Keep your eyes on her winning smile

This is the face of a girl, not quite five-and-a-half years old, who just lost her first tooth.

This is also the face of a girl who wandered into our neighbors' yard last night for some energetic post-dinner trampolining wearing a full blue catch-good-air tutu skirt...and no underpants. But that's another story for another day.

Tend your garden

On Mother's Day we planted our garden. It's all I want and it's become tradition. It's not the activity of choice for any other person but they humor me because they have to do so and we traipse to the garden center and get pepper plants and eggplant plants and tomato plants and pretty flowers and flashy annuals and fragrant herbs in 4" pots and we get home and it's a dirt frenzy, all peat and trowels and watering cans and bare feet. It's the herald of real spring, Official spring, and then the house is garlanded in jewels and I can begin my annual tradition of the Shaking of the Fist at the black squirrel who eats my tomatoes. We might not be high-yield gardeners, but we're tenacious.

There are the in-ground plantings and the small pots on the back porch and the few pots at the bottom of the back porch steps and the large pot on the front porch and the new one I added on Mother's Day between the porch and the garage and suddenly the weather is warm, hot even.

Every night we come home, all a tumble out of two cars almost at once, purse and laptop bag and backpack, backpack, backpack, papers and art projects, permission slips and precious ephemera, pinecones and stickers and wilted dandelions, bent paper clips.

We fall over each other into the house, shoes in the hall and someone needs the bathroom, someone needs a drink, bags drop, projects unfold at the kitchen table, energy expands, unpacking all the buttoned-up proper hours for barefoot evening, belly laughs and belly rubs, shenanigans and some kid runs pantsless into the backyard, we're entropy and cacophony and those snakes that pop out a can, a shaken two-liter of seltzer, a perpetual motion toy bouncing every way at once.

Slowly the pieces settle, float down to the floor, and the walls sigh in relief. Another reentry and no new cracks. There will be dinner and there may be homework and there might be baths and knotty hair and missing favorite books or pajamas. There will be the needs of night's routine. But first there is a space, cumulus, where everyone is anywhere and I can slip out.

The faucet sprays my toes. I fill the watering can and I circumnavigate the house: the container on the porch and the one by the garage and the new roses on the side; the herbs and the sunflowers, the containers on the back steps, and the tomatoes and their friends. It's five minutes, quiet and rhythmic, spreading water where it's needed, nurturing the thirsty plants, and then I walk back in and ask who's hungry.



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Corner dragon

This little guy, a dragon on his back, smiling, sucking his thumb, he lives on the ledge of the sink in our master bathroom. He's incongruous to the rest of the house but he's always been with me, years now, dorm room to shared apartment to my own apartment to our townhouse to our home.

He was a gift, the little dragon, from someone who meant a lot to me but whom I never could understand. We were close but she kept herself unknowable. I knew all her stories but only the emotionless versions. But we were great complements: I tamed her too-reckless plans and she taught me not to bring too much worry to adventure.

She was gone for a few days, once, traveling to visit family, and brought this little dragon home to me. A token of friendship, she said, and his smile made her think of me. I haven't seen or spoken to her in a very long time. Her tumultuous life took a few more tumultuous turns. My more cautious life took a more predictable trajectory. The two couldn't dovetail too fluidly. But I always have my dragon and her fingerprint on my memories. She was a good influence on me, even if our stories put to paper wouldn't read that way.

Sometimes in the traffic congestion of bedtime one kid or another will brush teeth in our bathroom. Tell me about the dragon, I'm occasionally asked. He's a memento, I just say, an old memory with a broad smile.

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This post was inspired by the novel A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra, and the particular story lines of the beefeater figurine and the suitcase of souvenirs. In a war torn Chechnya, a young fatherless girl, a family friend, and a hardened doctor struggle with love and loss. Join From Left to Write on May 20 as we discuss Anthony Marra's debut novel. As a member, I received a copy of the book for review purposes.
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The boyfriends

For most of this school year, E has been talking about her boyfriend, a sweet classmate who, just in case he becomes a long-term character in this here story, we'll just call N. He's a great boy, kind, cute, funny. He's smart: they're in the highest reading group together and the skip morning meeting together to go to advanced math. Sometimes they hold hands, her teacher tells me. They have a secret hand-tapping code to communicate with each other across the classroom. I never fell in love with a boy as a seven-year-old and I have a hard time understanding exactly how deep her feelings can run, but she's sincere in her expressions. And he seems to reciprocate them.

We've been hearing about N since November or so and after all this time, L has internalized some of her sister's language. We didn't know that, though.

When L and I had our mama-daughter day a few weeks ago, we concluded with lunch at a restaurant she enjoys. We were there later than the lunch crowd but too early for dinner and the place was nearly empty. L was spinning on the swivel stools and generally being extra adorable, and she charmed the shift manager. They shared some repartee and he left to sweep the floor. He returned with a large cookie in his hand and made a great show of offering it to her. But I don't like that kind! she yelled with brazen honesty. He laughed. "What kind do you like, sweetheart?" And that is how L scored a chocolate chip cookie the size of her face.

They exchanged names. He complimented her eyes. She complimented his silver hair and gold tooth. They high-fived and eventually, we left.

As we replayed our day in conversation, L marveled that out of the kindness of his heart, Melvin had given her the biggest cookie of her life. It just made her so happy. All the experiences of that day paled. The cookie was the keystone. Her gratitude and wonder and amazement at his generosity filled her heart and disposition. Sounds like love, right? By the time we reached the end of the day, she'd decided that Melvin is her boyfriend.

And now whenever E talks about N, L brings up Melvin. When can we see Melvin again? And what if we go there and Melvin isn't working that day? And where does Melvin go when he isn't at work? We have a lot of conversations about the man who bought her heart with chocolate. And there isn't any easy way to tell her that a 50-something man is probably not the best match for her first great love, nor that we might really never see him again, nor that he might not remember her name if we ever do see him again, and especially not that he's not likely to repeat the free cookie trick. She'll hear none of it, though. She's in love.

What we know about N: his favorite color is red. He loves soccer and basketball and went skiing with his family in Idaho over winter break. He has an older brother and lovely, accomplished, attentive parents. What we know about Melvin: he's bold enough to give away the confections. And he is (based on looks) old enough to be L's grandpa.

E has just a few weeks of school and we wonder: will N's charms extend across summer vacation and into the next school year? But L has bigger challenges to confront: her man works over in another county, and her mama might not find reason to feed her there again any time soon.

This is what we know. Young love may turn out to be an anecdote and nothing more, or an epic love story. E was drawn to a boy of great intellect and character. And L: her love can be bought with sugar.

(But we already knew that.)

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Electronic mail

 image via Wiertz Sebastien

We were reading a book** together in which third grader best friends are torn apart when one of the friends has to move away because of a parent's job reassignment. As the boy who leaves rides away in his parents' car, he calls his friend: "Hey, Piper. What's your email address?"

Get off the bus! yelled my E, because that's what Piper always says in excitement. I knew kids could have email!  

I didn't know it was a fact to be disproven but her enthusiam was darling. The best part about spending time with children is observing their delight at observing all those things to which we've grown so accustomed that we forget to acknowledge their wonder. It didn't take her more than a minute to ask for an email account, but it did take her much more than that to contain her surprise when I said yes.

We reviewed some rules. I disabled almost all the features. She knows I have her password and not to open any attachments or forward any mass messages. She knows that her mail is auto-forwarded to my account. There are no generations of internet-savvy parenting tricks to rely on, so we're approaching this slowly and unjadedly. But my girl: she doesn't know about predators and identity theft and sexting. She's just excited to email her friends (or their parents) for play dates.  One day we'll have to relax her restrictions, but first she'll have years of transparently supervised access to this fine world wide web we know and love.

I got my first email address in my first year of college, I told her. And the computer showed words on a black screen with green letters. And I had to walk to a pay phone and drop in a token to make a phone call. Communication was an entirely different phenomenon. She listened, slack jawed, and couldn't even imagine what that was like. This new world moves so fast and of course she wants to be a part of it. And so we give her access, carefully, because truly it's her birthright. 

 

**If you have a Piper Reed fan in your house, you should know that by looking up book 5 in Amazon to provide that link, I learned that book 6 comes out at the end of this month. Get off the bus!

 

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