Posts Tagged With: parenting

hope that perches

Posted on December 14, 2016 by Laura M Gibson

http://www.lauramgibson.com

Just after the election, while I was vacillating on the despair-o-meter between head-in-the-sand and rage, Riley came home from school with a list of actions for the future. That’s what she called them – “actions,” uttered with the most delicious conviction – and her brainstorm included ways to engage in the community. In class that day, they’d talked about the power of volunteerism (one of the many reasons I love her school) and the possibilities inherent in tapping into the needs of beings outside of oneself as the only way we’re going to move forward together.

On Riley’s list were actions that indicated what she loves best and not what she thought sounded good to someone else (from the beginning, it’s been clear I’ve had very little to do with her rock-solid self-awareness, which is strange terrain for a parent). Volunteering at the World Center Birds of Prey, at the zoo, and The Humane society. She threw down her backpack and got online to find out how an almost thirteen-year-old can work for her chosen causes. In her notebook, she made another list of phone numbers to call, dates she’d be able to participate, and paperwork required to make it all happen.

I hovered on the edge of her intent, preparing dinner, and marveled at this girl of mine.

After months of conversation and reading and listening to pundits, after months of classroom activities and learning about the democratic process, after going with me to the polls to vote and then staying up late to witness what felt like the world burning down, Riley had had enough of the adult version of solving problems. And who can blame her?

Admittedly, I haven’t been a very good role model in the days since. Each new cabinet appointment – which I take as a personal affront and further evidence every safeguard I value and respect is being dismantled and sold for parts – calls up fresh desolation and confusion. Fresh dystopian metaphors. As if the White House is a frat house, and Voldemort’s doling out bids to Death Eaters after rush. As if the Hunger Games contestants are all environmentalists, artists, scientists, educators, thinkers, philanthropists. The last one standing in the arena will be a reminder not to live against fascism. As if our new Big Brother positioned himself for office for no other narcissistic pleasure than because he cannot get enough of watching himself on T.V. Orwell and Huxley and Bradbury are turning over in their graves. I feel confident my future may involve standing in front of a bulldozer, literal or metaphoric.

What seems clear, especially to Riley, is that I’m no peach to be around. Also, I’ve forgotten my job, which, in addition to teaching her to speak up and question everything, is to model and encourage critical thinking, making connections with people we might not understand, working hard for the common good.

My resolution as we leave this odd year behind and face the new one is to take a page out of Riley’s notebook. To focus on chasing down what I love best with more joyful purpose. The byproduct, I’m hoping (I’ll work on my optimism here), will be to heal some of what feels so broken.

Onward then.

To gardening that nourishes the soul and belly, that becomes a reason to share.

To working with students to uncover what sings best for them, that seeds a new generation of mindful citizens, that becomes a reason to listen across generations.

To being outdoors and finding dark nights, that become a reason to preserve and to acknowledge how ecosystems are tethered, reliant upon one another.

To reading and writing stories that ask us to question what it means to be human, that becomes a reason to wonder, to seek bridges.

And to rediscovering music, which for some reason that escapes me we’d taken a hiatus from in favor of radio and T.V. covering the election. A friend once told me she likes coming over because there is always music at our house. Looking back, I can’t remember at what point we turned this part of ourselves off.

This week Riley and I went to hear the O’Conner Band (with Mark O’Connor, known well in both bluegrass and classical circles) perform An Appalachian Christmas. We’re pretty enthusiastic bluegrass fans, and this seemed like just the right kind of medicine for a pre-holiday evening. You know you’re in the presence of something inspired when strings and voices give you chills, when they sound better live than recorded.

A few minutes into the fifth or sixth song, Riley leaned over and pointed toward Mark’s son Forrest, the mandolin player. “Listen to that mandolin,” she said. “Boy, can that guy play.”

We tapped our feet and sang along to a few Christmas tunes, and then the band played a new duet, the mandolin welling up in the space between voices. Riley leaned over again.

“That mandolin,” she whispered, grabbed my arm. “Mom. I think that’s my spirit instrument.”

All the way home we talked about the mandolin, where to rent it, if she’ll ever be able to make her spirit instrument sound like that. I’m tickled, of course. Our new season of action, it would seem, will involve more music. And even better, music from my capable daughter’s generous, curious hands.

We’ll see what happens; the journey is the thing. But I can’t think of a better sidekick for greeting the actions of the future than a girl who believes in possibility so fiercely, it’s emanating like light from within her. .

Riley at the Taj Mahal (www.lauramgibson.com)

Categories: community, music, parenting, writing | Tags: community, music, parenting, writing | 8 Comments

tiny farm notebook

Posted on November 24, 2015 by Laura M Gibson

Snow’s on its way. I’ve closed up the garden and turned my attention to indoor pursuits. It feels good.

In the last two seasons I’ve learned a few things about tending a tiny farm. It’s a ton of work, for starters, which I knew. But also didn’t. Just as I knew, but also didn’t, how raising a high school senior and keeping a garden bigger than the house would invade writing time.

Still, I’ve managed to harvest some bits of wisdom along the way:

Two roosters fight. Constantly. If you try and give one of your men to a gal pal with more land and a bigger flock, she will lecture you about why you should be made of tougher stuff. Real farmers suck it up. They do what’s necessary.

So, you research what to do.

No one else you know wants, or is allowed to raise, a rooster. If you list your FREE rooster on craigslist, he will be used as cockfighting bait for champion roosters to practice on.

You let your two fellas range in the pasture, hoping nature will decide. The red-tailed hawk that hunts on your land looks hungry for fresh chicken, but the boys are better than you thought at avoiding danger. This is the only activity during which they create an alliance in order to survive.

Weeks pass. Every time you feed the birds, you get assaulted by the big rooster Carson (formerly named Custer), who shows his irritation that you’re near his harem by flying at you sideways with his spurs out.

In the interest of taking care of your own business and being merciful, you have to kill him. Then you explain to your kids how not all living things on our farm are pets.

Even though this is a lie.

Bees sometimes swarm. When your bees flee, it doesn’t mean you’re a bad parent. It’s not like 20,000 kids ran away because you neglected them. This just happens, according to experts who know. If your bees only get as far as the plum tree twenty feet from the hive, and you catch them after watching seven videos on YouTube about how to do it, count that as success! The dog, who tries to “help” and gets stung twenty-seven times, will be okay once the swelling goes down.

Try not to congratulate yourself too much. The next day, your bees will get attacked and killed by someone else’s robbing swarm, and that will be the end of that. Utter colony collapse.

There’s always next year. You have all the equipment now.

Gardens get big. When, in your spring zeal to GROW a GARDEN, you plant three times more tomato, pepper, zucchini, and bean plants than your family can possibly handle, remember to preserve, can, freeze, salsa, red sauce, bruschetta, and chili your way through harvest. Once the shelves and freezer are full, you can SHARE the wealth. It’s important to hear poorly at this time. For example, when friends in August try to tell you they’ve got all the zucchini they can handle, it really IS okay to insist they take more. It’s their civic duty.

Also, you can leave presents on the porch when they’re not home which, let’s face it, is better than a visit from Santa.

Labradors like birds. If a friend’s dog attacks your remaining rooster Willy (formerly named Napoleon), think carefully before you use your home as the infirmary. Chickens really do prefer to be outside. Once the injured fella is inside the house, there’s no helping the way the whole of your living space will smell like a barnyard. Several websites will suggest giving injured chickens Epsom salt baths and syringe-feeding them electrolytes, and you can employ these methods if you want.

However, it will likely make tending Willy’s psychic and physical well-being very heartbreaking. Your friend’s dog gave him a sound thrashing, and his legs are clearly broken.

Try not to be relieved when he dies on his own. You won’t have to subject your children to another round of murder, which, as they keep reminding you, will be the reason they’re in therapy later.

Woodstoves are a hassle. If you have a tantrum about the inefficient woodstove in the living room that leaks and covers the furniture with ash and takes up too much space and MUST COME OUT, and if, then, you watch more YouTube videos about extracting the beast from your world, be careful. These videos are not nearly as entertaining as the ones you watched about bees. You might discover that woodstoves are quite heavy, and awkward to move, and you can’t do it alone. So you enlist your spouse, the foul-mouthed pirate, who helps you while he cusses the thing out the door. When it’s over, he’ll tell you that this activity does NOT qualify as an emergency, and that it would be nice if you could learn the difference between what is acute and what can wait for someone who knows what the hell they’re doing to help you out.

Also, when you remove something attached to the house, you will be left with HOLES in the wall and in the roof. Because you were a Girl Scout, you’ll be able to insulate the holes, and also fashion a piece of tarp to prevent any water from coming in through the roof.

But it will be a sad little Band-Aid of a solution.

Remind yourself not to let too much time pass before you arrange a drywaller and roofer to clean up your mess.

Because critters WILL find this space. Word spreads fast about the easy access your tantrum has created. You’ll likely hear them in the night, scratching and squirreling away food for winter and hiding whatever they’ve found inside the walls.

Fall is windy. You might hear the chimney cap you jammed back into the hole in the roof fly away one night in the wind and land somewhere in the yard. The next day, you’ll climb up there and put it back in place and wonder how a person who’s smart in so many ways could have decided to proceed with home “improvement” in this way.

You will have to get the roof patched. You will.

Kids leave home. If you’ve raised them right. Because hasn’t this been the point all along? To plant the seeds, to build the tools, to foster independence? He’s ready. He’s got the skills to drive his own life, mostly. He’s already making plans, one eye on the door to the what next, and he’s itching to walk through it.

But he’s wistful and tender, too, about his “youth,” as he calls it, which is almost as funny as when he calls himself “a grown man.” Because neither is true today, and both squeeze your heart. The little melon-headed boy who had two speeds: awake and busy with endless questions, or asleep and sweating, breathing too loudly. The young man: articulate, curious, driven.

You hadn’t reckoned on this. The way your boy is a man and still such a child.

Maybe you’re the one who’s not ready.

You’ve got seven months left, and you’ve been telling yourself for a couple of years that you’ll have a party when that boy leaves the house and takes his stubborn opinions, loud music, cloying cologne, disgusting bathroom habits, and bottomless hunger with him.

And you will.

But now, you’re thinking about how quiet it will be without the hum of him, and how much bigger your tiny house will be without the size 11 shoes he dismounts from and leaves in front of the door and the bags of swim gear and books you trip over. You’re thinking about how the leaving, for both of you, is the beginning of the rest of his life disconnected from you but tethered to everything that’s come before.

It’s a lot to process. This joyful sadness.

Categories: chickens, community, family, fiction, gardening, parenting | Tags: chickens, family, gardening, parenting, urban farming | 10 Comments

mice & men

Posted on December 4, 2014 by Laura M Gibson

As family gatherings often are, ours is total chaos. I’m from a family of seven—more now including spouses and kids—and this Thanksgiving fifteen of us gathered to celebrate. As always, there was too much food and noise, packs of dogs running out into the rain and bringing their joyful muddy selves back inside, a burn barrel night where we torched old bills and scraps – articles my parents save for the occasion, the murder mystery party we’ve adopted as one of our rituals.

It’s fun and exhausting, perhaps more so because we all come so far to be together. It’s hard not to binge out on catching up amid the fray.

This year marks the last Thanksgiving we’ll have at my parents’ house. With five wooded acres, fifteen miles from the nearest town, a couple of knee replacements and other surgeries, my parents are finding it hard to take care of the place. Anyway, we seem to be a moving kind of people. I think for my parents this will mark the seventh time they’ve moved together, and we hope next summer will be the last.

Moving will be no small task. Like so many in their generation, my parents have a lot of stuff.

They’re not hoarders, exactly, but they do love a bargain, and they don’t love getting rid of things. “I might need that,” Mom says, and Dad, “I’m going to fix that.” The result of this philosophy is rooms gorged with belongings, a three car garage they usually don’t park a car in, and difficulty with the decision-making required to downsize their possessions to fit into a smaller next-time house.

There’s a lot of work to do, and since my brother and I are the siblings who don’t sit down very well, we take on a project each time we visit. It’s usually something my parents can’t do themselves, like chopping wood, cleaning the roof and gutters, clearing brush by the creek. But now, helping them come to terms with their possessions, namely which ones need to go to the dump or the giveaway bin, is our primary occupation.

Every time I shuffle through my parents’ things, I’m mindful of what I’d feel like if it was me at the spear end of this game. It’d be pretty shabby, conflicting, confusing. Which, I think, is exactly how my parents feel, though they’re open to the help from their kids. They’re overwhelmed and know they can’t do this next move on their own.

Still, it’s a funny thing to do the job right in front of them. Understandably nervous, they take turns evaluating what we’re getting rid of. They might need it. They’re going to fix it, they say.

Dad picks through the piles when he thinks we’re not looking and takes things back. He hides them inside the house until we leave. Mom wanders around talking about projects she aims to get done.

This visit my brother and I tackled a part of the garage, which is to say we went through boxes full of things that haven’t been opened in five moves. Shoes that haven’t been worn in so long their soles are disintegrated. Collections of broken toasters, lamps, rotary telephones. A box of Top Ramen from 1987. According to my brother, they don’t even make that flavor anymore. Vases, baby clothes, tools, dried flowers.

Near the end of the day, we’d dug down to a layer of boxes underneath a shelf. I reached in, pulled one toward me and opened it. Decanters, it read in Sharpie on the side. A desiccated mouse who’d almost made it inside the ripped tape rested on the top. My brother and I had already found eleven or so mice in our garage travels – it’s one of the perks of country living, the mice, and made worse because my parents’ cat Sam died last year.

I opened the box to find six decanters wrapped in paper, a pretty tidy packing job, my Mom’s work. When we were kids, my sisters and I called them genie bottles. My favorite was an iridescent gold one with indented circles.

The decanters were in there alright, along with my favorite. A closer look revealed a whole lot more than glass bottles, though. Cloth, hair, shavings, and shiny bits of things I couldn’t identify had been smuggled in and laid among the papers. Three dead and shriveled carcasses greeted me on the top of one decanter. I took the box out by the burn barrel and unloaded it. We agreed to get rid of the decanters.

In one corner of the bottom I found a mound of poison pellets, around which eight more mice were arrested in various poses of distress, their little front paws raised up in surprise near their mouths.

By then my sisters had wandered out to see what was going on. We stood looking at the box on the ground.

“It’s like Mauschwitz,” one sister said, and another elbowed her.

“Its’ the country,” Dad said, then shrugged. “See? We need another cat.”

“That’s probably enough for today,” my brother said.

“Twenty-three mice,” I said. “I think that’s a record.” The last visit I’d found fourteen.

We unwound the decanters and set those into the giveaway bin, and threw the box into the burn barrel. I stood a minute and watched the flames consume it, wondering how long those rodents had been in that box. There were many other such boxes in the garage, and eventually, someone would have to deal with those, too.

I understood, suddenly, a little bit about my parents’ inertia in getting ready to go. We were very far away from getting a whole lifetime full of possessions to a new place. It WAS overwhelming. The stuff, the change, the uncertainty, the saying goodbye and starting over and the sheer work involved with all of it. Not to mention the mice.

The next day, as I was packing to leave, I went back inside the house to make sure we hadn’t left anything. And then I found it.

The faux leather-sided decanter with a replica of a Rembrandt on the side. Dad had trash-picked it from the giveaway bin. He’d washed it and put it in the dish drainer after I went to bed.

Mom was in the kitchen making coffee and nodded her head at it. “He always liked that one,” she said.

I decided he could have his secret. After all, I’d done the same and kept my favorite. I might need it.

genie bottle

Categories: family, parenting, writing | Tags: family, parenting, writing | 4 Comments

billy and the band

Posted on August 25, 2014 by Laura M Gibson

This summer John and I gave in to the siren call of buying a log built home on an acre. A project house, a blank slate of a place, it’s too small, has poorly insulated doors and windows, and lacks reasonable cooling (which is to say, it has none) and heating (which is to say, it has a tiny woodstove and electric baseboard heaters we’re not sure work). We nonetheless fell in love with its possibility.

For Riley, the cabin fulfills a few wishes. She’ll get to raise animals, have her pick of climbing trees, eat fruit she picks herself, go wading in the small irrigation stream in the back.

The first time we showed the place to Owen, he stood next to the car shaking his head. “I mean, all that looking around and this is what you chose? I’m confused.” Our choice was further evidence that his parents are nutjobs, that he was switched somehow at birth and got taken home with what he calls “hygienic hippies” instead. Owen wanted a pool, a media room, a hot tub, a house that said “Wow” from the street.

Early summer was long and lovely and mild, the perfect conditions in which to move ourselves just the few miles with hundred of trips in our pickup truck and some help from a band of teenage boys. Owen’s friends are much more willing helpers than he is, for which we’re grateful. In addition to a growing curiosity about his real birth parents, Owen is newly in love, and therefore anything we ask him to do is half completed in a hot rush, one eye on the clock, while he counts the minutes and seconds until he can be reunited with his gal pal. When they cannot be together, there is furious love-struck texting, and also more than a little staring off into the middle distance, deep in thought. He wants to be fully independent and stay out at night as late as he likes. He wants to bring five friends home for dinner with five minute’s notice. He wants to go camping with a pack of boys and girls and no chaperones, burn huge bonfires in the desert, wear a LOT of cologne.

This territory is new for all of us and seemed to come all at once. He can hardly have a conversation, changes clothes three times a day, and takes a lot of showers. We like his gal pal quite a bit; she’s genuine, helpful, a good friend to him. John and I do remember how all-consuming teen desires of any kind are, which helps us dread the brain-damaged condition we’re all going to have to suffer through for the next few years. We remember enough to be a anxious about Owen’s choices in his Technicolor love haze.

“Give me a break,” Owen tells us when we talk about not getting carried away in love. “You’re in love too, you know. With LAND.” As if it’s a bad thing.

Many days, the new house is too small for Owen and me, so I spend a lot of time outside on the LAND, which I do, I must confess, love.

Anyway, by day three in the cabin I realized the back pasture’s thigh-high grass needed attention. On Craigslist I found a goat wrangling schoolteacher with a hobby farm a few towns over, so I called him and asked him to bring me some professional eaters, which he did. The next day our new Nubian friends pulled up to the house in the bed a tiny pick-up truck . A mother goat and twin kids, a boy and a girl about four months old. They’d been on the freeway and caused quite a ruckus among drivers, but when they arrived the goats eyed us from the back of the truck, chewing rhythmically on some hay, and didn’t seem too worse for the wear.

The wrangler stepped out of the cab. He wore workout clothes, a pair of Nikes, a baseball cap. I’d expected him to show up wearing, um, goat wrangling clothes, and then realized I had no idea what that attire would be.

“That’s Cooper, the mom,” the wrangler said, “and Coeur d’Alene, the girl; and Preston, the boy. We name all our goats after places.”

Riley and I sat on the tailgate. The goats nuzzled our hands from the truck’s bed and leaned their foreheads into our chests.

“I just banded Preston,” the wrangler said, “so he might not feel too well for a few days.” He took some leashes from his cab and reached to clip one to each goat’s dog collar.

I had no idea what he was talking about. “You did what?”

“See that rubber band back there?” I maneuvered to look at Preston’s backside and spied a green rubber band wrapped around the top of his testicles. “It takes the Billy out of his Billy, if you know what I mean. Last thing you want is a Billy around. Doesn’t really hurt, just tingles a little. Should dry up and fall off in a few days.”

Though I had just met the wrangler, I said something about how great it would be if it was that easy to take the Billy out of some human males, remembering John’s post-Billy-surgery-drama-queenness. The frozen bags of corn and peas. I thought of Owen’s burgeoning Billy, and also wondered how anyone could possibly know that for a goat, having a rubber band cutting off the blood to its Billy did nothing more than tingle.

We stood quietly a moment. “Wait,” I said. “Which thing falls off? The Billy or the rubber band?”

“You’ll see,” he said. “You can call me if there’s a problem.”

We put the three goats on leashes and took them into the pasture and let them go.

Preston licked at his backside and then laid down by the gate while Cooper and Cordy wandered off.

We watched them browsing in their new salad bar, and by the time the wrangler was ready to leave, Riley and I were decidedly smitten.

It’s been two months, long enough for us to train the goats to come when we call. They follow us around in the pasture, nudging our hands for kitchen scraps, putting their front feet onto our chests to make sure we’re not concealing anything. When it’s hot, they lie together under a big spruce at the corner of the property, just opposite the fence from our neighbor’s chickens, who lean against the fence from their own side, close enough to touch their goat pals. They’re fast friends, which has given life to a habit of breaking property lines to be together. Once, my neighbor found the goats inside his chicken run, where they ate all the chicken feed and then laid down with the chickens. A few days later, the hens were in our back pasture, trailing the goats and chortling to one another in chicken speak about what good fun a day visiting friends was. They put themselves to bed later in the evening.

We’ve spent a lot of time shoring up fencing, hoping each time we’ve succeeded in preventing their next houdinied adventure.

All summer we waited for Preston to lose whatever it was he was going to lose in only a few days. We called the wrangler once to ask why it was taking so long and got another cryptic answer: “Sometimes it does,” he said. In the background I could hear a chicken laying an egg, a lawnmower, some kids yelling. Riley and I decided to resist asking Uncle Google what to do, and instead, we just waited.

Preston, his Billy perpetually shriveling but not falling off, spent the summer trying to work out what it all meant. At dusk, he’d run up to his mother and nurse furiously for a minute, then canter spastically toward his sister Cordy and mount her until Cooper bleated at him to stop, at which point he’d run in zig-zags, until they were all sprinting back and forth along the fence line, tossing their ears.

Summer’s pretty much over as far as the kids are concerned. Owen’s still with his gal pal. Though John and I are bold in our conversations about how it’s possible to be in love and also make smart choices, we’re terrified of Owen’s Billy being in the driver’s seat of decision making.

Last week Owen and I were in the way back diverting water into the pasture. He’s been much more willing to help than I imagined, and I’m tickled. The goats were with us, using one of the fence posts to stretch up into the leafy branches of a locust and eat. Their appetite is like nothing I’ve seen; it beats even a band of teenaged boys after swim practice. Owen and I stood in the knee-high stream in our rubber boots, watching the water find its way through the grass in the pasture.

“Isn’t water games so much better than a media room?” I asked.

He shook his head, smiled, offered a clutch of mint to Preston, who nibbled on it, jerking his head to keep it away from Cordy.

I leaned down to check out the status of Preston’s rubber band, finding nothing at all. All of it had fallen off, both the Billy and the band. I patted his head and asked him if he felt better, if he’d even noticed that he was newly unencumbered.

“Poor guy,” Owen said. He stepped out of the water, and Preston sniffed his pockets and put his front legs up on Owen’s chest. “Wasn’t really a fair fight, was it, Bud?”

I opened my mouth to seize the opportunity to have another TALK about inhabiting the world of love while also making good choices. But my boy was in galoshes, mucking around with me in the pursuit to divert water, and he was pretty good humored about it, for once. And already, I was seriously at risk of being the dog whistle he couldn’t hear, so I let it lie.

Owen patted his pocket for the appendage of his phone, then looked toward the house. “So. We’re done here?” he asked. “I’m going to do that thing in a while?”

“Sure. Thanks for the help.”

I bit my tongue against all the cautionary words to live by, the pearls of wisdom gleaned from my own near-misses and hard lessons, the ever-present feed of news informing new pitfalls for youth. He wouldn’t have heard me anyway. Already gone, Owen walked back to the house, sloshing through the water-soaked pasture, his head bent into texting while the goats trotted along behind him.

Categories: family, goats, kids, nature, parenting, Uncategorized | Tags: family, goats, outdoors, parenting, urban farming | 4 Comments

screech

Posted on May 15, 2014 by Laura M Gibson

For the last few months, I’ve been watching a pair of small owls hunting at dusk in the neighborhood.

While they’ve spent the bulk of their early evening hunts flying into and out of the horse chestnut tree across the street, the pair seems especially to hanker for mice in the backyard next door. That house is empty, the yard a brown tangle of beds gone fallow and some iron monkey bar-looking structures. From the back deck, while I’ve watched the owls’ tandem swoops in the gloaming, I’ve come to know their calls to each other. The lilting tremolo, the barking chuck, the soft hoots.

Early last week I was in the backyard watering when I heard a low, bouncing whinny. It was mid-day. I looked up into the maple and spied a grayish mass on one branch, roughly the size of a housecat, and thought maybe Arturo, bigger than ever, had reasserted himself as the squirrel yard boss. But it was no rodent squatting on the branch of the maple. It was three screech owlets who sat huddled together, their feathers still a tufted, downy gray. They sat blinking sleepily, leaning against one another while I had a proper look at them and while their parents stood guard not too far away, chirping at them, no doubt, not to engage with the human.

image: jessica burtnick – http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/fpPhoto.html?photo=117816421

Over the course of last week the babies filled out. Their feathered ear tufts darkened a little and their yellow eyes remained open much of the day. I stood below their roost and made conversation while they stared unblinking, occasionally responding by swaying and bobble-heading, trying to get a bead on what sort of threat I was.

In the scheme of their life span, the owlets are pre-pubescent. After they hatch, they learn everything they need to know in five weeks. This week they are awake much of the day, begging to get off their branch and go do something even though the sun is high. The adults admonish, hush them by cleaning their feathers, let them shuffle to another branch, maybe chirp at the squirrels who roughhouse nearby. Sometimes the owlets split up and sit alone. From where I stand on the ground, I can’t tell the adults from their young now. They blink down at me, unfazed. They’ve got my number.

Aware that I’m at risk of sentimental anthropomorphizing, I know their presence in town is just nature adapting. Still, I feel lucky they’ve chosen our tree in which to spend their days, and even luckier that I can witness them leave this perch to go hunting. Well before dusk the owlets register their discontent, flap their wings, peck at each other. In the loud correction of the adults there is exasperation, as if to say, “We are sit-and-wait predators. When you can perfect that, we’ll see about driving.”

A half hour or so after the sun goes down, one of the adults leaves first and flies to the fence and then calls for the owlets to stay behind. There’s a lot of thrashing and tomfoolery in the branches. The babies fight, fidget, bark out into the night for the adults. They want to fly, and they can – they navigate within the branches of the big maple just fine. But it’s not yet time for them to hunt solo.

Their impatience is raucous.

At our own house we are teaching Owen, 15, how to drive. Being a passenger with him is alternately terrifying and rewarding. He insists that he’s an excellent driver already, that we’ve got nothing to worry about, but he has trouble with road awareness. He hugs the white line and argues that he IS in the middle of the lane when I suggest that’s the best place for success. I’m white noise, a goathead pricker in his sock, a dog whistle he cannot hear. He’s impatient to take the reigns of his life, raucous and flapping like those owlets, who, each night, get less and less obedient about following directions.

Last night, a full moon, the owlets flitted out of the tree as soon as their parents left and took their squabbling to the roof of our house, to the top of the neighbor’s van. I could hear one of the adults talking to them a few yards over. After short consultation, the babies decided they had better get home. Breakfast was on the way.

The moon rose higher, illuminating the show in the backyard. Three mice in an hour, a good haul. Food in the belly quieted the owlets in the maple. The adults flew off into the night. I’m not sure how much longer they’ll be in our yard.

Soon, the babies will be off in the world, hunting in the backyards of other streets, finding mates of their own, and these will be monogamous and long-term relationships. Owen, too. I try to remind myself that he IS doing it right. He’ll learn best by trying, by possibly failing, by sometimes succeeding. His flight is about to be out of his parents’ hands.

I wonder if the owl adults have an impending sense that their work of the season will soon be over. If, after dawn, when they’ve been up all night hunting, they wonder whether their efforts will build self-sustaining offspring who are smart enough to avoid death by hawks, by cars, by razed habitats. If they fret that their teachings, even now, are falling away and growing smaller in the rearview mirror.

image: http://thebirdsandthebeads-sue.blogspot.com/p/yard-birds.html

Categories: family, nature, outdoors, parenting, Uncategorized | Tags: family, nature, outdoors, parenting | 2 Comments

how can i keep from singing?

Posted on February 11, 2014 by Laura M Gibson

More like an older sister than an aunt, Susie taught me to swim. I was nine the summer she came to visit, and though I splashed around easily enough in the shallow end, nothing I did resembled a stroke. Over the course of a week, Susie worked with me at our little community pool, teaching me to do the freestyle and be brave in water. On day four I made the discovery that submerging my head wouldn’t mean sudden death. After that I was golden.

Since that summer I’ve been a swimmer. Not a competitive one, but a dabbler in the unstructured water play of paddling across lakes and rivers, jumping off rocks, bodysurfing, rafting.

In addition to last year’s big life changes I’ve probably written about too much here, in the fall I added swimming laps, a new skill that still feels humbling. I was looking for another activity that might deliver the kind of focused non-focus of running, one I’ll be able to do for many years, long after my running knees give out.

That I was very bad at surviving laps in the beginning is an understatement. But it was thrilling to engage in something at which I was terrible. I had to learn to sustain swimming and breathing at the same time without panicking and stopping in the middle of the pool to gasp for air. To put on a swim cap. To wear goggles so they were tight enough to work but not so tight they nearly sucked my eyes out of my sockets. To swim in a straight line and share a lane with another swimmer. To “deal” with the wall every twenty-five yards.

At first, swimming four laps in a row left me completely without breath. For the first month I could only swim ten slow, tortuous laps before peeling off, exhausted, to simmer in the Jacuzzi. In the second month I tasked myself with braving the wall via flip turn, and the day I figured out how to plan for and execute a series of turns I was high on life the rest of the day. The day swimming laps gave me a glimmer of the kind of meditation I feel while trail running was even more affirming.

Given the choice, I’d rather swim in a lake or bay over a pool, but I imagine no matter the space, I’ll be a swimmer as long as I can still walk. I’m grateful about that.

It’s 2014, time to renew my vow to learn something new.

On a whim a few weeks ago, Riley and I tagged along with some friends to their choir practice. Though we met at a church because that’s a space large enough for the group, the choir is secular and intergenerational. I’ve never really sung before, unless I count the shower or those musical performances from grade school. In high school I was both too shy and too busy playing sports to spend any time in the arts and theatre wing, a fact which I regret a now. Despite a year or so of piano in middle school, I can’t read music, and I don’t have a great voice. I’m on friendly terms with the voice I do have. Singing in public terrifies me.

In a packed sanctuary hall the night of our first practice, we met and were wrangled by three local, professional musicians, our leaders, who believe so strongly in the power of the collective voice they’ve volunteered their time in this way. A white-haired woman with a walker sporting orange tennis balls staked out a place at the back of the sanctuary. With our friends, we squeezed four bodies onto two chairs next to her. Kids of all ages wiggled and danced beneath the stage as we sang ten or so tunes, many we knew and some we didn’t. Reading lyrics projected on a huge screen at the back of the stage, we practiced singing in harmony. We sang in round. Folk, pop, blues, tunes from around the world.

I spent much of the evening sweating, working to manage anxiety about whether and how my voice belonged. But there are three hundred of us, and we sound good together. I can see that each week my fears will be allayed by my own efforts and being buoyed by the group. Our sessions together will be about the community building of raising our voices in song, and also about preparing for a culminating performance in the spring.

Pete Seeger had just passed away a few days before our first choir meeting. Even though he’d had a good run, dying quietly at 94, I’d been melancholy about his presence gone from the world. At home I’d been playing over and over Springsteen’s The Seeger Sessions and thinking back to 2002, when John, Owen and I went to the Great Hudson River Revival, an annual folk festival Pete and his wife Toshi began in 1966 to raise awareness about keeping the Hudson River and surrounding wetlands healthy.

That June weekend in New York was a rainy, hot muddy mess of a festival. Food vendors and magicians, hacky-sackers and jugglers, artists and storytellers filled the grounds. The afternoon Pete took the stage toward the end of the weekend, it was still raining steadily. John and I sat in our chairs, a blanket over Owen who slept across our laps, finally worn out, and for an hour we sang along with Pete and other musicians who joined him. Songs we’d known since we could walk and sing. This Land is Your Land. If I Had a Hammer. Turn, Turn, Turn. We Shall Overcome.

Then, I was aware as I scanned the soggy crowd that we were in the presence of a kind of greatness. Everyone sang, most eyes on Pete and his banjo, his enthusiasm and gathering spirit infectious. There was nothing pretentious about him, none of that rock star stuff he might have deserved after decades of fame. As I recall he wore faded jeans, a t-shirt, his signature cap. Through a gap in the trees, the sloop Clearwater sailed by along the Hudson, loaded with passengers availing themselves of learning how to save the river. I’m so grateful now we made that trip.

Owen navigating the rope bridge at the Clearwater Festival.

At choir practice, toward the end of the night, a photo of Pete filled the screen, and these words -“Participation! It’s what all my work has been about.” Singing next to Riley whose voice is bold and clear and lovely, I was a little sad she’ll never get to sing along with Pete. We stood up and grooved to a song Pete sang with Woody Guthrie, a fun kids’ tune about all working together with a “wiggle and a giggle.” Kids twirled and fell on the ground and helped each other up. This full-bodied interaction with music was exactly what Pete had in mind, for it’s not too far a jump to go from singing together to working together in all ways that matter most.

That night the spirit of Pete was all around us, it seemed, filling up our lungs and hearts. We began “How Can I Keep from Singing?”, a song many seem to take credit for though I think it’s a hymn from the 19^th century. This song always makes me a little weepy, and I was struck that night by the gorgeous impermanence of the music we were making and the universal truth in some of those words. Our individual and collective voices were vanishing into thin air, and yet long after the notes could no longer be heard, the people who’d gathered would remember the singularity of the effort.

I couldn’t really hear my own voice, though I knew it was a piece of the whole. Still a little sweaty, emboldened by my plucky daughter who wasn’t nervous in the slightest, I tried to sing with bravery and intention, thinking of Pete, and of the way participating with hundreds of other voices could -was already- rendering a similar kind of grace I sought in breathing life into stories, in trail running at dawn, in gliding through water.

Categories: community, parenting, Uncategorized, writing | Tags: bucket list, community, memoir, parenting, writing | 4 Comments

cyclopean eye

Posted on December 14, 2013 by Laura M Gibson

For the better part of a year, I’ve been agitated about selfies, trying to articulate what feels so Orwellian about pictures replacing words. I know too many adults who have given themselves over to the selfie revolution. A growing, navel-gazing army of teens is at the front lines of this surge. You know the posture – one arm outstretched so the self-directed cyclopean eye of a cell phone tastes an experience in order to broadcast it.

It’s hard to be in the world these days without witnessing a selfie in the making.

At our house most technology is considered poor company for sitting down to eat, engaging in conversations, reading, doing homework. Cell phones, computers and tablets are not invited to join us at these times, and this rule is largely true when the kids have friends over. We’re mean parents and expect our kids and their friends to actually hang out together, use real words from their mouths, and also maybe some eye contact. Our kids are pretty accomplished at live conversation.

Still, I know when they leave the house the story is different. Owen’s received a few alarming selfies of girls scantily clad. One poor girl repeatedly photographed and texted “I Love You” spelled out with a variety of objects — chocolates, candy canes, Goldfish crackers. I know about these photos because I check. A lot of parents don’t. I’m heartsick that for these girls, no one seems to be discussing self-respect and appropriate use of technology, and probably all sorts of other things too.

More to the point, though, too many teens are free to use their devices without boundaries or guidance. The result, it seems to me, is the crafting of a whole culture of self-consumed, image-obsessed, instant-gratification-seeking citizens. Immediacy of everything is king. Waiting of any kind is bad. I worry about the fate of the good, hard work of face-to-face social interaction and conversation. What about companionable silence? What about the art of doing one thing at one time? What will happen to these important skills?

It’s hard to say.

Now is the time of year for retrospection. According to the Oxford Dictionary, the word selfie has been so important to us culturally it’s 2013’s word of the year. This sort of thing makes me feel I was born in the wrong time, and also feeds my sometimes unease that perhaps I’m just not seeing the world clearly. I mean, if everybody’s doing it, maybe it has some merit. Maybe if I did IT, I would like IT. Growth and change mean moving out of one’s comfort zone, after all.

Back in October, I decided I’d do a whole day of selfies, dawn-to-dusk. First, I had to figure out my platform. I wasn’t willing to have an Instagram or Snapchat account just for the sake of research, which probably means this wasn’t a valid experiment from the start. But I was willing to text, so I enlisted my friend Heather. We agreed to text each other all day to see if we could crack the code of what made selfing so attractive.

The next morning, my alarm rang at o’dark-thirty. I used my phone alarm, so I could take a picture of myself still in bed, in the dark. I picked it up and realized two things: I had no idea how to use the camera directed the wrong way –where was that button anyway?– and also that I’d never taken a picture of myself. Ever. I HATE having my picture taken, which is plainly obvious in any picture with me in it.

John rolled over and pushed me to get out of his sleeping space. “I know what you’re doing,” he said. “It’s stupid. Just don’t involve me.”

“But don’t you think it’ll be an interesting sociological experiment? It might help us understand Owen better.”

“Get out of bed now, please.”

In the pre-dawn light, it occurred to me John was right. What I’d signed us up to do was, frankly, kind of lame. While I fumbled with the phone, thinking about calling it off, Heather texted a picture of herself waking up, so I went to the bathroom and took a bunch of pictures of brushing teeth.

Because we couldn’t help ourselves, we also used lots of words, mostly about how foolish it felt to snap pictures of things like our ablutions. Well, not all of them, just the ones involving teeth.

So the day began.

Heather’s two hours ahead of me. One photo of brushing teeth is plenty. Here’s one of her feeding the birds. Look how excited she was to be involved in this research. We were crushing it.

There was get-the-paper selfie. Drink-some-coffee selfie. Start-some-laundry selfie. Take-the-kids-to-school selfie.

Another trawl through the interwebs informed the heap of options I’d already decided against taking pictures of: my hair (a helfie), my backside (a belfie), my workout (a welfie, also called a gym selfie), my drunken stupor (a drelfie), and a funeral (a felfie?).

I opted for a kiss-a-beer selfie (my carrot later in the evening for doing this stupid experiment).

Running-with-the-dog selfie. Maybe this qualifies as a welfie, except with no abs or mirrors –the rules about this one seem shifty.

The dog-swimming-with-my-face-in-one-corner selfie.

Each time I snapped a photo, I texted it right away. Waiting for any kind of reply was excruciating. Sometimes Heather took a whole twenty minutes to respond. What the hell was she doing anyway, that she couldn’t make a quicker response? Our experiment was serious business, social science. Part of the deal was immediacy, because waiting is stupid. I worried whether she’d aborted the mission, whether her heart was in it, whether she was offended by my zeal or thought my pictures were stupid. Later, in our debrief of the experiment, we discovered we’d been doing the same thing — snapping many pictures but not sending them all, worried that the barrage of photos would be annoying, anxious that we were overdoing it, ill at ease with completely embracing the selfie way of shouting PLEASE RESPOND TO ME. I guess we’re not very good scientists.

By eleven that morning, I was running out of ideas. I tried a duckface-gangster selfie, except mostly I looked deranged. I mean, what grown woman pretends to be a gangster?

I sat down to get some work done and took some pictures of that. (Don’t zoom in and read the words; I had to murder those darlings.)

Then I tried to concentrate, but it was hard work because right next to me, the phone was silent. What was she doing anyway? An hour later I took another picture of myself working, texted it again, and tried to concentrate some more.

Heather sent a picture of herself doing the same thing, and also, because she was running out of ideas, some words about why teenagers do stupid things in photos. It seemed clear that when you’ve got your finger on the trigger all the time, OF COURSE you run out of material.

On a break from work, I googled selfie again and found an article by Alexandra Siferlin in TIME, “Why Selfies Matter.” Siferlin suggests parents who are gripped about selfies need to unhinge themselves. (Oh dear). Selfies are just part of growing up in the digital age (shit). What counts is to teach kids what KINDS of selfies are acceptable. And then the article tacks south and basically says that selfies can be dangerous because:

A: Kids don’t understand what’s an acceptable thing to take pictures of, even when you tell them (but hello, neither do plenty of adults. I’m talking about you, Anthony Weiner).

B: Selfies often make kids feel jealous and lonely when they see their friends doing what LOOKS like fun, and they are not. This leads to risk-taking, potentially of the naughty kind.

And so, the jury’s out, maybe, still, on how all this digital stuff is shaping the next generations.

Back to the experiment, more hours passed. All my pictures of working looked the same, so I stopped taking them until I left the house and had an experience worth documenting.

Later that day there were more driving-in-the-car selfies while I picked kids up from school. A man in the car next to us at the stoplight caught us being idiots. He shook his head and scowled. When the light turned green, he sped up and cut me off.

Heather sent a driving-in-the-car selfie also.

Back at home, Riley and I perfected the blowfish selfie.

Then we did some yoga and took pictures of ourselves doing downward dog. I can’t show those photos here because, in addition to our faces, the photo captures everything down the front of my gaping shirt. Sharing them would violate our household acceptable use policy about privacy. Our drumbeat of advice for the kids goes something like this: Remember that there’s no privacy anymore. Your technological presence is a PERMANENT DIGITAL RECORD. Let us be the voices in your head when you’re out in the world. Also, while we’re on the subject of out in the world, remember that GENITAL HERPES can ruin your lives. Please keep your pants on.

But. I digress.

Like so many I see around me, I went through my whole day without letting the phone out of my sight. Just in case there was a message responding to my message. By dinnertime, I was weary of the mission, sick of myself and horrified by how much getting an instant response from one person had come to mean over the course of twelve hours. What would happen if I expanded my recipient list? Would I begin to move through my days, starting every sentence with I and forgetting to ask people questions about themselves? If I practiced this kind of relentless self-focus, would my frontal lobe leave my body, pinging around like a pleasure-seeking UFO that couldn’t find the mothership?

While dinner cooked, I flipped through a smutty magazine and enjoyed that carrot beer. John came home and caught me snapping pictures of myself engaged in these two activities.

“Jesus. You’re not really doing that are you?”

“What? It’s research. Come over by the fire and we’ll selfie together. Although maybe if we’re both in it, we would dualie…”

“Oh great. Now it’s a verb.”

Once John was home, I couldn’t experiment with the same verve. It felt dirty somehow. We ate dinner, and I left the phone in the other room, though I confess I did flirt with hiding it under the table in my lap. Afterward, when I checked my texts, Heather had sent along a half-asleep-on-the-couch-and-goodnight selfie.

I took a last picture and sent it, quickly, while John announced from the kitchen that he was turning his phone OFF for the night and suggested I do the same.

Honestly, I needed someone to be the heavy and make some rules. I was exhausted.

Categories: community, family, girls, kids, parenting, writing | Tags: family, friendship, parenting, writing | 4 Comments

the shoulds

Posted on November 29, 2013 by Laura M Gibson

My feet and hands, a little rough and scarred with the miles, are evidence of my wonky pursuits.

Being pampered doesn’t often rank as a way to spend time, but last summer I tagged along with a friend to a salon so we could soak our feet, have the skin on our heels scrubbed with a cheese grater, get our nails painted. Above the sound of the motorized massage chair and the bubbles in the foot bath, we chatted, catching up while flipping through smutty magazines. On a stool below me, a very small woman set to work on my feet, clucking about the dead toenails and calluses (thank you, running). Ill at ease with the perch on my vibrating throne, I tried to engage her in conversation, made difficult by my general discomfort in salons, and also by the language barrier.

When I asked her about her day, she smiled and shook her head and pointed to the bottle of polish I’d picked. “Empty,” she said, and then went to find another.

After that, I gave myself over to the experience of having my lower legs rubbed with exfoliating scrub and the pedicurist’s deft hands loosening up a tight calf muscle.

Next to us in the bank of chairs sat another woman, older by twenty years or so, who greeted us when we arrived and then sat reading a magazine while her feet were worked over. Her long, white hair was tied back in a loose ponytail.

A half hour later, we all sat around the drying table together, cotton wedged between our toes, our flip flops on. It was June. The kids were about to be out of school, a busy time for families. My friend and I were lamenting our long list of things to accomplish before summer officially began.

At a lull in our conversation, the white-haired woman leaned toward us and said, “I used to talk the same way.”

We assumed she was referring to our kavetching about kids, summer, or the eighty-seven end-of-year projects and parties.

“But one day,” she went on, “this wonderful friend of mine said to me, ‘Why do you do that?’”

In the pause that followed, I filled in the blanks for what she meant by that. Why did we make ourselves so busy? Why did we bitch about our kids in public? Why were we talking about Hollywood stars as if we knew them?

She leaned down and disentangled the cotton from her purple toes, then sat back up. “Think about it this way,” she said, “there is what you need to do, and there is what you want to do. But should? This is a word you can take out of your vocabulary.”

“It sounds good,” my friend said, “but I have a big-ass list of things I should do today. I definitely don’t want to do them.”

“Yeah,” I chimed in. “I don’t know if I could break up with should. I mean, what would I complain about?”

I considered her perspective, doubting its merit. My life was full of what I should be doing instead of getting a pedicure. Like playing hooky, escaping from the shoulds was part of the thrill. In truth, the weight of my obligations felt heavy. I’d been thinking for months about how to disconnect gracefully from several commitments, which involved going head to head with my guilt-lined Lutheran upbringing. It’s an ugly, ongoing skirmish. Also, I was kind of pissed. I mean, I went to the shop with my friend to relax and not feel shitty, and here was this woman life-coaching me. Who did she think she was anyway?

The white-haired woman nodded. She reached into her purse and took out her wallet. “Those are probably things you need to do. Go to work, clean the house, pick up your kids, make dinner. Right?”

“But I should do them,” my friend said.

Gathering her things together, the woman shook her head. “Try it, girls. It’s very freeing. Now I think of the world in a totally different way. Before, I spent a lot of my time fulfilling the obligation of should. It takes practice not to, because we’ve all been at this kind of thinking for, well, our whole lives.” She paid the gal who’d worked up her feet, waved a goodbye to us, and left the shop.

My friend and I sat looking at each other for a moment. “I bet she cruises the nail shop circuit,” she said. “She’s like a salon prophet or something.”

“Or full of shit,” I said. “And also clearly has no relentlessly hungry kids to feed. Probably gets her toilets cleaned by someone else.”

After we left the shop, I filed this encounter away, chocking the white-haired woman’s advice up to a world view of someone who didn’t pressure herself too much. The bored rich. A woman who read a lot of self-help stuff and hired out for every last thing.

Except I didn’t really believe that. I kind of liked her calm, self-assured way of being, and also that she hadn’t dyed her hair or cut it super short to tame the wire out of it. She seemed like someone I might be friends with. We’d only had a few minutes’ exchange with her, but her words worm-holed within me all summer and into fall. I couldn’t say should without thinking of her, without pausing to reframe my sentiment and edit out the shoulds.

Lately, John and I have been talking with Owen about choosing a college, about what he’d like to do in the world. Our advice to him has always been to seek a path of joy and fulfillment, as well as one that will make him a living. Every time we have this conversation with Owen, though, I can’t help but think to myself about the similar, parallel path of partnering need and want.

At the risk of seeming like a white-haired lady groupie, it occurs to me that fulfillment comes when want and need intersect in a singular pursuit or practice, and that this is a rare, precious thing.

Of course, it’s hard to hit the right groove all the time. The dailyness of life isn’t all rainbow brilliant, shot full of light and unicorns and feel-goodery and self-worth. My kids make me crazy. The state of the world is scary. Fully in touch with my inner bitch, I’m not nearly as patient, loving or kind as I aim to be.

But living with purpose serves me well most of the time. I need and want to raise thinking, compassionate kids in the world. I need and want to write. I need and want to garden, to know how to do things for myself, to be a good friend, to travel and know the world, to go outside and teach kids how to do the same. There’s little room for should in any of these passions.

I haven’t quite been able to get to the same level of bliss about cleaning, driving or laundry, but it could come for me someday.

Meanwhile, in this season of thanks, I’ll sit down to the table with my family, enjoy a meal we’ve all pitched in to prepare, and know as certainly as I know anything that I both need and want to be spending my time this way.

Categories: community, family, girls, parenting, writing | Tags: family, friendship, girls, parenting, writing | 4 Comments

you don’t get what you don’t ask for

Posted on October 25, 2013 by Laura M Gibson

Until last week, for several weeks, our air space was jammed with the frequency of Homecoming: the powder puff football game and which class had the strongest athletes, then the “real” football game (actual words used by actual boys) and whether we’d defeat our rivals, then the dance, which was the most painful part, a reminder of how complicated being young is. It was both entertaining and excruciating to watch Owen begin to understand the gaping maw between his prevailing view that the world is a black and white place – easy to legislate, govern, and operate within if adults would just move over and let teenagers be in charge – and a growing sense that maybe life is not that simple after all.

The real sport of Homecoming was negotiating the dance. The pre-game show began weeks before the event as boys negotiated amongst themselves which girls to ask and how. On our way to swim practice each night, Owen’s friends debriefed.

Here is a sample conversation from the car (A conversation highly similar to this was reenacted every night for at least two weeks):

B: You should ask Emma because she’s going to say no to Brian and she will say yes to you.

Owen: But I want to ask Izzy.

D: Dude, you can’t ask Izzy. Tim’s asking her.

Owen: But what if I ask Izzy before Tim does?

B: You can’t do that because Tim already told us he’s asking her. It’s like stealing. Not cool.

Owen: But what if I do?

D: Don’t do it, man. That’s lame. You should ask Emma.

Owen: You should go with Emma.

D: I can’t go with Emma. She’s super quiet and so am I and nobody would talk all night.

B: D’s going to ask Jane because she talks a lot. She’ll make it fun. And you should ask Emma.

Owen: I don’t know. I want to go with Izzy. What if I ask Kate?

B: Dude. I’m asking Kate. D’s asking Jane. You should ask Emma. It’ll be fun, I promise. Plus, you just got here, so you need us to help you understand them.

Owen: Them who?

B: Girls, dumbass.

There was a long pause while we waited to turn left into the pool parking lot. It sounded settled to me. We pulled up to the front door and the boys loitered in the car, gathering up their gear bags.

Owen: So. I can’t ask Izzy? I mean. For sure Tim knows WE know he’s going to ask?

B: You kind of suck at this game.

Once they’d settled the girl question, the issue of the ASK descended. My recollection, which may be wrong, is that being asked to Homecoming used to go something like this:

(Written on a note passed to me in history with Doritos stains on one corner):

Wanna go to the dance with me?

(Written on a note shoved inside the slats of my locker door)

Will you go to Homecoming with me? Check yes or no and bring it to English.

In those days, which Owen tells me were uninspired, boys didn’t ask girls in person. It was almost always on a note, or through a friend, and in this way not much has changed since the dark ages. Except that now part of THE ASK has to be creative, thoughtful, unique. A big statement that others see, a “treat” meant to impress with a sugary crust of embarrassment.

Me: So, you’re going with Emma.

Owen: Yes. Not Izzy because she said yes to Tim.

Me: I see. Have you asked Emma yet?

Owen: Not yet. I have to figure out how to do it.

Me: I see. You mean, when you’ll have a chance to see her to ask her?

Owen: No. It’s not like that. You have to DO something. Like creative.

Me: Like creative how?

Owen: I was thinking about putting a piñata in her front yard? Inside would be candy and a bunch of ASKS wrapped around the candy, and when she breaks it open, it all falls out?

Me: I see. So you’re going to find all that at the store, then wrap each candy with papers that say something clever, then put the candy inside the piñata, then take it to her house after asking her parents and then hang it on a tree in the front yard and leave a stick or a bat to whack it open with? By tomorrow?

Owen: Geez. You make it sound like such a big deal. Also. I thought you might help me do it.

Me: But I’m not going to the dance with Emma.

Owen: Mawwwwmmm. I’m just brainstorming here. I’m supposed to do something creative. Can’t you just help me think of something, you know, clever?

Me: What about just asking her?

At this point he left the room, shaking his head.

As Owen deliberated, his friends settled in on their ASK. They pushed the ASK date ahead. B bought a betta fish (also known as a Siamese fighting fish) and left it in a tank in Kate’s room with a speech balloon asking her to the dance. It was an interesting choice – given the known aggressive nature of this species, which is not a “schooling” fish but one that prefers solitude and without it will fight— but I wisely kept my thoughts on metaphor to myself. D put some pink flamingoes in Jane’s front yard with a poster asking her to boogie with him, which was also funny because D had confessed to me that he hates to dance.

B and D waited for Owen to figure out his ASK, and then they all agreed to go forth and ASK on the same day.

The night before the ASK:

Owen: I’m sick of brainstorming. I’m just going to get some flowers and leave them in Emma’s locker.

Me: Sounds good. How will you get her combination?

Owen: B’s getting it. Will you get me some flowers today?

Me: Sorry, pal. That’s your job. You can walk over to the shopping center and choose some. We’ll put them in water until you’re ready.

Owen: Wait. I have to do it?

Me: Yes, sir. Because Emma is not my date. Take your wallet. Please don’t get carnations; they’re grandma flowers.

Off Owen went to flower shop at the market, where he chose six red roses, proudly brought them home remarking on the deal he got, then threw them on the counter, sighing with relief. I felt bad, having sent him into battle with so little information. We had a nice chat about the loud statement a flower like the red rose makes in the romantic world, at the end of which he just shrugged and said, “I’m not going to marry her or anything. They’re just flowers.” And that was that.

We hadn’t even gotten to costuming yet, and I was already exhausted. The boys all chose bow ties. Those had to match the dresses. Emma’s mom picked Owen up after school one day and off they went to the mall to choose a bow tie that matched the champagne color in Emma’s dress. I can only imagine what this must have been like for Owen – shopping, which he hates, with a girl he hardly knew and her mother who was in charge of choosing part of his outfit. For my part, I was relieved, since I also hate shopping. He came home with a bow tie that cost forty dollars and went to bed early that night.

Then began negotiations about dinner and which restaurant would be good for a party of 12. B was in charge of reservations, and there was a lot of conversation in the car about the automatic gratuity for parties so large and whether it was a scam. Then there was the issue of transportation. As sophomores, many of them not yet driving, they decided it was totally uncool to have parents ferrying them around. They booked a limo, and Owen was in charge of organizing that. Meanwhile, his stash of earned cash was dwindling.

We expect him to use his own money for many things, and this policy has been instrumental in his more thoughtful and miserly approach to spending, for which I am grateful. There’s nothing like having some skin in the game of spending to learn about money management. I suggested he and Emma split the tab for the night and was told that’s not how you do it. When I asked him why, he shrugged and said, “I guess that’s just how it works. I think the girls pay when there’s a Sadie Hawkins dance or something, except I’m not sure we have that kind of dance at our school.”

We paid for the clothes, but the tickets, dinner, flowers and transportation were up to him. It was hard to watch him struggle with how much the night would cost and whether it was worth it. He wisely kept to himself any bitterness he harbored about his friends’ parents’ footing the entire bill for the time.

By the time the actual dance arrived, and we’d learned how to tie a bow tie courtesy of YouTube, and gotten more flowers, and showed up early to the garden of friend’s house to take pictures, my boy seemed to have lost the bounce in his bungee. But he rallied.

The night was a success, thankfully, and Emma proved to be a fun date, though the next morning over breakfast Owen confessed he was glad it was over.

Owen: Now I can focus on swimming and school. I think my math grade has dropped.

Me: Was it worth it, do you think?

He chewed his bagel and thought a minute.

Owen: I think so. I mean, we could have had a dance without all that, you know, stuff. It was a lot of stress. Plus, I’m broke now. Life is expensive, you know?

Me: I do know.

He shook his head and opened the sports page and we were quiet for a minute.

Owen: I mean, I’m just not sure about events where the boy has to pay for the whole thing. It’s like you say. Where’s the skin in the game if someone else is paying for you? I just don’t know about it.

I kept to myself all the things I wanted to say, or the high-five I itched to give him, or how I’d asked myself that same question more than a few times.

Me: What if I come up with a creative ASK for cleaning the bathroom and washing the car? It’s a paying gig.

Owen: Okay. You can skip the flowers and candy, though.

Categories: kids, parenting, writing | Tags: friendship, parenting | 8 Comments

flown the coop

Posted on September 26, 2013 by Laura M Gibson

Around 7:20 each morning in the yard behind ours, a very vocal hen lays an egg. This hen’s egg-laying aria (a reenactment here) is followed by irritable complaining about the state of things, and then, since I can’t see her, what I can only assume is some active scratching and feeding. Her sisters lay eggs much later in the morning, usually together, making their own duet. To be fair, if I had to expel an object that size every day, I’d have a thing or two to say about it, too.

I’m comforted by these new birds, and by how many folks in our neighborhood have chickens. For now, listening from my yard is as close as I’m going to get to owning birds myself. We’re renting a house. Zora is allowed here, but nothing else. The lease agreement expressly forbids chickens, cats, guinea pigs, rabbits, rats, mice, and any sort of reptile. This list is followed by two exclamation points, which seems like a clause written for a bygone willful renter!! Also in the lease is language about how I won’t do any yard maintenance, and that feels almost weirder than no chicken wrangling.

Hopefully, this limboed state of alert is temporary !!

Before we knew we were moving, we’d gotten new chicks, Ameraucana babies – Artemis and Athena, named by Riley. I’d gotten them so we could diversify the flock and have green-blue eggs. We brought them home in March, a cold one this year. Because I was having problems moderating the temperature in their cage in the garage, the goddesses lived inside.

Chickens inside your house is a disgusting business. Sure, Artemis and Athena were cute. Sure, it was entertaining and unnerving watching the dog drool with longing, hanging her head over the side of the galvanized tub, quivering. Sure, waking to the sounds of those little peeps from the breakfast nook (yes, they were near the kitchen, which is really, really disgusting), drinking coffee while listening to them practice being big birds wasn’t a bad way to start the day.

Sure. They were cute and we held them and talked baby talk to them and told them how great their lives on our farm would be. But chickens are filthy. About week three the stink kicked in. They shat in their food, in their water, on each other. They scratched and made dust and filled their water dish with fecaled shavings. Despite our efforts to keep the place clean, the dust from their quarters filtered into the house, as did the relentless scratching sound. Artemis and Athena got older and smellier and the world outside got warmer, so we moved them to the garage to finish being babies before we introduced them to the big girls.

Giving the goddesses away was one of the first things we did when we decided to move. They were high maintenance, they didn’t lay eggs and wouldn’t for several months. I wasn’t so attached I was sentimental yet, so they went to live a few streets over with some friends of ours who’d just started their own chicken operation and had room for a few more.

The big girls – Ginger, Marianne, and Rainer (Mrs. Howell was a man. We swapped her for Rainier)—were a different story. My first bird children, I’d raised them up from babies, trained them to come when I whistled the opening bars of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, benefitted from years of delicious eggs.

Also, I couldn’t get out of my head a scene like something from the Beverly Hillbillies, our truck piled high and the chickens in a wire cage on top of a jalopied heap, their feathers trailing in the wind behind us.

Also, there was that business of the no pets !! in our lease agreement.

It was harder than it would seem to find homes for them, what with their “advanced” age. No one wanted new-to-them chickens who were probably going to stop laying within the year, even if they were gorgeous and tame and cleverly named. In the end, Riley’s soccer coach Brett, who owns land and has twenty or so chickens already, agreed to take them.

We drove the girls out to Brett’s property a few weeks before we left. He was ready for us, a separate cage set up near the main coop.

“I’ll toss them in tonight with the rest of the girls,” he said. “Works every time. They’ll wake up tomorrow and the others will be like, ‘Hey. How’s it going?’ and that will be that.”

Inside a huge chicken run, his birds – five or six breeds altogether—were gathered around cantaloupe and watermelon halves, clucking and gorging themselves. Brett had built the coop, his own design, also large and set up so his kids could easily gather eggs and clean it. The place was like Club Med for chickens.

His four-year-old daughter Shey led me over to the chicken graveyard under a stand of cedars. “This is our pet cemetery,” she said. “Rosy the cat is here, too.” Several rocks brightly painted were scattered on top of the needles there. “Also Blacky, Whitey, and Socks.”

“Cats?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Hamsters.”

She gave me a tour through each stone and what was buried under it, and then skipped off to play with Riley on the tire swing.

We have a pet graveyard at our house where we’d buried a gecko, some goldfish, a dead wren we found on the deck, and a frog Riley found in the mailbox that she petted too much. They’re buried there for closure’s sake, because it mattered to our kids, and because we couldn’t eat any of them.

But chickens are different, I think. Their presence in our lives had been about more than love and nurturing. Having them was symbiotic – I did a good job and they did too. Our house wasn’t a chicken pleasure cruise. When the girls stopped laying, our plan was to harvest them and make soup stock, a reminder for our whole family about not wasting resources and knowing how to do things for ourselves.

Still, I was charmed by Brett’s kids, four girls, who were fully involved in caring for their animals. He never gathered eggs, the two younger ones did that. His elder two did all the feeding and cleaning the coop. The birds also came out to “play.” They sometimes wore doll clothes and went to the front of the property on leashes. Another look inside the coop revealed a chicken-sized rocking chair, filthy with chicken poop, and a window with gingham curtains.

When I asked Brett about it, he shrugged and said, “It’s more a petting zoo than a farm.” He rubbed at his beard and looked over at the girls swinging. “There’s a lot of…uh…estrogen out here. ”

For Brett’s family, I guess that graveyard makes sense. My bird girls will have a nice retirement at his estrogen ranch before they join the others under the cedars. No soup pot for them.

Birdless for now, I guess it makes sense to scratch off the chicken wrangling headline on this blog. I’ll have to live vicariously through my neighbors’ birds and the yards they tend themselves.

Hopefully, it’s only for a little while. !!