Kath at Redcurrent made me a winner! Once again, I love Kath! And I can’t wait to get the pants in the mail.

Ford ran his first 1k fun run at the Austin Rodeo Rumble. We trotted beside him past cotton candy machines, hot dog stands and hat vendors, in the noontime heat. But he was a winner, himself! It was the first time in two years when he agreed to wear shorts and a tshirt (he prefers long clothing).

Chas lounged in the chariot with a popsicle:

Sheep dog trials were underway in the arena afterwards. Their finesse blew me away, and made me wish I were so effective corralling my own kids. Focused and efficient, the Australian shepherds rested on the ground while the cattle fumbled over each other on their way through chutes. We’ll have an Aussie Shepherd next door in a few days; our neighbors are moving from Santa Cruz county, dog in tow. Will it dutifully keep everyone out of the road? Hope so.

We spent the better part of yesterday hung over, the kids climbing all over us in blinding sunlight while we lay in bed. Around 5pm, I rallied the kids (as if they needed any help) for a neighborhood detox run. It was difficult. Ford wanted to run every so often in one-minute sprints, then recline in the twinner. I plodded along, feeling full of sand and rather gummy. But it was well worth it, because dinner the night before at Polly’s, drinking wine while the kids orbited around us at warp speed, was uplifting, totally fun. In the meadow behind their home, I saw the first bats of the season, flitting about above fresh green grass in the twilight.

We took a spring walk this morning at Zilker Botanical Gardens. I helped Ford list all the new emergences: flowering quince, fragrant mountain laurel, new growth at the base of old inland sea oats, cypress trees leafing out in whispy tufts of soft lime green needles, ferns unfurling in dappled shade.

I called out to Ford, “Look Ford, there’s some spiderwort!”
and he walked up to investigate, but snorted back “That’s NOT spiderwort! That’s Purple Heart, mom!”
And I smiled and shook my head, amazed at what four year-olds spit back out at their parents, these days. He looked up at me in rebuttal, face scrunched up in the sunlight.

Some unabashed, desperate attempt of one tree to get laid–what kind if tree is this?!:

We drive to the Pedernales River this morning for a hike. It is quiet around 11:50 except for the last of the churchgoers leaving mass. We cruise under a weary, overcast sky that echoes a landscape hardly awake from winter, except for a lone quince tree blazing pink alongside a truckstop. 290 is growing. What was once a frontier escarpment of limestone and prickly pear is now claimed property of “Muirwood” and “Oak Haven” and the mycelium of other residential real estate developments. But the road itself is still old. We climb and descend each hill like a motorboat on choppy water, tossed about by the scars of traffic and extreme temperatures on the road, our eyes following the varicose veins of long asphalt-filled cracks in the pavement. Scores of Open House signs are everywhere, in short trains of five or six (per builder) they picket the shoulder. There’s a balmy southern breeze and the American flag at the Pulte Highpointe Information Center is at full-mast, waving gloriously. I wonder how many prospective homeowners will visit this trailer today. A part of me can understand how a person would appreciate a home, like the ones I see beyond the trailer, sitting on two green acres and surrounded by white ranch fencing. Perfect for your one-horse family and sidekick goat.

People driving along this road must buy a lot of pottery, rustic metal art and deer antlers; every other store has a side yard filled with chimineas and yard art. Sheet metal silhouettes of cowboys leaning against imaginary walls are among them, so you could (if you wanted to) lean one of those buckaroos against the entrance to your ranch, right there next to the gate. So everyone would know your home was cowboy-friendly, supporting all cowboy-related endeavors.

Damon used to work on the King Ranch. When he was in high school, he had many different roles on the ranch, and his least favorite was the caballero duty of processing freshly-purchased cattle for their new life on the King Ranch. And since he worked during the summers, I’ll begin the description of setting to include blistering heat and dust. Add to that, a two-foot layer of bull shit to stand in (and I mean literally), the smell of burnt flesh, the bustling sounds of hydraulics and metal and groaning cattle.

There’s a short list of duties to perform on the newly-purchased stock: a bloodbath of dehorning, branding, castrating and immunizing. You corral cow into the chute with a cattle prod. If it’s female, the most effective way to move her is to stun her with a cattleprod to the clit (I kid you not). If the cow has horns, you take a large pair of tree pruners and slam, slam, slam them together until the horn lops off, trailed by a river of blood from the marrow (since the horns are, after all, a part of the cow’s skull). While the cow is bleeding out, you take a branding iron and burn the famous running W onto its hide (a cow may have many brands over the course of his or her life). Then, if it’s a bull, you have to castrate it. It’s a systematic thing, really: you slice with a razor blade, pull them out. Period. Lastly, you immunize. If you look up occasionally while injecting, you can pound the huge hypodermic needle accidentally into your own leg, as Damon did. While all of this is going on, the Mexican laborers will take a few testicles and fry them over the same fire that’s heating the branding irons, a sort of freak show snacking. And at the end of the day, the laborers will often take a long latex rubber glove, the kind used for artificial insemination, and fill them with the leftover balls to take home. They’ll leave, smiling and proud, holding a bloody bag of bluish-pink cow balls to cook up later, for themselves? For their family?

Yes, we are in the middle of country with a capital K, as in Kountry Kitchen, Kountry Klutter and Hill Kountry Kabins. I had to retype these names a few times to get it right. It was difficult.

The river is low. The river bottom is worn smooth, and deep crevasses bore through the bedrock like swiss cheese. I hold my breath as I boulder with Chas in the backpack over deep divides, and gasp when Ford leans over edges, peering into the whirlpools. We stop to investigate fossils, embedded everywhere along the riverbottom terrace.

On our walk back up the trail, I stop in my tracks to listen. I hear a slight symphony beyond our parade of noise: Ford is belting out more White Stripes, while Chas is simultaneously repeating Dvorak’s New World Symphony (to the three syllables “Hi Daddy, Hi Daddy,” over and over again–amazing in itself!). Everyone stops, and we all hear it, the distant sound of geese underwater. Looking up, we see birds flying in V-formation, due North, but they are clearly not geese. In a less-focused, more carefree jaunt, these are actually Sandhill cranes flying at about 2000 feet. We watched as they flew over the river, paused, and dissociated into a flowing fabric of cranes, wafting upwards on thermals in freeflowing spiral, resting their wings as they ascended. For about three minutes or so they did this, until one set course and the rest followed, straight into V-formation once more.

We learned three new things on the longish return hike uphill:
1. open-toed sandals and sand do not really mix well, according to a 4 year-old.
2. Ford will knock down any structure, no matter how sacred, to prove his power over inanimate objects.
3. Chas will always attempt to get in the water, so never take him out of the backpack without preparation.

We’re on the cusp of Spring, you can smell it in the damp air like pheromones. Grass shoots tint the meadows, still covered with leaves. On some property near home, Chas ditched his wellies to run sockfooted down a long dirt trail, his cheeks bounced up and down as he ran and sang. He shoved his head into a hole in a tree, shouted, and plunged his foot into a burrow near the creek. Life was hidden everywhere. But closer to the lake we passed under a gossiping flock of Red-Winged Blackbirds, a throaty playful labyrinth of song in the pecan treetops. Once we were directly below them, and they noticed us listening, all talk ceased and the troupe flew away like a fluttering, carefree black veil. Chas followed them with his eyes. It was quiet like that for a few seconds, before Ford started belting out White Stripes lyrics (I still have ‘Blue Orchid’ pumping in my head). On the drive home, close to dusk, a very large Coyote jumped the fence into the chaparral. I shouted and pointed it out to the kids, almost running off the road, but when I looked back at them, both heads were buried into the sides of their carseats, asleep.

I return to the exhibit on impulse, after viewing the installation of Eva Hess’ drawings. I know the corridors by heart: the oak floors creak in the east wing, but enough to surprise me every time; I am always arrested in front of the Ernst frottages, three paces north and an immediate left lead to the painting of the pipe, Leger on the diagonal wall across the room. This time, there is something different (after all, things usually change after ten years). An alcove off the Surrealism exhibit with its own security guard outside.

It’s like walking into a jazzy vacuum chamber. A dark room, painted blue the color of Chas’ eyes, the sky on a full moon. It is a wonder-room filled with tribal masks, katchinas, headdresses and totems. In the center, a sculpture of a human being, with pins radiating from all surfaces. The opposite wall, above my head, hangs a charming sculpture of a man riding a whale, the two of them casting animated shadows on the wall. It is a collection, tribal and oceanic, curious and natural. Things collected by the Surreallists. I stand in this dark room, awestruck, wondering why this feels like home.

In a corner I notice Dominique De Menil’s provincial desk, filled with ephemera: keys, marbles, blue butterflies, feathers, coins, seashells, buttons. “For the children who visited her home.” It’s a Darwinian duplicate of my dad’s roll-top desk. I stand in front of the desk for a good five minutes, examining treasure. Wealthy couples circulate in camel coats and leather shoes, fresh out of the box. The men are distinguished and chiselled, the women have long, glossy hair and everyone smells of ambigously scented soaps. They speak softly of travels to Fiji, and smile at certain masks. They feel at home, too.

I exit the museum onto the wide open expanse of green lawn and sunshine. Down the block, behind a rambling old white oak tree, the boys run circles around Damon. As he waves at me from the void between branches, Chas stumbles onto the grass. Ford is laughing, calling me. I take the children into my charge and urge Damon to go see for himself. We are playing gallery tennis, allowing the kids to be kids while we struggle to be grownups.

They are often called primitive for want of a better name.

What could never have been written is there, all the dreams and anguishes of man. The hunger for food and sex and security, the terrors of night and death, the thirst for life and the hope for survival.”               
      

Dominique de Menil, 1962  

We leave the playground, and I weave along the lake, trailering the boys. In this warm winter weather, Austin has molted and begun to grow again in little green patches along the water. The rest of the landscape is still dormant, less agressive than the shoots. Clusters of Elephant Ears brazenly crowd along the bank, submerged and waving in the breeze.

The wind awakens me, and my rhythm intensifies while growing efficient. My muscles remember well; I biked for many years before children. I love the way my quadriceps begin to feel warm. I don’t feel this way when I run. My neck burns. I am smiling.

I pass under Riverside drive, and pause to watch reflections dance uninhibited on the bridge’s belly, winding up the concrete posts like white fishnet. Sliders anchor the river, basking in the sun, and we count them. I notice a canoe, motionless, with a fisher aboard, waiting.

It’s a dry day, and chrushed granite crunches as joggers pass us under the bridge. One woman smiles at the trailer, and I follow her eyes to find Chas’ sleeping head on Ford’s shoulder. I return to meditate on the coke bottle water, crystalline turquise jade with a fuzzy rockbottom, brimming with rippling silvery fry.

Barton Springs feeds the creek, the creek feeds the river.The dedicated swimmers, all three of them, are lumbering the length of the pool, their slow, regular paddle lulls me.One is wearing a wetsuit . The elm trees lining the pool are tipped with new leaves, on the pecans, empty shell cases gape at the sky on bare branches, so that we don’t forget that Fall ever happened. But it did, and so did Winter.

Friday at Bull Creek. Cattails.

Scientists.

Philosopher.

Thrill seeker. (Fording the frigid stream in mocassins)

Considering Botox.

I took the boys out for loop around Wild Basin wilderness preserve after lunch. As we unloaded for our walk, we were met by a investigative swarm of yellowjackets. Ford began to freak out as I watched him eyeball three drones on his shirtless body. Not sure what to do, since my hands were tied, I urged him to just be still and watch them explore. I told him to use the opportunity to see them up close, so long as he remained perfectly, perfectly still. Which he did. And the whimpers ceased as he began to comment on their similarity to bees. I have no idea why they were attracted to us. All I can figure is that we smelled too lavendar-y with our herbal sunscreen, and that Ford might have left a little strawberry jam on his face after lunch.
At any rate, once we started on the trail, they lost interest.

The trail crests a ridge that overlooks, um, Wild Basin wilderness. It’s Westlake’s backyard, full of, um, wildlife. Besides the wasps, however, there wasn’t much wildlife awake to greet us on the trail except one lone mockingbird. We did see something new, though. Atop a limestone outcropping laid a half dollar-diameter star-shaped fungus that could have easily been mistaken for a spider: a small sphere, on inspection, had burst to reveal a tiny hole on top; the “legs” were eight radiating, pointy black extensions. I think it was an Earth Star, a type of exploding shroom, and this lesson captivated Ford. Like, the rest of the afternoon. These days, it’s all about explosives and things with bioluminescence.

I brought a heavy and clunky 35mm camera without batteries. The strap irritated my neck, but Chas, in the backpack, seemingly felt sorry enough to pat the back of my head and play with my hair. He occasionally pointed to things and shouted exclamations that we couldn’t understand but agreed with. We felt so jaded on the trail, Ford and I, because it was a very large version of our yard. I guess we were hoping for a water feature or a cave or, um, more wildlife.