seasonal prep

We put up the tree and much of the decor for the season today.

Toots was a good helper, even with her snoggy nose and chesty cough.

Mr. Cynic helped pull stuff from the attic.

He had to put her down to straighten the heavy star on the fake tree. I used to always get a real tree, but with pine allergies in the house, we have used a fake one for a few years.

Once all the ornaments are on, who can tell anyway, right? There’s a real piney wreath on the door and when the morning sun shines on it, the scent fills the house when we open the door. Smells like Christmas without sending certain sinuses in the house into misery.

In other seasonal joy, Mr. Cynic’s high school competitive Jazz Choir and the other musical groups, had their Winter Concert on Thursday night. Here’s a little taste via 1 min cellphone video.

My son is the pipsqueak on the right, wiggling to the beat.

sparkle

The best man is like water. Water is good it benefits all things and does not compete with them. It dwells in lowly places that all disdain. This is why it is so near to Tao. ~Lao Tzu

By the Water

I will always live by water
It is more than a drink
A bath
A pool to swim in

Water sustains me
Reminds me
Its ebb and flow
Cove’s stillness
Ocean storm violence
Have been here much longer than I
Longer than any of us

The amoeba the shark
Even the desert scorpion
Would not be
Without a drop

But that’s too deep
Too unfathomable
Will drive me to distraction

I walk by shorelines
Lake River Bay Sound Ocean
I am alive
I am grateful for the peace
I find in the murmur
By the water

sandy bottom

On Thanksgiving, we had guests and we ate a lot. On Friday, we couldn’t move, and half of those guests returned and we ate some more. On Saturday after two days of sitting around eating and bloating, we said, enough!  Plus it was a gorgeous day and unlikely to be too many more of these for some time.

Sandy Bottom is a nice little nature park tucked into the middle of Hampton, VA’s urban sprawl.  We love to go hike the trails, especially around the lake. Although the sound of traffic is loud enough to drown out conversation on one side of the lake.

Toots had something very important to tell her daddy on the fishing pier.

Someone is about to outgrow someone else. He is carrying his trusty Batman compendium of the old 60s television series.

There is a harmony in autumn, and a lustre in its sky.
~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

Two teens not quite growing like the trees.

My loves. Until moments before this shot, guess who had the bag of drinks  and stuff, camera and curious dog on a leash? Hint: I am not in the picture.

Toots wanted high piggie tails today. They are bouncing.

The rest and view deck on the opposite side of the lake from the fishing pier. There were ducks.

Someone started to get tired. She didn’t nap since Wednesday.

I love this guy. He is always seeking to learn. Just not always at school or while doing homework.

Love this girl. She is tracing her fingers in the sand.

I love this guy, too. He does not love having his picture taken.

Dog greeting committee: Their black one’s name was Lucy, too, just like ours!

A little artsy at the end of the day. I loved the long shadows.

odds and ends

1. Lots of landscaping this weekend and the plants purchased eons ago are now in the ground. Honey levelled and installed a lovely patio area by the front porch.

1.5. Lots of singing this weekend, too. (I thought of this when I was giving the list a once over)

2. Porch is a loose term. We live on a coastal plain, so have a slab foundation. No steps lead up to our door. We have no basement. Our two-car garage is wrongly named. Our cars are parked in the driveway.  The garage is full of what should be in the basement.

3. The boys had their wellness checkups yesterday. We are starting Captain Comic on Omega-3 fish oil and B-complex vitamins to help his anxiety.

4. We’re starting Mr. Cynic on protein shakes. He fell off the growth chart. How does a 16 year old male fall off the growth chart? I swear he’s not anorexic. Not even close.

5. Captain Comic officially out-weighs him.

6. I have writing group today.

7. Toots is going to shuffle from Grandma and the Y to her great-aunt’s house for childcare because Grandma and I had conflicting appointments.

8. Mr. Cynic is home sick from school today. He has a bad cold. He hasn’t missed school in well over a year. This is a marked improvement from his elementary days as Mr. Strep.

9. It’s raining.

10. In the driveway sits a wheel barrow loaded with dirt and a flat tire. Now it will be loaded with dirt and rain water.

11. We are hosting Thanksgiving for the in-laws.

12. Honey and I stayed up way too late last night for no discernibly good reason.

13. More coffee, please. I have writing group, and a house to clean. And a sweet potato souffle to cook.

14. And Mr. Cynic has snickerdoodles to cook for a class ‘spontaneous gathering of cultures’ – they can’t have parties at school these days.

15. My bed is calling.

16. So is my shower.

17. Have a great Thanksgiving if I don’t make it back here. I hope you spend it with people you love. If not, love the ones you’re with – CSNY was onto something. Or work a soup kitchen.

 

 

 

 

hoary frost

Hoar-Frost

In the cloud gray mornings 
I heard the herons Flying 
And when I came into my garden, 
My silken outer-garment 
Trailed over withered leaves. 
A dried leaf crumbles at a touch, 
But I have seen many Autumns 
With herons blowing like smoke 
Across the sky. 

Amy Lowell 

 

For those of you who know me, even a bit, you know my prior couple of days contained more mayhem than usual. More is to come. Changes on the horizon.

Hoary Frost

For now it is morning.
The frost sugars the grass and leaves.
Winter birds call to each other
and my little girl sings,
entertains herself with nonsense
that makes perfect sense to her.
Videogames punch and groan in the next room,
and a crayon scratches across paper,
across a plastic table’s roughed surface.

It is a November morning
like any November Saturday
that has ever come.
A little late and bright,
but early stillness reigns.
My warm coffee to my mouth,
traffic rolling by the big road
beyond the barer trees,
and my house reluctant
to remove the covers of sleep.

november rain

This is not a Guns & Roses song.

After five and a half years in southeastern Virginia, I have an enduring habit of comparing the seasonal weather changes to my lifetime of living and studying New England’s degrees of daily weather changes.

Some are monumental, a sudden ice storm overnight after a day when it was in the sixties. Some are so minute, it is the scent of an electro-magnetic charge in the atmosphere.

Yesterday, here in Virginia, a humid temperature hovered at eighty degrees. The leaves were more on the ground than trees from the prior days’ breezes.

This morning there is wet iron in the air. It finally feels like November to this old New Englander at heart.

Even the wisteria on the swing set is in mourning for the sun.

small pleasures

Every preschool morning (three days a week), Toots and I drive by the horses, her big brothers’ schools, the road to where she will go to kindergarten and our favorite trees. She names the schools in order and who goes or will go to each. She looks for our favorite trees and if the horses are wearing their waincoats. She loves when the horses wear their raincoats, I love the morning light through the trees on the horses and hay while they have breakfast.

We take the smaller windy road rather than the bigger one that will get us there faster, but doesn’t have the same views, though they basically run right alongside each other.

There is a turn onto a side street instead of ramping back onto the main road sooner, and we take that, too. That is where our favorite trees are. Hers is at the beginning. It’s a really big tree over an old square farmhouse whose wraparound porch is covered in old toys I’ve never seen kids playing with outside. This big old rambling, paint crumbling house is incongruously set amongst 50s-60s style one floor brick ranches. It’s like a stalwart old aunt who refuses to pass on. A Mrs. Haversham house. I love the house. I fantasize about buying it someday, though it is a major fixer upper wedged into a pretty crazy 5way intersection.

But the big old tree over it is glorious, and that is Toots’s tree. This morning she remarked excitedly about how it has every color in it wight now. She is having a 3 year old’s love affair with that tree, no question. I think it is a big beech tree, like the yellow one at the corner of our back yard in the header above.

My favorite tree is a little farther along the windy little road. It sits at the edge of the road in front of a white clapboard Korean Baptist Church. It is an odd placement for an odd little church. I kind of want to check it out sometime, listen to the attempt at saving of my soul in Korean.

My tree is a sugar maple. Last year at this time, it was a radiant halo of yellow all around with a slight coppery burnish at the outermost leaves. This year, I seriously considered taking photos of it daily to post here, then decided I would just enjoy and appreciate its daily changes with Toots. This year, its coloration has been moving from a very Irish green to a deep orange around two thirds of it, but when I approach it from the opposite side after dropping her off at preschool, hints of that amazing glowing yellow of last year are emerging, turning that midtone green into a springy light-infused greenish yellow. The deep orange is its main color, though.  And that orange has its own kind of radiance in the morning sun.

Toots and I are fascinated by these trees. Between hers and mine,  as the road winds a smidge from one direction to the other around bends revealing reds and oranges and yellows and deep purples, she asks in sweet anticipation if we are going to see my favorite tree next.  And in between, during the asking and not yets, we oo and ah over the variances of all trees as they merge into view.

We are amazed every day by the same old route to preschool, and everything we encounter along the way, comfortingly familiar, yet constantly changing.

 

 

spooks

This jack o’ lantern  started as this design by Captain Comic.  I love that he drew it in three quarter profile.

 

This fairy was very excited to go trick or treating. This scarer terrified one of his friends who ran screaming away as he removed the mask and called after her, “Don’t worry! It’s only me!”

Toots was Miss Independent on the trick or treat rounds, “Ok, yet’s go to anuver peepo’s house!”

“I can walk in the da stweet aw by mysef. You don’ need to hode my hand.”

One man opened the door before she could ring the doorbell. She made him go back in because she had to ring the doorbell. He complied, slightly frightened.

Another man declared, “Oh my god, she’s so beautiful! Here, you can take anything you want!” He proceeded to give her handful after handful of candy. I feel bad for any kids  that came after us. The neighborhood grandmas cooed over her, too.

The littlest fairy was very brave at the spookier gimmicky houses. We have some neighbors who really know how to do Halloween right.

Saturday night, I had some fun as a Mexican Day of the Dead sugar skull. A handful of us moms of asperger’s syndrome kids (and other special needs) had some good laughs.

I hope your Halloween was as fun as ours.

 I’d like to wish my little rescued dog Lucy a happy 6th birthday today! And happy November to you.

Time for me to get back in the editor’s chair and open my manuscript!

pumpkins everywhere

Corn maze looked a little more like a construction zone maze.

Best friends picking their pumpkins, the one in the foreground will be our jack ‘o lantern.

 

We’re holdin’ hands!

Two giggling running girls

Spooky, especially in the breeze

We’re going’ on a hay wide! Woohooo!

I have a thing about old tractors. I really do.

Dis hay wide is so much fun!

Toots knows how to do a hay ride right.

poem

October

I am up before dawn to send one

son off to middle school.

The first crept out the door

to high school in the dark.

This one talks too much,

too much enthusiasm before

I have poured my coffee.

With a reminder, he stops, briefly,

Oh, right.

He complies with order to brush his teeth.

Then he slams the front door,

no goodbye.

I pull back the curtains

to pink golden light

yawning the dawn

upon burnished beech leaves.

The tree glows brighter, more golden.

My honey creaks down the stairs

slowly, a two hundred pound cat

reluctantly stalks the day.

He rumbles,

She doesn’t want me to wake her,

she only wants mommy today.

She is usually daddy’s girl.

When he is home from work,

he is her heart.

But for the past day,

she has been stuck to me:

a monkey baby, koala,

a litter of opossum grown too big

for marsupial carry.

She clings, she cuddles, she coos

I yuv you, mommy.

I ascend, I go in.

She smiles sleepily,

a smile that says, I won.

And with barely a glance,

she rises, scoots right by me.

I open her curtains,

and the beech tree glows deeper.

The dawn is almost complete.       .

Look, isn’t the yellow tree beautiful

in the sunrise?

Her tip-tip sleepy steps change

direction on the carpet.

She slips in front of me and presses

her forehead to the window.

She sucks her fingers rhythmically.

With a nod against the glass,

she agrees.

This is the moment.

This is how we love.

I hope she remembers.