278. Summer Evening

The sun past the park treeline, I sit facing north watching a plump gray squirrel creep along the electric wire highway above my alley. A mosquito bites me but does not leave a welt. Humming A/C units turn off and on. The air is still but more pleasant than it's been in 2 weeks. I hear the phone ring inside, Jake's voice talking with Daisy and Fiona.

Clouds this year have given dimensions to the sky that shock and please me. The sky is so big now, bigger than I remember it every being since I moved from Texas. Jake says I'm wrong but this year is different.

A squirrel gnaws, somewhat desperately, at my baby pin oak branch. I need to decide between the pin and the scarlet. With the magnolia, two redbuds, a dogwood, and the straight hybridized red/silver maple, I can't keep both oaks. Like Penny says: I can't grow every tree. I think the scarlet will win. It's already taller than my house and the pin is crooked trying to get enough light.

My foot is resting on a large patio pot containing a basil plant and a jellybean tomato. Tiny red grape-sized fruits, the woman at the market told me. Right now they are green but I have hope.

Our old dog's bowl is still on the porch. Jake, I think, suggested it as a burglary deterrent. I don't think it would fool me.

The euonymus is leaving this fall. I will replace it, perhaps with a Japanese maple. The euonymus attracts too many flies to its flowers.

Steve and Jerry's wisteria is blooming, but they moved to Amsterdam, I'm sure they don't care. I miss them. To bastardize Frost, good hostas make good neighbors.

277. Pool

Bree is so happy with the new pool. Yes, Bree, the neighbor, not one of the kids in my house. Zelda told me that she came home after the first afternoon when she and Noah came to swim and was very happy.

Our old pool was a galvanized metal horse trough. It was reminiscent of my childhood but it was a tetanus shot waiting to happen. Each summer involved more and more fiberglass patching and painting. I was done. We rolled it into the alley last fall for bulk pick up and bought this one in the springtime. Total cost was astonishingly low, especially considering that there's a freaking filter built in. The water is clean and I don't have to constantly change it out. It's smarter. Maybe not nostalgic, but smarter.

In my experience, that's not always true about new things, but this time it is.

276. What day is it?

I just published 275/365 and realized it had been several weeks since I last wrote here. To top that off, I was temporarily unaware of what the date actually was. Yup, it is summer. Totally completely summer.

And I have been writing over here for over a year, but the 365 format isn't working for me anymore. My thyroid is in check, for one, and so I don't find myself as hypergraphic and out of whack as I once did. I don't write every day anymore. Because I don't have to.

So I'm going to continue here, but I'm going to drop the 365. My other add-on blog, Ease in Fullness, is simply counted. I probably don't even need to do that, but something about these extra little blogs makes me want to number them.

How long? I don't know. I kind of like the pseudonyms, the kid conversations, the big old pat on the back for having the luck to live here. So we'll see.

275/365 Last Child in the Woods

I'm reading the book, Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv (I think Richard? I'm actually too lazy to walk into the next room to get the book). It came out a few years back. Its premise is that due to a number of reasons (fear of litigation, the Bogey Man, over-scheduled childhoods, the idea that nature should be left pristine for viewing purposes only, and so forth), children are no longer in touch with nature.

I read these statements and I nod my head. But then I look at my block and I think that even though we are in the city, even though the park across the street is one of those "look, don't touch, unless you're playing on approved fields or equipment" kind of parks, we are doing our very best to allow for this nature connection.

We camp, for starters. The older girls are in girl scouts, and as their leader, I'm making sure they learn about their environment (and not in the distant "save the rainforest" way, but in "this is an edible weed; this is a white oak; these are possum tracks" way). My yard is, due to laziness, mostly in a wild state. No pristine swaths of grass back there. The McAllisters have left toy dump trucks and shovels on the tree lawn for digging. Our kids build, and destroy, and build again, fairy houses--perhaps not the same as building their own treehouse, but they still learn something through this.

A couple of dads hunt. A couple others fish, and take their kids. Fiona will get her hunting course done this summer. We garden. I'm about 5 years away from chickens--that number fluctuates but it's not here yet. But our kids know where food comes from.

Daisy plays with these little centipedes that live in my open compost pile. Both girls know you can eat daylilies, but not Easter lilies. They know poison ivy and they have built dams on creeks and canoed down rivers.

But sitting at Irish dance the other night waiting for Fiona's class to finish, the topic amongst about 8 parents turned to vacations and camping. Many of the people there had camped as kids. I was the only one that still camped. Or had been to a state park even for a day trip.

And I realized this book wasn't for me, the woman with the book of knots sitting on top of the computer desk. And as Lisa put it in the comments over on my other blog, my kids aren't the last children in the woods but perhaps the last children in the world.

We live a good life here. I guess sometimes I forget how good.

Anybody want to live across the street from me?

274/365 Power struggle

Eliza calls just as Daisy and Fiona are getting in the backyard pool. "Do you want to come over?" Fiona asks her. No, she doesn't want to swim. Swam all day Sunday or something like that. Since they're on speaker phone and Daisy craves playmates, begging begins.

"Don't," I tell her. "If she doesn't want to come over, that's fine. Don't whine and beg."

They get off the phone. "I don't understand," Fiona says, my lovely non-game-playing child. Straightforward.

"She probably isn't too interested in swimming," I begin, "and maybe wants to see if she can pull you away from swimming to play on her terms." Maybe not. Maybe I read too much of my own experience into things.

Fiona shrugs. "I like the pool."

Three minutes later, I'm heading out with the phone. Fiona is taking the cover off the pool. The phone rings. Eliza has decided swimming sounds ok.

273/365 Sprinkler!

Mostly interested in trying to fill tiny little water balloons. But there was some running and jumping. And a lot of squealing.

272/365 Gnome

He just wasn't quite ready to bare it all for the sprinkler.