Tales from the Shark Tank

Our son brought home the flyer for the first PTO fundraiser of the year. After the adventures in Cub Scout popcorn, I had rather dreaded its advent, but it turns out my fears for overpriced, useless edibles were mercifully unnecessary. We didn’t get beyond grandparents in the matter of popcorn, because I could not, in good conscience, ask people to buy the stuff at $12.00 for a box of 12 microwave packets. I’m sorry; that’s absurd. But evidently I was not the only one to feel that way, because this one isn’t useless junk and is reasonably priced. They’re selling packages of flower bulbs, at $5.00 each. The number of bulbs in a packet varies by variety, of course, but they’ve both come up with something good and and kept the math simple. Nor does it require much skill; bulbs are about the easiest sort of gardening project in existence. You put them in the ground at the depth specified on the package in the fall, and leave them alone. Some of them need grass kept out of their bed (like the windflowers), but most are self-sufficient enough that they don’t need even that much attention.

I’ll be in some trouble anyway, because gardening nut that I am, I want one (or more) of everything. That’s not a problem with the fundraiser, though; indeed it is an indication of the merits of the project. So when the rain stops, I’ll be outside later today, figuring out what to plant where. I think I’ll put some early daffodils and crocus on the east side of the house, where they can bloom before the trees get their leaves and turn it into a shady area. And a clump or two of Grecian windflowers would look lovely at the base of the lilacs. And irises…now where shall I put a bed of irises?

Anybody want to buy some flower bulbs?

The first of this month, I decided that rather than put our rent check in the mail, I would walk it over to K’s house, as she lives a grand total of half a mile away. Then I kept going on up to the next county road, turned around and came back. I paid no attention to how long that took me, but I only went about a mile and a half total. When I was done I was absolutely wiped out and appalled by the fact.

It’s two weeks later. I just went out for a walk, as I’ve taken to doing daily. I covered about three miles all told, and I’m fine. If there weren’t other things for me to attend to, I could have kept going. There is no outwardly visible change yet, nor was I expecting any after so short a time. But I wasn’t expecting any perceptible change in stamina yet, either, and here it is. And since that was the point of this in the first place, I’m very pleased indeed.

Indiana is playing it’s usual autumnal games. Tuesday the high was above 90. Tuesday night it stormed, and Wednesday the temperature topped out at 70. Yesterday it was 67, and today promises to be just as wet and colder yet. I’ve been waiting for the weather to cool, but it would have been kinder of it to do so a bit more gradually. See, I have a body that is as conservative about barometric bounces as my politics are liberal. (If you know me, that really does say it all, and if you don’t, well, you’ll figure it out.}

The real problem with this, aside from objections to pain which are both philosophical and practical, is that it leaves me cranky, tired, and worst of all, slow. There is very little that annoys me more than to be a member of the orange triangle brigade and to find that force of will only goes so far in enabling me to bull my way through. You’d think by now I’d have learned to shorten my to-do lists when necessary, but I haven’t. Those are a function of how quickly my brain can conceptualize a task, not of how long it will take my body to carry it out. Mind you, I know the excess (murphle) pounds don’t help, but I’m working on that – not out of vanity, but to be comfortable in my body again.

But still and all, I’m weathering this with (I think) fair grace. I’ve gotten a sewing table put together for myself up in the attic, and as anticipated, my son is more than willing to play or read up there if I’m there. Since I want his trains to remain upstairs as well, and I’m much happier about providing the companionship necessary for him to be willing to keep them there if I can sew, I’d say we all win. The attic in this house can’t be merely storage space; the house is small enough that it must also be living space. Setting up a place to sew to keep my hands occupied while my mind is engaged with my son is a major step in making that work. I’m planning to attend a small ren faire in Illinois with a group of friends in early October, and I’m making costumes for all of us, which is an exercise in fun I’ve not indulged in for a very long time. The combination of weather and my goofy body have slowed me down a bit, but it will take considerably more than this to stop me. Sometimes being stubborn as a brace of mules is useful.

At my son’s insistent invitation, I went to have lunch with him at school. Greater love hath no parent than to spend half an hour in earnest conversation with half a dozen 7 year olds, but that is beside the point.

As I was there, I looked around and saw a little girl at the next table wearing socks with cute cat faces on them. That was fine. What wasn’t was the text above them, clearly readable from a distance. They said “Sexy Kitten” in wraparound repeat.

Who makes such things for a 7 year old? And what sort of parent buys them? Or is it just me that considers the juxtaposition of “sexy” with a second-grader to be utterly inappropriate?

What with one thing and another, I have yet to spend a weekend in my new home. This is, of course, a direct result of my inability to focus on the tasks at hand when it came to getting out of the old one. The other direct result is that Mondays (or Tuesday, for Labor Day weekend) are generally a dead loss. Those are the days when my body delivers a message, the text of which is “Hey, woman! You aren’t 20 anymore. You aren’t 30 anymore. You aren’t even 40 anymore. I don’t care if you have a 7 year old kid; you’re a boomer, and your 50th birthday is a whole lot closer than your 40th.” The method it chooses to deliver this message generally comes in the form of an aggressive nap. No matter what grand plans I go to bed with when I get home, the following morning, once J. is off to school, will be spent sleeping. I can give in gracefully and sleep comfortably in my bed, or I can argue and sleep in my recliner with my glasses still on, my book on my chest, and my tea, half drunk, on the end table beside me.

So it was today as well, but offsetting that frustration are a couple of things. One is that I still managed to get out and find a small student desk suitable for puttting my sewing machine up on, so I can set it up in the attic any time I like without taking over the dining room table, or risking ketchup and orange juice stains on my silk or handkerchief linen. And the other is that there is definite, visible progress on the old house. The vast majority of my chosen family showed up last weekend, so that we managed to wash and prime all the walls in the house, and paint most of them. This weekend, it was just me. Our son was getting increasingly stressed with every weekend of travel, so this one we decided that he would stay home with his dad. I was the logical one to go paint because what remained was the fiddley bits, walls with more small spaces and edges than open expanses amenable to a roller, and I have far more patience and a steadier hand for that sort of thing. The same eye that can cut fabric with 32nd inch accuracy without a pattern can apply paint with a fine brush in the tiny space between the door frame and the cabinet in a bathroom. The entire interior now has a coat of fresh paint, and I can see the end of Project Sale Prep in sight.

And I have been the recipient of great kindness from folks I’d never met before and will most likely never see again. I posted our monster desk on Freecycle, stipulating that it would take at least two strong men to move it. So a family came out to look at it, but decided that it was both too big and too utilitarian in appearance. (Ok, let’s be honest here. It’s gunmetal grey steel, 5 feet long, 2 1/2 feet deep and ugly as sin.) But even though they weren’t taking it, they shlepped it down the stairs and out to the curb for me, where it was left with a sign reading “free” taped to it promimently. I’ll have to call a neighbor and see if it’s disappeared yet.

So this hasn’t been a totally lost day, and it was certainly a productive weekend. But I’ll be heartily glad when all the work there is done, we can turn the house over to the care of the realtor, and stay home and unpack and organize here, so that we can quit living in the midst of boxes. Or maybe we’ll just claim a weekend to be vegetables. Right about now, that sounds both tempting and utterly impossible.

Our son came home from school yesterday with a tale that sounds like something out one of the “Little House” books. This is, as previously noted, a very rural school district. It also seems to be a very good one, but that’s another matter. What is relevant to the story is that there is a working farm next door to the school, with a pasture separated from the playground by a single fence. Human young romp on one side of the fence; lambs frolic on the other. So yesterday the second graders went out for recess to find that they had a new playmate, one with four feet, a black face, and a coat that will be sheared in the Spring. Indeed, one of the sheep had broken through the fence and gone exploring into the next fenced area, which was the children’s playground. When he first started telling me about it, I thought there had been a field trip. His teacher and another had been discussing arranging for one around shearing time, so when J. began talking about touching the sheep, I thought perhaps I’d misunderstood the timing of either the trip or the shearing. Then as he went on, I realized what had actually occured.

The farmer was called, and he and the custodian cornered the creature and took it back to its barn, with the due assistance of 40 excited little primates. The teacher, bless her, proceeded to turn it into a lesson in the care of animals and due caution around same. But hard though the adults tried, there was no keeping the children apart from the creature. It was simply too exciting. And I’m betting that by the time the sheep made it back to her barn, she was deeply relieved to be home where it was quiet, no matter how green the grass had looked on the other side of that fence.

I’ve known for years that the huge orange moon of September is called the Harvest Moon. Until now, though, even living in an agricultural state, that moon is the closest I’ve gotten to being aware of the activities of the farmers. Oh, I’d notice in passing that yesterday’s cornfield was today’s drying stubble, but that was about it. This year, for the first time, I am in the middle of a harvest. If I couldn’t tell from looking at the leaves on the soybean plants beginning to yellow and the husks on the field corn drying and pulling away from the ears, I would know it from the traffic.

That’s right. The traffic. In the few weeks I’ve been here, I’ve grown accustomed to seeing perhaps a dozen vehicles a day go by the house. There are enough that it’s not a shock, but not so many that I don’t look up. Now the number has approximately doubled over the last week, with the difference being that what I’m seeing are tractors and other assorted farm machines. I’ve watched them go by, waving and getting waved to by the farmers driving them. The other day I heard a great clatter and crunching of gravel in my driveway. Looking out the kitchen window, I saw a tractor emerging from my own barn. Our landlady’s brother drove it off somewhere, coming back to return it to the barn about four hours later. I daresay I’ll be seeing more of him…and the tractors…over the next month or so.

I must admit it fascinates me. I noticed changes in the sounds around me as the nights began to get cooler, and flights of migratory birds going by overhead, calling as they go. Sunrise is perceptibly later, and sunset earlier. None of those are things I associate with machinery, and yet those passing tractors and combines really do seem to have taken their cue from the same cycle that the birds and insects are following. Perhaps it is that gas-driven and motorized as they are, they are driven by people who are as tied to the seasons as much now as they were when the tool was a plow pulled by a horse…or even earlier, a sharp stick in the hands of a woman with a shawl full of barley.

New Orleans. I’ve been there. A friend of mine was moving there, and wanted someone to drive with him because he’d a tendency to fall asleep at the wheel. He worked for an airline, so he was able to get me a ticket back to where my car was parked in Illinois, but in the meantime I got a week’s vacation in the city. I remember the drive down, noticing the changes in the trees and the land as we went, coming to understand what live oaks and spanish moss were, and why they were part of every description seeking to evoke the character of the city. It was coming up on Halloween, and I ended up costumed by a professor of theatrical costume design as Titania, with my friend dressed as Oberon. We entered a costume competition at a local bar, and I’d never in all my life seen anything like that place. My friend drove me all over the city, not just to the usual tourist sites, but everywhere, and because he was interested in everything under the sun, I got a fascinating running commentary on the history of the city, the role that the water table played in architectural design, the modifications to the usual designs that had to be made in building roads and power plants and everything else, because the city is below sea level. He explained the construction of the levees to me, and the modernizations that have been made while maintaining the character of a city that is far older than the country it enhances.

New Orleans has been there for roughly three centuries, if my memory serves correctly. I was searching both my memory and my personal library (an occupational hazard of being an historian), and I can find nothing in all that time that has managed to so utterly devastate the place. I’m seeing pledges from people in power that it will be rebuilt. But how? Sure, you can put a building up where one stood before, you can even give it the same name, but it’s not the structure that a French planter put up to sell his cotton. It’s not the sea-borne house that hosted the fair flower of southern womanhood by day and smugglers on moon-dark nights. It’s not any of a thousand and one historical places, nor will it be filled with the things that gave it a soul. A reproduction can’t have the soul of the original, and at least right now, it looks to me like that’s what will have to be done. I hope I’m wrong.

If I could, if I were single and without the responsibilities I have, I’d be heading south. If I’m not terribly strong physically, (and I’m not), I’m intelligent and resourceful and very good at solving problems in non-obvious ways. And I listen very well. It seems to me that the displaced survivors will be needing someone to listen as much as to have their physical needs for food and shelter and clothing met. I know there are professionals to provide such services, but it’s overwhelming. I don’t see how there can be enough listeners in the world. It’s incredible, and horrifying, and utterly sickening to contemplate. I grieve for the people who have lost…everything, really. But I grieve as well for the loss of New Orleans itself.