Election day/Election night

We lined up this morning at the Presbyterian church a block down the hill from us. Two divisions vote in the social hall there, and it was reminiscent of the co-op line fifteen minutes before closing on the night before a big holiday. Lots of crowding, but people patient and chatting with neighbors, everyone in it together and anticipating a celebration.

Z. dressed in a blue-striped dress top and (finally, after more shouting than I want to recall), red cords, with my yellow Obama "volunteer" button on her dress. An Obama poll worker gave her another, which I pinned on her coat--parents, you'll understand what a godsend that was while we were still lined up outside in the (somewhat) cold.

The whole wait was maybe 45 minutes. Luck of the draw, A. had Z. when we got to the front, so I went into the booth on my own. Standing inside the privacy of those curtains, I had a hard time pressing the green button to record my vote. For long, long moments, I felt caught in something that I couldn't move out of before I'd let it move through me.

It felt like prayer.

Please, god, please, god. A new world.

Edited at 11:02 pm: NBC just called it. For Z., President Obama will be who she knows, how she grows up.

Fly, my baby girl. Fly.

What the cool kids are wearing

The new, hot shirt in my neighborhood...



...and I got me one. Score. I'm all set to canvass again tomorrow.

(Nicholas, I got you one, too, with slate-blue sleeves. I'll touch base about getting it to you.)

Life and Woods

Back in the middle of December, I took a walk in the woods on a Saturday in the middle of the day, not my usual time and not my usual day. The woods were a very different place from what they usually are for me early on a weekday morning: there was a whole pack of people attached to a five year-old's birthday party, who were searching out snacks and party favors secreted in different corners of the path. There were friends to greet and people I didn't know greeting each other and stopping to talk at length. There was, improbably, a cyclist on a mountain unicycle, who stopped at the end of footbridge as I sat at my place on the bank, and bounced in place three times to hop onto the bridge. There were no birdwatchers and not nearly so many dog walkers, and on the two blocks I walk to and from the woods, there were far more people hurrying to the co-op and milling around the cafe.

One of the people I met that December day, at the beginning of my walk, was the artist who made this installation. She's not someone I know well, but she's a good friend of our neighbors-through-the-wall, and I knew her slightly when I had my first-ever full-time teaching gig, a quarter-long leave replacement I did nine years ago, at the same time I moved to this neighborhood. Neither of us has been at the school for years--it was not a school that was good for the soul--and since I was just a long-term sub with far shorter hair and far less weight on my frame, I'd be surprised if she remembered me from then, but I tend to hang on to details like that.

That day, we stopped and talked for the first time since we were both at that soul-strangling school, me because I hadn't yet said anything to her about the installation even though I had blogged about it, she because, well. She was grieving intensely and freshly, she needed to talk to everyone there was to talk to. She told me her husband had died the very day after the installation went up. He'd had cancer for months, but it was the chemotherapy that killed him, so it was in fact sudden, and the installation took on a meaning she hadn't expected it to have.

After I talked to her I went to those papier mache trees, melting and disintegrating into the loamy earth, and I watched the birthday party making its way through the live, leafless, hibernating trees, and I went home and revised the post I'd written a month earlier, adding a final sentence.


Today, A. and I took Z. to the woods after a naptime that we grownups had used to wear ourselves out with talk. Z. bopped along the path, wearing her Queen Esther crown, making up games, jumping over roots and picking up sticks and futilely commanding us to stop. At the footbridge, Z. ran from one end to the other while I sat and listened to the water in the creek. When A. was too cold to stand around anymore, we ventured down to the creekbed to pluck a dirty plastic bag from the rocks ("We did a mitzvah forw da wateuh!") and made our way home.

On our circuit of the woods, I made a detour to the site of the installation. The papier mache is gone. The ground is exposed, still dark and loamy. Five young oak trees are planted in a circle.

Edited: the artist has a lovely site up about the work, but I don't want to link and show up on such a well-publicized neighborhood site. But if anyone wants to see it, drop me an email, scallen3@aol.com, and I'll send it to you.

The news from your daycare co-op

Z. has been in a pulled-together daycare co-op a few days a week, with kids from another class at her school, just until the semi-permanent interim place opens in the middle of next week. I can walk her to the regular daycare location (currently closed for repairs). It's a drive to the co-op. It takes us just long enough to listen to this song twice, stopping the cd once to discuss the state of the snow on the ground, and taking time out between repeats to discuss Kermit the Frog's musical opinions.

Next week, driving to the semi-permanent place, I think we can probably memorize the song in one trip.

I feel almost like a commuter.

Routine disruptions

Toddlers are people who, despite the chaos they engender around them, love order in their days because they need to predict what's coming and what's expected of them, and they need as much help as they can get. (Don't we all, really?) Z. has been matching colors since she was walking, and the order in which we prepare for school must not vary, and she has other small rituals that get her through her day: leavetakings are especially hard for her, and she has formulas she says (sometimes embellished with a hug or a kiss) to make this transitions manageable. "Dat one is foah somebody else," she says as she replaces an item on a shelf in the store. "We can do dat anuddeuhr day" she says about an activity that won't fit into the schedule. And so, somehow, she handles the things she wants but are not permitted to her. Not infallibly or without tears or fussing. But she gets through.

Every night, I sing Z. "Goodnight Irene" before she goes to sleep, and I sing her different words to the last verse depending on what's going to happen the next day. If the next day is a school day, I sing about that. If she's going to stay home with us, I alter the words to reflect that, instead. Z. is still shaky on the days of the week and how they arrive in an orderly, predictable pattern, so our song is part of how Z. keeps track of her schedule.

For the past week and a half, I have done a lot of improvising on that verse.

Z.'s daycare is closed for repairs, and the search for an alternate site is ongoing. Meanwhile, the 70 or so children who go to her school are improvising, and in that time Z. has not had one single day that looked like any other day. I have been home with her in the afternoon for naptime, but in the morning we have made different arrangements with swapped playdates or pooled childcare, and one day I simply stayed home all day, alone, with her.

We are suffering, she and I.

Neither of us is getting any exercise. Neither of us is getting any significant space from the other. I am getting almost no time alone, and I am having to cancel or give up various parts of my own weekly routine that help keep me sane. Therapy, for instance. I was at work for about five hours all of last week and less than one hour so far this week. A. leaves the house before Z. and I wake up so I've showered, oh, three times since Z. has been home.

That is the context in which we left town and had a car accident on Saturday.

Tomorrow is the first day since all of this started that we have somewhere for Z. to be all day.

I'm actually looking forward to going to work.

Imagine that.

One will spread our ashes round the yard

Home again, finally.

After too much time spent on living room couches or in the car over the last five days, and after far too little time spent paying attention to my own thoughts, I finally squeezed in a late-afternoon walk over in my little patch of woods.

Since the last time I walked there, before we went up to A.'s parents' house, the trees have gone from mostly covered to mostly bare, and the leaves that were up on the branches have settled down on the ground in an inches-thick carpet of gold, red, orange, green. The little shallow creek at the bottom of the woods is covered over with leaves, too; in places it looks like little more than a wet ribbon in the russet groundcover.

I came to the spot where I usually perch on the creek's bank to let my thoughts wander along while the water flows over its shallow bed. The place where I leave the path for my spot lies between the footbridge and the fencing that keeps the erosion-control project safe from wandering feet and paws. It's a favorite place for dogs to get wet, and suddenly I realized what it was that my eyes had just barely been registering without taking in, as I'd made my way down along the path.

Fine, grey dust lying on top of the leaves. Fine and grey, but not uniform in grade or regular in shape. Fine and grey, across the leaves on the side of the creek. On top of the leaves that carpeted the creek itself. Settled on the bottom of the creekbed. As yet completely undisturbed.

I walked along from rock to rock for a few yards, respectfully, carefully. I found more fine, grey dust on the opposite bank of the creek, another place where pawprints are common.

I stood there on the rocks in the creek for a few long minutes and thought of Smartest Dog, whose ashes I spread in the St. Mary's River years before I moved to my house near the woods. I thought of Diva Dog, whose ashes are buried near the gate to our garden, who loved this spot in the creek. I thought of the Iron and Wine song, "Naked As We Came," that made me cry this morning while we were on our way to a shiva visit.

I thought of how much longer it is, forever, with people than with dogs. Decades and decades longer, god willing.

I thought of how little I know of how you get there. To forever.

Life and Art

This installation went up in the woods last weekend.



These are papier mache tree trunks, and they have been wilting all week.

I generally like the little bits of human-made beauty I find in the woods, but they usually run to sculptures of twigs and branches or rocks, or arrangements of seeds and leaves.



These trees, though. I appreciate the work that went into them. I just think I would have liked them more if I weren't comparing them so starkly to real trees that withstand the weather. I think if I encountered them indoors they would have been more imposing.

Maybe that's the point, though.