We are going camping this weekend, our first camping trip since we became parents. Although the campground is beautiful and luxurious and coastal, we are fortunate in that it is an hour away from home, forty miles as the crow flies from our house westward towards the Pacific.

I spent the entire morning searching for my sleeping bag. In the end, where would I find it? In the garage, in a tall box with the words written on the side in a black Marks-A-Lot:

WELDING JACKET
+
WEDDING DRESS

Of course!

Have a wonderful weekend, everybody. And may your clutter be so happily married!

An early morning trek to Santa Cruz, but we were still too late for swapmeet. The omen walked past as we were unlatching the children from the carseats: a teenage guy carrying a shiny aluminum tricycle. You just know the good stuff is going, going, gone. And for the most part, it was. But the garlic fries bufed the bitter edge, and we still managed to have fun poking around atticfuls of yesterday. Alis and I flirted with two cute plant geeks hawking boutique perennials from their watsonville nursery, and I selected a naughty little eggplant penstemon and another plant I still can’t pronounce.

We lunched at the Saturn diner, bouncing on the vinyl seats and throwing quarters at the pinball machine, downing yummy amber pints and and more garlic fries.

Afterwards: Derby park. Just before the big kids started to file in, some of them hungover and sobering up atop sunny expanse of a wide blanket. Ford is getting more confident, now sliding down the bowls and taking turns with the highschoolers. Wide boards are the fashion here, with small wheels (not too Penskey!). They stand on the edge of the concrete and smile at Chas, who is playing with a notaLego skateboard (HELO, made in Mexico, bought for small change at swapmeet) atop his deck. I’m drawing in my sketchbook and Alis is chasing Seth. Jim is reading a magazine and getting very sleepy. Damon is with Ford. I’m heavy with satisfaction.

After a day-long playdate, when we are pooped and our eyes are closing and our tummies are falling asleep, one picture can say it all, as we quietly drift off into slumberland. Goodnight! I hope your day was as fun as ours!

It’s an inexpensive easel, Ikea sells them for twenty dollars and some stores sell them for as low as ten, but there’s not a better tool in this house for creativity than it, save what the kids thrift from leaves and mud and berries within the matrix of their imagination (you’d be surprised to find what can be made into homemade paint and collage). I set the easel in the mudroom, facing due west and in full sun and bright light for the better part of the day. In the chalkbasin at the bottom of the board I let the children leave stubby black and white caran d’ache crayon segments, sometimes a random red or primary stump. Today there are two brush pens inside as well, painted black from another day’s painting session, and now it’s your guess which one is red and which is pale blue.

Chas is in the studio but I can’t see him through the glass window. I am standing in the living room holding his shoes and socks, ready to find him and sit him on my lap and finish dressing him to play outside. He hears me and responds, I see a mop of strawberryblonde dreads bounce behind the table and out he emerges on the other side, slapping his fat little feet along the cold concrete floor like a happy hobbit running for high tea. He rounds the door and passes in front of the easel and skids to a halt, almost stumbling over himself. A piece he worked on earlier in the day: one large circle, spined like a black urchin, and two smaller circles in the corner. He feverishly grabs a red pen and scribbles away meticulously first, then faster and faster until he jolts to a halt and pauses with pen in hand. He mutters something that I cannot hear, looking at the page, a validation perhaps, nodding to himself. He caps the pen, sets it back into the chalkbox with matched intensity, and continues at a dead run into the laundry room where, by echolocation, he finds me.

I am holding a ladybug vivarium in my hands. It is a tall glass vase filled with quince branches and the dry twigs of a grapefruit tree, the diced green onion tips, shrouded with a black veil of aphids, and the contents of the ladybug bucket, those thrown in at the last minute and left to settle autonomously, which it has already begun doing, the ladybugs crawling over each other and the carnage of a week in captivity in a labryrinthine race braiding through bug and brush to the sunlight above. At the top of the vase I have taken a newspaper rubber band and turniquited the opening with a square sample of gauzy purple polyester. Ladybugs are scaling the top of the vase, their tiny feet gripping the fabric as they head the escape reconnaisance. To placate them, I slip four halves of soaked raisins, which they hone in on, with deft purpose as if by program, and begin to slurp up the sweet juice. Meanwhile, a drop of water placed atop the polyster floats with all structural integrity and maintains its globular shape as ladybugs descend upon it, dock and drink in the quiet silence of satiation.

Chas and I put on shoes and walk together into the garden, and I set the ladybugs down upon the grass. I open the lid and watch as fifty-odd shiny ladybugs whizz out the mouth of the vase, landing in my forearms, shoulder, eyebrows, knees. One bites me on the hand and I flick it off into the bush. Everywhere, crawling bugs, and the green onion remains a smorgasbord.

When enough have flown the terrarium, I stretch the rubber band over the fabric, spread it taut and drip another drop of water atop the lid. Thirsty ladybugs begin honing again upon it. And Chas continues to laugh in the grass, crawling himself with fifty-odd ladybugs as they roam his sunny toddlerscape. He giggles and drools accidentally. At his sooty bare feet, ladybugs congregate in a drying puddle of water, irrigation from hours ago, some with noses to the ground and tails pointing skyward, devout and transfixed.

In the sleeping house at midnight I finish folding a load of whites on top the dryer, which is already humming to a new heap of wet laundry. There is a stack of dishtowels one foot high and I pick up a prefold diaper, still warm and soft from the basin, and I hold it by the corners and let it hang lengthwise, bring it to my chest and take either corner inwards, folding the diaper into itself. My muscles on autopilot after years of memory, I turn the top three inches or so down and then fold the entire thing in half. Now it is ready for a bottom and a snappi fastener, and I set it down onto the stack of towels and frown at the anomaly. Because Chas hasn’t worn diapers in over six months now. And a small part of me frets that he never will again, a very small part of me called Insane. I pick the prefold off the top of the pile and sling it over my shoulder, walk into the kitchen and start to tidy the bar, a cuttingboard still wet with lime juice and cut spearmint, dribbles of rum on the white hexagonal tile counter, sticky now with mostly sugar remaining from the spills.

Outside the open windows on a windless fifty-degree midnight, a mockinbird hammers away atop some neighborhood perch, several doors down, hawking himself witlessly from every persuasion and to absolutely no end. After all these spring midnights since, filled with hours of mockingbird song in pitch black, and there are many in the expanse of fifteen springs, I always remember walking my bike from the architecture building on my way back home down the middle of an old college hill street in Providence, laughing and talking to a classmate about a project under the passing streetlights, to the swelling soliloquoy of a crazed mockingbird just days before finals. Tonight I am there again under pink falling blossoms, anticipating phantom critiques in the morning. My stomach is in giddy knots, I can’t sleep.

The bucket of ladybugs is sitting on Ford’s lofted bed in the cool north exposure, the hundreds of ladybugs awake now in the advancing daylight and ravenously crawling over each other in the mysterious nutrient-shavings the were packaged with. I lay on Ford’s bed looking out the window now into the sunny patio as the boys flip pages in picturebooks atop the bed beside me in the quiet spot of our schedule just after lunch. At the top of a middle pane of glass, just under the white wooden frame, a bright red ladybud scales the perimeter and it is surely looking for that colony of aphids in that cluster of chives on the other side of the house. Or just a way to get outside, I reason. I roll my head back towards the bucket of ladybugs on the bed. Crawling as they ever were, teeming with purpose. A few unfortunate bugs are carelessly macerated between the clear lid and the bucket. Ford.

I pick up Island of the Blue Dolphins and leaf to the first page of the first chapter and begin to read. Words cascade off the page while I stand on a remote island in the Pacific northwest somewhere on a typically windy day, and I look out onto the glassy sea to find a ship with two red sails. But I know what a ship is. And I wonder what I would imagine this thing to be if I had never seen a ship before, and as I wonder out loud I ask the same question of Ford, who has begun to watch Seti ram his wet nose into the glass window at the foot of the bed in a senseless pursuit of a housefly. Chas is no longer listening either, and he has cracked a smile at the dog, along with his brother, as Seti continues to buffett the windowpane with ears all a tonic and the tenacity of an inbred terrier. I lay the book on my chest and the boys reel in delight as Seti smacks his lips and eats the stupid fly.

Ford and Chas have two buckets of ladybugs in their hands at the local nursery and they are looking at the hundreds of them crawling inside the bucket. The bucket is filled with shavings and they tilt the container round like a gyroscope on some invisible axis before them, trying to see all those ladybugs as if in an effort to count them all the clear platic tub, behind the bilengual paragraphs of instructions and disclaimers and branding on the package’s outer skin. I have found a boutique huechera, Key Lime Pie, and return to my own set of disclaimers with narrowed eyes for a few seconds before their intense excitement catches up to their awe. Chas has redefined priorities and the circular sprinkler attachment, the one he has been carrying around for fifteen minutes: brown plastic with ten black prongs, used in this manner as an alien spacecraft, is laid to rest momentarily on the nursery’s potting table, beside eight other buckets of ladybugs. Ford has set a diode battery-powered dragonfly necklace with blinking red light on the table already. The area has become a still life, a shelf of curiosities for the young collector.

“Mommy, can we get some ladybugs? we really need a whole bunch of ladybugs for those aphids in the chives. Please, mom?” Ford pleads and Chas steps up behind him, “Yeah, dey’re so tool! We got a WOT of wadybugs Ford, huh? Yeah! Wet’s go put em in de aphids in a gawden now Arrrr! Jus wike in ‘Bug’s Wife’ huh?! (begins to reenact a scene from said movie, very physically carrying the ladybug bucket into his character as he stomps down an aisle of shade-tolerant plants, splattering water puddles along the way. Ford continues to peer in through the clear plastic container while I watch Chas roam, half my face smiling and biting my lip at the same time.

The winding drive down 92’s western slope was typically satisfying, the exuberant decline through the winding fertile gap towards Half Moon Bay set me reeling for the low tide, earmarking time later in the day for the nursery that I breathlessly passed along the way.

We plop down immediately on the beach and the boys begin carving into the coarse, wet sand. In the distance, atop the rocks on the outer reef, gray harbor seal pups shimmy up to their enormous basking mothers and settle back down. The surging surf swells back into the ocean, returns seconds later, breaks upon the shining boulders and the seals hoist flippers above the white surf. The boys are building alien spacecraft and reenacting battle. I am sitting crosslegged, smelling a rotting rockfish that I hadn’t yet noticed, which is drying in the noontime sun and it’s close enough to where we are sitting that I can discriminate white swim bladder tangled in other viscera. We have so many bags, we just sat down, the boys are building. There is no sense moving yet, until they stop playing and notice the smell. I put my book down and walk to the upper intertidal pools.

You aren’t supposed to pick up rocks. Beneath rocks, small animals hide during low tide. To pick up a rock undermines their efforts to survive; anything can come along and notice them in this hostile little pool, which is heating up by the minute, already a stressful enough for any small Pacific animal stranded in a small pool, and the salinity is heightening at the same time. It is a small, ragged rock perched in the middle of the very shallow pool.

Still, I pick up the rock. The kids aren’t watching me. Nobody is watching me. I feel like I’m trying to rob a bank in this kind of stealth. I lift the rock gingerly about six inches above the pool. A small crab crouches, freezes. A serpentine fish slinks into the nearest algae frond. I take the half dollar-sized crab and transfer it to a neigboring pool so that it can hide again, and turn to examine the fish.

It’s small, the length of my index finger, the width of a chopstick. It is brown, with a tiny tailfin and a cerebral noggin, eyes set close and undoubtedly fixed on me, perhaps my own eyes. I think it’s pouting. In the dark shadow of the red algae I can barely discern other features, but I know enough; this is a monkeyface eel.

I search for a vacant space and set the rock down, a few inches from where it once stood. By this time, the kids are tossing sand at each other and before I can reach the dispute, Chas is screaming about the sand in his eyes that Ford threw, and Ford is laying a screaming claim on his innocence. Time for lunch.

It is midmorning and the boys whine in disappointment as they watch the highschoolers slip quietly down and up again in the Sunnyvale skatepark bowls, their slaps, skids and rolls hushed behind the windows of the Golf. Why the kids weren’t in school, I couldn’t explain. Perhaps they were college students? Or homeschoolers? One thing was certain: I couldn’t place my younglings in the bowl’s bottom while a pack of adolescent men bombed around them at high speed, flipping boards here and there, sometimes missing catch, and pitching their whim against my maternal fear.

So we trudged homewards and took an unexpected left at the last intersection before our road, heading hopefully towards our neighborhood park, and when I was one block from the park I realized that my intuition rang true: It’s the perfect preschooler skatepark because of a fifteen foot landscaped berm inset with a spiral sidewalk leading up to a bench on top, perfect for idly skating down and safe by all measures.

Three hours later we lie in bed, and I’m exhausted from reading to them but they are nonetheless climbing like cubs over me, ready for more stimulus. Mentally drained as well as physically, I shuffle down from their lofted domain and idly brew an espresso, that I might match their might, but in a half hour’s time I’m merely irritable and tired, so we lived the late afternoon in a disharmonious rut; the boys, fighting not so much for the right of their individual wills but probably more for my undivided attention and I, weak from my own mental slump, puttering among household tasks and small ambitions. By five-thirty I have a glass of wine, amble into the garden with the boys, notice that the deer have mowed all but the basal eight inches off all the tomato plants and the entirely of the paprika achillea (they didn’t touch the yellow one in the ground beside it). I handed Ford the pepper spray and he sprayed with robust purpose while chas whacked the potted ferns with a black plastic bat. Seti lay on the grass gnawing on a panel of redwood from the rotting firewood stack.

By the sun’s setting I found myself serenely watching the quail out the studio window, nice benchmark that is for dusk, and detoxing on a second installment of bottled water while Damon and the boys skated at the elementary school across the road, by now empty of all children save mine. Peace found in the quietude of their silent grazing, I watch the quail weave their way darker into the thick of our hedgerow.

It rained last night, throughout the night and into the morning, until the sun poked through the snivelling stratus and proclaimed that it was no longer a time of grieving. So the rain packed up and moved eastward, I’m told. And in its wake, the starlings came back out of hiding among the ivy boughs, and the quail promenaded atop the dewy lawn, properly.

For the past three weeks we have had occasional rains, and each time the pitter pattering begins above our heads on this old roof, we tell ourselves, “This is the last rain of the season.” That was the last rain of the season.

Speaking of proper, this is a blog where I am obliged to to log a chronicle of events, and I missed the holy weekend of Easter. I’ve been called on this, so let me indulge you people on what you missed, heretofore two weeks.

Alis threw Seth an Easter rager. Thirty-odd toddlers turned every stone and log looking for eggs and chocolate on the Whitman commons that straddle Skyline ridge. She spent the week beforehand sewing fleece easter bunnies and dying eggs in pots of boiled beets and onionskins and cabbageleaves. On other nights, she wrapped heirloom seeds in tulle and tied them to colorful tongue depressors, and when she was busy wrapping little pots of violas and wheatgrass with tissue paper and hand-painted yarn, she enlisted friends to string wooden beaded bracelets into the wee hours or, as in my case, stand in her kitchen, slackjawed and dumbfounded, to gawk at all the hard work she really put into this fete while she dyed yet more gorgeous eggs.

Which is all to say that my boys cared neither here nor there about any of this, on that particular day, the day of the hunt, as they poked and prodded through the Lamb’s Ears and Lilies until they found all forms of chocolate, but that we girls, and by that I mean me( because I was trying not to notice my younger competition) secretly dashed through the garden like a pixie, collecting shiny glass beads and seed packets, purple-and-orange violas and wheatgrass pots, slipping them inconspicuously into Chas’ easter basket while he gorged on his gold, his precious chocolate. Occasionally I’d urge him to pick up a seed packet that I’d found, and he’d probe the entire area first for chocolate, certain that I had scouted for nothing other, and finally reach for the only thing hidden in the foliage, which was indeed the seed packet and which he indeed picked up. For me!

And so, with seeds to plant, I’m faced by the bare patches of three quarterempty flowerbeds, spared just for such purpose, and the blank face of a front and back yard, freshly plowed by a thirty year-old and rusting tractor with a likewise rusted and ringing plow, just days ago before the rain fell. I see mounds upon which to plant two to three ppumpkins seeds apiece. Give or take a melon.

I have tenacious, hard callouses on my hands from three weekends ago, when we spent the rest of Easter weekend in Pebble Beach, playing drunk barefoot tennis doubles into the black of night. I’m not sure how I didn’t bleed through my feet by bedfall, on those heavy, luxurious sheets; on the contrary, my feet tingled as if they’d been freshly shorn of three old inches of thick hide. Perhaps they were?. Indeed, the rest of me felt that idyllic; it’s fun having rich friends with third homes nestled in the surreal beauty of California’s monterrey bay peninsula. We drove home along the coastal highway bisecting the prim acres of golfing lawn and the rugged, emerald blue jumble of ocean and guano-stained rock and the white froth of my amazement. Acres upon acres of blooming artichoke and fruiting strawberries, laborers scattered along the endless rows that stretched inland, hunched over the produce like props. Surreal produce signs with enormous specimens that seemed to shine from the light of the sun itself, which glared down sternly upon us as we shook off the two day hangover that only an irresponsible weekend in someone else’s mansion in someone else’s neighborhood could bring.