lake

click photos to enlarge.

for a while when i was very little my grandparents ran a sort of motel or maybe a handful of cabins on beaver lake in northwest arkansas just out a bit from rogers. i can tell you now there's not much i thought i remembered about that time other than smells. the smell always of pine-sol from my grandma's cleaning and the similar, but oilier smell of the paints she used to capture and keep what she saw when she looked out onto the lake. the smell of my grandpa's cigars. the smell of lake water itself, which is not easy to describe but which is immediately recognizable to anyone who knows a lake anywhere, full of fish and a good breeze and coolness. not much else a child that small could gather up except a few rocks and shells.

but then the sweetie and i drag the boat into the water here in our own new york mountains i look around and feel like i am snagged on something, that crazy proust and his cookies again, something from so far back in myself it is barely there. the water is low this time of year, the city needing so much more in this heat. the drop of eight or nine feet has unearthed a part of the world that usually lives without air and keeps to itself. bare rock and sand that will soon enough slip back into the water. but for this day the sweetie and i row around inside the water of my grandma's paintings, rocks and trees overhanging, right up inside the earliest part of my thinking about what a person needs. rocks and water and trees and sky. not survival needs or comfort needs. higher up than that, less necessary and maybe because of that somehow more vivid. it is funny to think that needs, desires, can be passed down through generations like eye color or curly hair or dimples. but there they are, reminders of who we are and where we come from.

lemonade

it is just past 5 and the air outside is lurking somewhere near 90 when guthrie and i go out. we head south, toward the park, toward the coolest part of brooklyn. i can hear the girls before i can really see them but when we come up close there are four of them, fairly close in age, with those skinny girl knees sticking out everywhere. one of them is dressed up in some sort of tutu outfit, white and pink, with some orange as well. and they call out lemonade all together and singsongy like some sort of lemonade sirens. they are perched there on the stoop, two on the cement banister sides and one in a chair. the ballerina stands, hops from one foot to the other.

i do not really want any lemonade but i ask for one anyway and one of the girls pours it into a clear plastic cup that looks like what bartenders put old fashioneds in while another hands me change for my dollar. they thank me and tell me to have a nice day and i thank them right back and wish them luck on their lemonading. i suspect they will do well. guthrie and i head on up toward the park, he with his red lizard and i with my cocktail glass of lemonade.

it is not fresh squeezed lemonade and some part of me is always a little sad at the first taste of lemonade stand lemonade but the rest of me knows fresh squeezed lemonade is not cost effective at the elementary school level. but there is always a second sip and that sip is good because it is cold and tart. we walk along the edge of the park and under the trees like we are at some party just our side of fancy. i sip my lemonade as we walk and feel dangerous, decadent. my drink sloshes from time to time, onto my skirt or my feet or onto guthrie a little but that is all part of the risk of drinking lemonade out in the open like this, reckless.

on the walk back we pass a woman standing in a spotted summer dress, head thrown back, cigarette like a chimney sprouting from her lips. she just stands there, smoking, eyes closed, face to the sky. a teenage girl sits on a stoop petting the soft ears of her own speckled dachshund, whispering into his head to keep cool. and then, when we are getting ready to cross the street and walk up to our own home an old man comes running toward us and stops short. in his left hand is an empty manger and stable covered in dark moss. his right hand is up to ward us off, maybe. maybe to stop himself from running into us.

we cross the street and head up past stoop, stoop, hydrant, stoop, fire escape, everything heavy with july flowers and potted tomatoes. how else is there to live in brooklyn's summer but by walking out the door and into lemonade?

wash, spin, tumble dry

things started to change back in the fall when the families started asking about christmas. what do you want? and because we live far away and most folks on both sides don't really get to see us much, don't know how we live our wild lives, we try to be helpful. we try to be creative. but then this year the sweetie said, "what we would like, what we would really like more than anything else in the whole world, is to be able to do our laundry in our own home."

and i know what you're saying, but unless you live in a city like this one, unless you look down the road of your future and see yourself at seventy dragging a twenty pound bag of laundry four or five or six blocks down the street where the woman who does the pound laundry will ask you if you want all the loads done together and then, whatever answer you give her, will shove every last article of clothing your whole family has worn the past week into a tiny machine and she will press start without looking to see whether the machine is set on cold, hot or make everything shrink to barbie doll size, you do not know the hunger for the ability to do your own laundry.

and before you get all high and mighty, saying you'd go down to that laundromat with your quarters in your pocket and the new bottle of detergent you will inevitably leave behind and you would sort out all your whites and your colors and your delicates, you just settle down and listen. you could do all that, press the buttons on the machines corresponding to temperatures and agitation speed, but you could also explain to a two year old child how to pilot a plane. you'd put the words out there, but you shouldn't expect the kid to get that plane off the ground. the machines at the laundromat, any laundromat, are so old they do not remember anymore what delicate means. nor are they really sure what temperature warm is, so they tend to go for broke. all hot, all cotton/sturdy, all the time. it is one thing to hate a stranger for the rust stains on your towels and the fact that your favorite skirt will now fit your dog. it is another thing to have to look at your own face in the mirror every day as you dry your hair with a rusty towel and know you shoved those towels into that washer. you didn't stick around long enough to see if "air dry" is siphoning its air of some dirty vents in hell.

the family, both sides, takes this very seriously and we find ourselves, after the holidays, staring at a handful of plastic cards of varying amounts that, in the end, add up to a washing machine and a dryer. no kidding. but we aren't impulsive. we are wily. we spend our time online and in stores, reading manuals, turning dials and pushing buttons, opening and closing doors. finally, nearly six months later, we stroll into the large store where the cards work and we saunter up to the desk where the appliance sellers lurk. i glance at the "next day delivery" signs and can feel the drool pooling in my mouth. turns out you have to select an item that's in stock in order to get next day delivery. otherwise it's six to infinity weeks. also turns out there's only one complete set (that's one washer, one dryer) in the entire store. one. the sweetie and i look out over the vast plains of the appliance section, thirty or forty machines just lying there, waiting, but not in stock. they are all the same to me. so many dials and buttons i cannot tell one from another. they are all glossy and shiny and terrifying. we decide to take the one set in stock. this means i have to forgo the lovely blue paint job i'd been gazing at online but i am ready to sacrifice such a small thing for the hugeness of laundry by week's end.

the appliance saleswoman tallies everything up, adds on our dryer vent tube which i make a mental note to wear around the house while talking in a robot voice at least once a day until i do my first load of laundry. then she says, "okay, do you want that the sixteenth or the thirtieth?" and i do not know what she means because there are maybe forty signs all around the place screaming about next day delivery. turns out this particular store has two days. tuesday. friday. all other days are not days and therefore do not count when you are counting the days to your appliances. the sixteenth, according to this thinking, is actually two days away. she explains something about a backup in the trucks or something causing that extra day delay. the sweetie is diplomatic and, although it will mean taking a day away from work for him, we agree to the sixteenth. i am thinking, in my head, about a washing machine on wheels that i am driving through the store at high speed, slowing only to kick each and every appliance salesmonster in the store.

but the laundry fairies don't just show up and attach your machines to your house and fly away. okay, they do if your house is already set up for laundry, but the only remnants of the laundry hookups left in this house are two pipes that burst a few years ago, sending incredibly cold water spraying onto the back of the fridge and then on me when i pulled the fridge away from the wall to find out what was going on back there. so we hire a plumber. and we hire an electrician. the electrician comes over and sets things up as much as he can, but has to wait for the plumber to finish before he can do the final electrical. the plumber, evidently so fantastic at plumbing he is in constant demand, had so many emergencies he is unable to make a tuesday appointment, nor is he able to make it any other time during the week (emergency after emergency, i guess). and when we don't hear from the plumber after the second appointment (also second week) has come and gone (see, we're in brooklyn during the week and don't have a clue whether he's managed to stop by and do anything), i get on the phone with my best teacher voice and say i am absolutely sure he is finished so the electrician can stop over friday to do the last few things, but i would really appreciate a call to let me know for sure so i won't send the electrician over there when he still can't do any work. i get a very nice call a few hours later from this plumber saying he's finished and will stop by saturday so we can pay him. he does not stop by, nor has he called. perhaps he is just too busy with emergencies.

so the sweetie calls the electrician (i don't usually call because i find these guys take a giant shaggy man more seriously than they do me and although it pisses me off, i just want to do my laundry right now) and we don't hear back until saturday. he'll be there between three and four. fine. we get home just before three and we wait. and we wait. and a little before six he calls. a little before six! he just got too busy but he'll come over tomorrow. he shows up and does the final electrical then tells us after he's finished he's charging us extra for working on sunday and i'm figuring he wouldn't have been working on sunday if he'd answered his phone. still, i just want to do my laundry and this won't cost me that much more than doing laundry in brooklyn anyway.

i am loading the washer before the electrician is out of the house. i can tell you this. on the washer there is a big round dial with a bunch of choices and lights all around it. there are three buttons side by side, each with a menu above and little lighted areas telling what you're selecting. there are several other buttons scattered across the face of the machine, including a separate start button and power button (when did they stop being the same button?). there is a digital timer to tell me when my clothes will be done (it is not very honest and sometimes backtracks or skips ahead). the place where the detergent goes slides out for detergent entry but slides even further out so i can put the whole thing in my dishwasher and wash it. what have we been missing at the laundromat where thousands of other people each week pour their filthy horrible non high energy detergent into the same machines where we wash our own most precious clothing? but it is the max extract button i love most. i love it because it squeezes out my clothes so fiercely they are nearly dry, laughing at the timer on the dryer when i toss them in. i also love it because i could have used a "max extract" button back when max was deep into dying and was trying to prove it by bleeding on every skirt i owned. there are so many choices, so many buttons to push, and i am a bit bewildered but the scariest part is the machine will make some of those choices for you when you put the clothes in. i get to select one button. i choose normal because i don't know what sort of disaster might happen if i choose anything else. i stand in the kitchen, staring at the washer. the sweetie suggests i get a chair if i'm planning to watch the entire forty minutes. i do not get a chair and i do not stand there the whole time. i do find a million reasons to walk into the kitchen, though, and each time i do i watch the clothes flopping around behind the glass.

we put the clothes from the washer right up into the dryer and i cannot believe how easy it is to do that when they're right there like that instead of on opposite sides of a store. the sweetie says we should probably get ourselves a laundry basket and i think of all the glamorous varieties of laundry baskets out there. you heard me right. i think of all the glamorous varieties of laundry baskets out there. when the little bell dings, we take the clothes in armfuls to the dining room table and fold them. somehow, even on a hot day, warm laundry feels good.

telephone call

this is supposed to be a story about how the original supernatural nephew took a metal detector to his grandmother and laughed while she beeped like a mine field, but i am selfish and i want it to be about how a nine year old child loves me enough he is smacked in the head by that love while riding in a car, smacked hard enough he has to call and say something to make himself feel better. and i know that i am only part of the deal, that the sweetie, who is tall enough to turn himself into a human amusement park ride, who can send explosives screaming toward a pile of children without getting into trouble, who does all the really good gift shopping in our house, is probably at least 65% of our combined value as an aunt/uncle team. this is fine. i like to think my 35% value is based entirely on the child's connection to strangeness. i suspect i am right. this is also fine.

the phone rings and i hear the sweetie walking around inside the house, talking to the original supernatural nephew. i am sitting on the front porch, watching the day finish up, waiting for the bats. there is discussion of some sort of dog, a new one, who might help ease some of the emptiness sprawling around in the child after a recent dog death. there is talk of the fourth of july and then the sweetie brings me the phone. the nephew tells me he's calling because he wants to answer some questions for my blog, questions about a grandmother of his and a metal detector. but he is like an old man and this is not why he is on the other end of the line. my sister tells me later he said he just wanted to check in.

he hurries through the answers to the metal detecting questions the way children recite the pledge of allegiance and then begins to tell me about the fireworks. he says when things were just starting, he was thinking maybe this would be just like christmas. he was pretty sure it would be like that, where we showed up unexpectedly while people were opening presents. he says he kept thinking it over and over but then we didn't leap out from behind anything and things just weren't the way he'd hoped. it wasn't the same. he says this several times. he mentions how nobody- NOBODY- launched a styrofoam plane on a rocket.he says it was a good fourth. he says he sure does miss us. i tell him we miss him right back.

listening to him has always been fascinating but conversations with him now, at nine, are unlike anything else i know. his voice is heavier than it was. he is shedding the child sound of it. it has the cadence of his great, great grandmother, hillbilly with a prettiness to it that makes him sound wise, trustworthy. his vocabulary rivals those of most adults i know and he can put words all together in a row the way a smart poet wants to but doesn't very often. i don't know if he knows this and i'm not sure whether i should mention it to him so for now i will hold off.

but i can feel how far away his voice is, how much he is in missouri and how much i am here. i see a lightning bug flashing its way up the yard from the street and concentrate on it, think about all the lightning bugs from my own childhood flickering around not a mile from where he is right now. i think about the june bug i saw yesterday, the first i've seen this far north, how it was velvety and brilliant and how he has probably seen a million this month alone. i think of those crazy seventeen year locusts and how, even when he was very small, we had entire phone conversations dedicated to their sound and the skeletons they left behind and the strangeness of living underground so many years only to come up and sing just that short time.

and i miss him all the time, the supernatural nephew. but it is now, when the summer bugs are flashing and singing and shining, when my own homeland and his smells like dry grass and fresh peaches and creek water, that i feel it punch me in the chest, slap me on the side of the head. but what makes it bearable is that he feels that same punch, i guess, that same slap. and he has sense enough to call and tell me so.

little boy shopping

i am at the atlantic center. the atlantic center is what most of brooklyn has instead of a mall. i am in line at a discount department store, more or less, waiting to pay. there are thirteen people in line in front of me and three open registers. register three is occupied by a man who appears to be, fairly successfully, trying to pick up the woman behind the counter. i say this because the entire time i wait in line, he never leaves and she never calls a new customer. he keeps walking around the front of the store, getting more things for her to ring up, then he leans way over and talks to her in a low voice that draws lots of giggles from her. so there are thirteen people in line and two open registers.

so i am waiting. behind me i hear a fairly reckless cart rattling up and of course it slams right into the back of me. hard. i turn around to glare and there is a little boy, maybe eight, staring right at me, looking a little lost but also just a little triumphant. he is one of those children whose face is still cuddled in baby fat, with huge dark eyes set on top of cheeks that would make one of those pinching grannies nearly faint. if he grows up, if i do not strangle his sweet self right this minute, girls will write his name on their notebooks in bubble letters. but there is some question about his future right now. he looks thrilled to have hit me with his cart. his mother is nowhere so i sigh and turn around, tell myself i am off duty, that disciplining someone else's child is not my job during the summer.

he is joined a few minutes later by a mother who can only be described as frazzled. her entire life appears to consist of attempts to prevent him from doing things and then attempts to redirect or repair whatever he has done. in what will eventually seem like three hours that we are in line together she will be unsuccessful in every single attempt. the line is flanked by product- towels and soaps and books and things made of glass. he touches every single one, moving each item slightly with his tornadic little hands. he sees a backpack and screams out to all who will listen that this backpack has a character from a t.v. show right there on it. a show he watches! he emphasizes his proclamation by grabbing the backpack and whipping it up to his mother's eye level. but you already know that a backpack sitting on a shelf with towels and soaps and books and things made of glass will only have its straps wrapped around the glass things. in this case, a very large vase. which i shove back onto the shelf with my foot.

the child is excited about everything. "look, paper towels!" "hey, mom. MOM! look! brown flip flops!" and i can almost hear his mother wilting behind me. she gives in and gives him the cart again. now, i may be one to judge folks, but i try to avoid doing too much judging of strangers publicly. but then she already knows this child is going to slam that cart right into me again and she has decided she would rather sacrifice me than listen to her little angel any longer and this is ugly. selfish. so when she begins yelling at him to stopstopstop i figure he and the cart are pretty close and then he slams into me again and plows on past. i grab the front of the cart which surprises him. he sizes me up to see just how much alike we might be. i push the cart back, slowly, toward where his mother is waiting, saying and doing exactly nothing. i tell the child very calmly and clearly that his behavior is rude and he needs to stop slamming the cart into me. he looks at me like i am from somewhere he's never heard of, like i am surrounded by flames. he lets go of the cart but continues to smile. it is not a nasty smile. it is genuine and pretty and guileless. behind me there is a very low and tense conversation where his mom's voice goes on for long stretches and he punctuates things with his own little voice.

i am summoned to the register by a cashier and am paying when the child and his mother are called to the register two past me. she walks by pushing the cart, slowly, leaning on it heavily, like someone much older. he saunters behind her, thrilled to be in the world. when he is even with me, he drags his arm across my back, the way you see children slap their hands along fences or light posts. smack. drag. like i am something other than a person. i start thinking now about what we will do in a few years when he shows up in my class able to see and hear every single thing in the world all at once, worried that he will hear once again that these are liabilities, not superpowers.

big time at the round barn

our own farm market, just a bit down the road, is in a real live round barn. this is not the only reason we go there. the sweetie can be convinced to mosey on down there almost any saturday as long as someone mentions the word cheese. this is where we buy our summer cheese, or really, most of our cheese from midmay to midoctober. there are cheeses with beer and hops and jalapenos and some with raspberries and blueberries. so we are stopping by on the way back from looking at rain barrels, which i have been howling after for a very long time and which the sweetie decided were perfectly fine as soon as he saw one sitting at the corner of our maryland folks’ house.

so we stop and the birds of prey are there right at the entrance but i am looking for peas. you know, the kind where you just snap the end of the pod and unzip it. there are plenty of things you can do with peas like this but really, mostly you should just shove them, podful after podful, into your mouth. if you have folks around you, you can share at your own discretion. i spy the peas on the outskirts over across from the birds of prey but we head on into the barn first. this is how you do it. you graze the barn, then wander on out to see what else might be waiting for you.

we get our cheese and stroll over to the potato chocolates. now, i’m not going to argue with you about something you don’t know anything about so you’ll just have to trust me. these folks make plenty of chocolates but the best, by far, is something like a peppermint patty, only sassier in the mint department, and made with potatoes. that’s right. the white minty insides are potato based. so while i am forking over my dollars for the potato mint chocolates one of the women behind the counter asks the sweetie if he likes bacon. i tend to think this is a foolish question, but she waits for him to nod and say yes. she offers him a white chocolate bacon bark with some sort of hot spicy stuff sprinkled throughout. i know the sweetie and i know he hates the white chocolate. certainly this is a foolish way to live but it is one of his few flaws so i have chosen to overlook it for now. but he tosses back a piece of this concoction that should have a warning: may cause heart failure, stroke, blindness or hysteria. and suddenly the man who has waged his own personal campaign to eradicate white chocolate and to end the suffering it causes is pulling dollars out of his pocket and nudging me to pick up a container of this stuff.

the goat and sheep guy is around past the chocolates and he has a giant cooler full of tasty packets of both animals. i am looking at the yarn. kid mohair. it is expensive but plenty worth what he’s asking. i will come back, will save it for a reward. but the sweetie is bent on getting something from the goat and sheep guy (who has a lovely accent that sounds a little bit belgian) and the next thing i know he’s handing me a neatly wrapped package of goat for the grill with the promise he will have goat milk in spring. i am thinking about the goats i know and worry they might think me a traitor. do not tell them.

we head back over to get peas on the outskirts. the sweetie runs off and when i have paid for the little basket heaped with peas i wander around , trying not to look over at the soap lady because the sweetie and i are both suckers for this soap and sometimes accidentally end up going home with enough soap for a year, in flavors like tomato and coconut lime that will make you sniff the air around you all day in surprise at your own prettiness. he is in line over by a tent with a pig on it, a plate of two fat ribs in his hand, waiting for a plate with a pulled pork sandwich and fries. there is an african musician in the tent next to the ribs playing some sort of piano like instrument made of a bowl or maybe a gourd and nails. we sit on a picnic table at the top of the hill and listen to the music and eat. the storm that pulled the nearby rivers back up to respectable levels last night seems to have brought reinforcements but mostly the purplish clouds just hover, making the mountains hunched under them look even more dramatic.

because eating ribs isn’t something you do without a drink i go for tea. i am halfway down the hill when a little boy, maybe three, leaps out in front of me like the troll under the bridge. i think he is moving to get out of my way but as i dodge him he is right there between me and home made iced tea again and again. he looks up, arms outstretched and says, “please stop. please!” and i stop and look down. “why?” i ask him. it seems like a good question. “because i said, ‘please stop.’” hmmmm. i ask how long i will have to stop, thinking of all the nearby roads washed halfway out that are now single lane with those stoplights at either end of the damaged section. sometimes waiting is necessary. another child, similar enough in size and shape to be maybe a twin, comes barreling along and leaps on my leg, clutches it the way i’ve seen children do when parents are leaving them at daycare. “five minutes!” says the first child who then flings himself on me as well. the woman who is with them turns to see her two children wrapped around my legs and apologizes profusely. but five minutes seems like a reasonable time, especially since i know how long five minutes takes for small children. they take turns letting go, then clinging again to my legs. i ask if the five minutes is up and they say yes and release me. the empanada place at the bottom of the hill is out of iced tea but i get water and it is plenty cool and goes just fine with the fat ribs and the few pods of peas i’ve shelled out onto my plate.

blue jay

the blue jays who live in our yard are kinder than the blue jays of my childhood, the kind of birds who divebombed unsuspecting dogs with a scream and a flash of blue, leaving tiny specks of red welling up through the fur, who screamed at small children on sidewalks with such violence parents would run out and drag the children back indoors. the blue jays in our yard have never been mean to anybody. and these birds are monstrous, bigger than all those warblers in the apple tree, bigger than the woodpeckers. not as big as a duck but if i were the sort to exaggerate, that might be what i’d say.

the birds, two of them as far as i can tell, spend their days in the front yard spruce trees, peering out from the high branches, then gliding out of the low ones to eat. because they are gentle i can sit on the front porch and watch them and quite often i do, small dog sprawled out beside me, unafraid. some days they flap right up onto the porch railing, then leave as quickly as they get there. i like them the way i am learning to like bears, pretty animals that mean me no harm as long as i’m not between them and a baby or food.

so today guthrie and i are out in the yard doing a little weeding and cutting back the mint. two kinds of mint, really, and some lemon balm. there are always birds and unless someone is singing something particularly fancy all that birdsong scoots to the background like the sounds of trucks rumbling down the road past the house or the sound of a hammer hitting nails a few roads over and further up the mountain. familiar is familiar. so i do not think at all about the soft, thick sound of birds not quite ready to fly until we are walking back to the compost bins and we walk under the back yard spruce tree, a runt among the others, a tree that has more in common with a deranged christmas tree than anything else.

although those jays spend their days in the front yard spruces, it seems that about halfway up the backyard tree they have built a nest. and the sound, louder now, a hundred rusty swingsets all going at once, is coming from just a few branches down from the nest. i look up to see four fat and still fuzzy blue jays sitting next to each other on a branch. a branch up and over across from them is one of those big, grown birds. it is yelling at the babies, teenagers, really, who are not listening closely enough. then it opens wings i wouldn’t imagine could fit in that densely branched mess and it flies past them, down and out of the tree. two of the babies flap off after it. not graceful, but enough to get themselves out of the tree and into the real air outside. the third flies around from branch to branch, a flap or two then landing. the grown bird comes back with its yelling and that third bird hits the air fast.

the last one, though, is in no hurry. it is soft around the face and its crest looks tousled, babyish. it sits on the branch a few feet away from where it has spent most of its life and listens to the other birds. the young ones have returned and they are all screaming along with the grown folks. and this last little one listens a while, then turns away from the birds and the nest and the screaming. if he had headphones he would put them on. if he had a bedroom door he would stomp through it and slam it behind him. if he had a secondhand car he would hit the gas hard and peel out. but he is the last baby bird in a runty spruce tree. he might as well get those wings going and fly.