” she asks, confused. “Are you throwing this away?”
I think fast and answer truthfully: “Well, we went through everything, and we’re saving the best.”
She looks at one of her crayon drawings and asks incredulously: “And this?!?”
Truthfully, it is quite good.
“Well, we can take that,” I admit. “It’s a good drawing.”
“And this?!” she exclaims, pulling out another. “And my subtraction work?!”
Soon she’s pulled out every single item of hers, each time accompanying the delicate removal with a gasp of shock and horror.
I explain to her that we can’t keep everything, making a mental note to check with K before having the Girl help sort recycling again. Still, it’s not a lesson she’ll learn quickly: most of us tend to hold onto things more than we should.
The Girls
I spent the morning with six lovely ladies and a camper with a Jacuzzi, flat screen television, double hammock, and loads of other extras.
It was a morning of pretend: “Tata, pretend she…” “Tata, let’s pretend they…” “Oh, Tata, you need to pretend the dog…”
The days of pretend, when the simple imperative “Pretend” was enough to make it reality.
When we still had complete control over something.
And we could easily get a closet full of whatever it is that thrills us.
Flowers for the Morning
“I promised her!” K mouths to me as L thumps up the stairs to brush her teeth, disheartened by my casual dismissal of her idea to go down to the blooming azalea and pick some flowers to take to school. “You can just get some from our neighbors’ azalea in their front yard,” I said just moments earlier. They’re out of town, but I knew they wouldn’t mind: they’re like long-lost family to the Girl.
“I’m not tromping down through the cold, wet leaves and grass to pick blooms for her when she can walk fifty feet…”
A few minutes later, I’m pulling small clumps of blooms from the bush, excited about the foggy early morning that promises a sunny mid-morning.
An hour later, the prophecy is fulfilled.
On Hiding and Emerging
Our two hostas (Fortunei Albopicta) winter under decaying leaves and an ever-dwindling smattering of decorative rocks. After the new leaves of most all trees have fully unfurled and the crape myrtles have begun budding, the hostas finally begin to emerge from winter dormancy.
It’s almost magical to watch such perennials resurrect themselves every spring. Little buds emerge from even the dampest, thickest blanket of last autumn’s leaves — the strength to push stones and leaves away is a testament to life’s tendency to conquer death.
Then again, maybe it just likes to hide.
After all, who doesn’t like hiding?
Spring Break?
The first day of spring break 2012 proper, and it starts like any spring day should: sun, warmth, clear light. Freshly emerged leaves offset the patch of Azalea blue (or is that purple? I’ve never checked, i.e., asked K) in the back corner. It would be great to be out in the warmth, to do some work on our small raised-bed garden, to work up the first sweat of the year. The grass needs mowing; autumn’s leaves need raking; the raspberries need netting shortly — yet none of these are options.
With a major paper due in a week, I’m sequestered, reading through articles, planning an attack, drowning in coffee and tea.
I spend the day filling a folder with articles from JSTOR, Gale, and seemingly countless other online resources that make it possible to research most anything from home. Then I write, write, write.
“In calling these stories ‘parabolic,’ we encounter an critical etymological parallel with geometry.”
Did I really just write that?
Still, I take my own advice, the mantra to my students that I seem to chant daily: “It’s a first draft. Don’t worry about making everything perfect — or even close to it — in a first draft.”
Evening approaches and with it, new tasks. I help the Girl get ready for bed; I trim tenderloin and prepare the brine for smoking later this week. K reads the Girl stories and prepares a salad for tomorrow’s lunch. Having to go to work tomorrow, she trundles off to bed; I sit down once more at the computer.
Others I’m sure are enjoying a first evening at the beach or the sounds of crickets at a mountain retreat. Me, I’m just ready to turn out the lights and head to bed.
Palm Sunday 2012
In a Pickle
It’s a bold idea that only a winter-hardened Polish woman could come up with. It’s more Eastern Europe that a consonant cluster. We need only imagine the ground, frozen solid for months, is covered with snow as a scarfed babcia digs about in the cellar for something to use in soup. She happens upon a store of cucumbers preserved in brine — pickles to us, but since everything in the East is pickled, it makes little sense to single one veggie out for distinction like that.
Whatever the series of fortunate events, Polish pickle soup is a reality, and now that we know the Girl likes pickles — “I eat them at school with my lunch!” she smiles — we have a new soup in our regular line-up.
A recipe for those interested is here, though I don’t vouch for it. It’s not what K uses — she freestyles!
The Arrival of the Camper
Afternoon Play
Summer always had a dream-like feel to it when I was a young kid. Even though it seemed never to arrive, it had an aura of endlessness once it finally did. Two and a half months seem a lot longer when you’re five.
And waiting for summer vacation when the weather is already warm and everything around you is beginning to scream, “It’s summer!” (even though it’s technically spring) makes for itchy feet.
So we decided to get a jump on summer today, though, with some tag in the front yard. We ran around the yard, fell on each other, and rolled around in the grass, winded and sure that the moment would last for ever.
At least I was sure. The Girl, not so much. She was up again, ready to go.
“Come on, Tata! I’m it!”
Arrival
When everything, positively everything is blooming,
or about to bloom,
when spring is leafing out everywhere,
there’s only one thing to do: get out and enjoy it.
Atypical Saturday (Lent 2012: Day 32)
Saturday has a morning ritual that never changes. It begins with some Skyping to Babcia and Dziadek in Poland. The Girl carries on two-thirds in English, a bit in Polish, and the rest in squeals and laughs. Ballet follows, with me heading to a nearby McDonald’s for a coffee and some paper grading. Returning home, it’s time for polski cwiczenia, Polish practice. Saturday after Saturday it’s the same, in ordinary time, Advent, Lent, or Easter.
A five-foot visitor in our backyard, though, is hardly an every-Saturday occurrence. If it were, I think we might be seeing less of Nana (and, by proxy, Papa).
A black rat snake Pantherophis obsoletus, this fellow came slithering along our side yard, and I noticed him just as he was winding his way among the Leyland cypresses that shield our deck from neighboring yards.
K was simultaneously fascinated and repulsed, wondering aloud whether I should kill it.
“Of course not!” I declared. “This guy eats rats, mice, chipmunks, squirrels, and a host of other things I’d gladly do without.” But as a compromise, I took a pitchfork and scooted him down to the edge of our property where he promptly wound his way into an extremely large azalea, curling around the branches until it was four or so feet in the air.
Returning to the upper part of our yard, I discovered some moss that appears to have sprouts. First a snake, then odd moss — who knew what else might come our way.
Yes, a very tenuous Lenten connection. Still, one can’t say I didn’t try.
Lent 2012: Day 31
Lent is about sacrifice, and a significant part of our everyday reality is sacrifice in the form of delayed gratification, when we sacrifice the immediate satisfaction of our desires for some further, greater good. For example, we could buy that new camera lens we want (and I have been drooling over Nikon’s 17-55 2.8 for some time) on credit and have immediate gratification; delaying said gratification by saving for the lens (and at $1,500, that particular lens would take quite a bit of saving of my personal spending money) means not racking up unnecessary debt that could hurt us in the long run. So we delay gratification for a good that is even further in the distance, and in this case, hypothetical. But the immediate price is a sacrifice of potential joy.
The Girl has been saving for a Barbie camper for months now. Granted, it only began a little before Christmas, but five-year-old time is like dog-years: it’s all relative. She gets a little cash here and there, from us and her grandparents, and this week, she made it: $70, the Wal-Mart website price.
So this evening, we went to Wally-world to buy it, only to find the price there was $94. I took it to customer service to inquire about the justification for the price difference. It turned out, they were aware of it — and they did nothing about it.
“We’ll price-match with a competitor…” began the customer service rep.
“But not with yourself,” I finished.
“Right. Not even store to store.”
I sensed a crisis brewing, but the Girl handled it marvelously: a few whimpers of disappointment but nothing significant.
Back home, we shopped around and found it on sale for $50. And now the Girl has a good start on her savings for a Barbie house — and a lesson learned about delayed gratification.
Lent 2012: Day 28
Conversation often turns into an excuse to discuss oneself, and talking with someone who seems to have a knack for turning the conversation back to himself is exhausting.
The unselfishness of speedily and gracefully distracting ourselves from self is also singularly difficult to practice.
Yet it’s somehow a natural conversational occurrence. Whether it’s a sincere desire to help someone by sharing a similar experience or an unconscious competitive streak, we hear a story and we want to add something from our own lives into the mix. Resisting this urge is critical for what Faber calls “kind listening. But like many other kindnesses, it involves a degree of self-sacrifice.
I think of the Girl dating at some point in the future — within the next, say, 25-30 years — and one of my most deeply held requirements (as if I’d have any say) for any young man interested in her would be that he show the ability to listen. It’s a rare gift these days, and I fear it will be rarer still when the time comes.
The quoted excerpt is from Father Frederick Faber’s Spiritual Conferences, excerpted here.
Lent 2012: Day 26
After a beautiful day yesterday, it seemed only appropriate that this morning begins with rain — a drizzle that suggests an afternoon movie and, if we’re lucky, a nap. But by noon, it’s sunny, and the backyard calls.
There, we find that the cabbage in the backyard planter, growing since sometime in October or November, has reached the point that putting off consuming it would be almost wasteful — at the very least, it would hint of sin.
So what’s a Polish girl to do but make a surowka out of it — basically, a vinegar cole slaw. The Girl helps with the sauce/marinade. But that only keeps us busy for so long: our newly discovered park is only four miles away, so K packs some fruit while I entertain the Girl in the swing, then just before four, we head out.
We take a different route, with a trail head buried in the back of a Little League park I’ve passed almost every day for five years. Who knew?
Same park, different sights.
A quick stroll through the woods brings us to the lakeside and a small observation platform built out into the water.
With the temperature and the amount of green, it’s difficult to believe that spring is still technically two days away. And from what I’ve been reading, it seems to be the same situation through most of the States.
“If it’s this warm now, what will it be like in August?” people wonder, as if weather had a cumulative effect.
Cumulative effect or not, there is a cumulative effect of all this walking: a tired, fussy girl who’s ready to head home and get some food. We make it across the largest bridge in the park just to sit long enough to decide it’s time to head back
counting and noting the steps along the way.
And what does this have to do with the twenty-sixth day of Lent?
With an end like this, does it really matter?
Nana, the Girl, and the Swing
Playing and Building
Helping
Food
