We’re a little culture starved around here, snug within the benign mycelium of silicon valley. Granted, if I’d just know where to look around here, I’d find something interesting on exhibit. But the truth is that I’m just acheing to go to a fussy art museum where I can feel the music of terrazzo under my feet and experience air conditioning without a trace of retail and ride that fabulous chase from security guard to security guard, close behind Chas, always on the fringe of expulsion as he tries to weave fast arcs around freestanding sculptures. Art is, after all, mostly about the personal experience one has with the piece, and with Chas there is no exception. He loves sculpture, it FASCINATES him to discover giant colorful pillars shooting from the ground or brushed-steel geometry shining in the sun. OH! The joy! Must scream and run circles around them all!

There’s one exhibit in particular that I’m planning on taking them to see sometime soon, the Matisse exhibit at the SFMOMA. Ford is a collage guru and I figure it might provide a springboard for translating some of his 2D work into a new dimension; specifically, creating something 3-dimensional that his younger brother might be tempted to play with (especially if it’s made of paper or papier-mache). But again, really, I’m just sad that we haven’t been able to go for so long, for fear that we might die during the struggle to patiently corral our children politely through a quiet space for art.

I think it’s more important that they experience art from a very young age for several reasons. First, I think it’s fun for them to see how some people have translated emotions or themes into art. Secondly, I like for them to understand the value and purpose behind the art process. Thirdly, I want them to grow to respect the work of others as well as their own art, because the enduring value of art is that it has the power to change the future in many ways: it can alter a person’s perspective, create controversy, quiet a restless mind, you get the idea. Lastly, I want them to evolve quickly within the rigid confines of the art museum institution so that they naturally respect that paticular environment as they would a shrine, an that is mostly because I’d LIKE TO ENJOY THE MUSEUM, TOO.

So, this weekend I’ve requested we pay the MOMA a visit, take our chances, hope for the best. There’s a book I heard about that recommends certain tips for taking 5 year-olds and older children to the museum, How to talk to children about art: is the title. As an art teacher, I feel qualified enough to come up with my own suggestions (which, in all it’s conceit, is actually true) but I’m still curious about what it has to say and am ordering it anyway.

Wish us luck! Double that for the MOMA.

I am traversing the eastern slope of Fremont Open space, and I’m walking along a terrace once trafficked perhaps by laborers on this former orchard as they roamed from tree to tree during harvest. What kinds of trees? I don’t know. Today their gnarled, leafless, stunted silhouettes stand arabesque upon the hill above me, black and static amid the flowing grasses, beneath the hovering falcon. Birdsong travels like a current over the terrain, bees are busy buzzing in the clover mats, hummingbirds fighting in the treelimbs. I stop along the trail while Seti sniffs the newspaper; it’s Sunday and the weeds hang with dog pee here and there along the worn trail. The entire hillside is tense with new life. You can almost feel the warm ground quake beneath you, a mycelium overtaking winter’s rot, aerating the bedrock, paving the way for shooting rhizomes and weeds. Little yellow wildflowers sway with glossy grass. If I were to try drawing three square inches of this space I might scream; beneath the mat of green urgency lies an even tinier world, a lilliputian army of plants and fungi working together to hold the soil firmly against the hillside. A linear delight, it reminds me of Dutch painting and discovering the architecture of dandelions and drawing for hours on end, without interruption. But today I’m plodding onwards, at times tugging the dog to urge him faster, so I might get back to unpack yet more boxes, and break down more boxes, making space in the mudroom for this naked and young morning light to pour into our house and penetrate the walls with its warm yawn.

Birthdays. They just keep getting sweeter. Alis and I celebrated our birthdays tonight by having a fondue party up at her place in the Santa Cruz mountains. I think we both might be missing the absence of the yearly Red & Chocolate party, which used to include a few more guests than just the ten of us that were there tonight. It’s normally such a wet, cold time of the year here, especially up in the mountains, where the rain freezes and sometimes turns to snow. But the weather is warmer this year. I cut a quince branch, already in flower, and attached it to the bow on her present. Fruit trees along the Saratoga avenues are white with blossoms, rolling hills at the open space preserve, where I run, are adorned in special corners with tiny pink and white buds, showering petals along the path. It’s already Spring and it’s righteous.

Every time I think it’s a beautiful day down here in the valley, I’m blown away when I step out of my car in her driveway up on Skyline ridge. For starters, there’s the quiet outdoor air there that’s almost deafening, like the sound of nighttime in the suburbs after two fresh feet of snow. After the birds have gone to roost, near dusk, I can almost hear my ears ringing (thanks due in part to Chas and to a lesser extent, Ford, the loudest children I’ve ever known). And then there’s the view. The breathtaking view that, were it not for the fog, would include the Pacific, beyond Santa Cruz.

Birthdays are sweeter and sweeter. I can cook in the same kitchen with my college buddy, smile about where we are right now, and look into the living room to see benchmarks we’ve left over the years since we met: solid ties with men that became important to us along the way; the three beautiful, vibrant children that this love made possible; our two little dogs who are getting older, followed by the ghosts we’ve grieved to tell goodbye, recently: three other dogs, a horse; a mother, a grandfather.

Turning 35 this year is the sweet little nudge in the arm, reminding me about babies and books and other priorities that can’t wait behind my hedonism. But I think this year I might start lying about my age. Alis and I made a deal: it’s not important for anyone to know. Except for the clerks at the grocery store, but I’ll tell them my age any time because they still card me when I buy groceries (which, I now realize, tells me that I buy entirely too much booze). 35 used to be old. But I’ve never carried myself better (thank you, yoga. why didn’t we meet sooner?) and my smile, most often, has a careworn grace to it that I am proud of, suggesting achievement and the attainment of purpose. I think motherhood did it to me.
…The rest of time I think I’m frowning, though, and I can attribute that to motherhood, too 😉

Damon, thanks for the photos! You’re getting gooood!

As it turns out, Ford hates school. He dreads it like a fat set of immunizations, asking every night whether the next day is a school day, telling me that he’s already feeling sick; he asks me every morning if it’s a school day, and tells me that he’s not going to school; he runs away from the classroom on some mornings, bolting back towards the car. This is a lot to pay, on top of tuition, for the three hours each morning that he is in “school.” In his defense, Ford says he’s “bored,” and that he doesn’t like the teacher, and the schoolroom “sucks,” along with the toys.nThey, apparently, “really suck.” Straight from the horse’s mouth, four going on fourteen.

And I just don’t know what to do about it. I thought this would do him a world of good. After all, I loved my Montessori years: feeding the animals, teaching myself to ride a bike, learning about different countries and fiedltripping to cotton gins and post offices. In fact, the only school years I like to reflect on are those freeform, user-paced, friendly three foot-high days. Really, my heart is in unschooling him and raising him on experience and one-on-one “lessons.” But we aren’t able to freewheel it around the globe for years at a time, immersing ourselves in the daily rhythms of various cultures, learning to make our rope hammocks in Bali, build fishing boats in New Zealand and forge our own stainless steel toenail trimmers in Germany. Who has that kind of independent wealth? If you’re in this group, don’t bother raising your hand because it’s already pressing my angry buttons.

I also don’t know whether Ford is telling me the whole truth. When I ask him,
“Ford, what did you guys do in circle time, you know, right after I dropped you off?”
“We didn’t do anything. We just sat there and stared at the walls.” Is his immediate and nonchalant reply. And when I asked him about the red bump on his noggin, he told me he got hit with a rock, “and no teacher noticed. Nobody cared.” Yeah. And when I asked him whom he sat with at lunch, on the second day of school, he replied: “Nobody. I didn’t sit next to anybody. Nobody cared about me.” Uh, huh. He follows with this raised eyebrow, sideways-glance. It looks like this: C’mon, Mom. Buy it! I’m so convincing! And you’re soooooo gullible!
For the record, I sat in today and watched the little rugrat in circle time. Lo! He did sit and stare at the wall. Complete disinterest! And I’m beginning to see why. He’s the eldest in his class, eccentrically focused on resistors, capacitors, stratacone volcanoes and molecules. He could care less about “learning to roll a rug” (which, according to Ford, he has practiced in circle time three days in the past week) and “how to walk in a line” (today’s lesson—something I thought he’d learn if he ever entered public school).

So, I’m in a conundrum about what to do with him. I’m a neurotic, borderline schizophrenic parent who plays devils advocate with herself and her decisions. I can’t decide what’s best for Ford. I think I’m deciding for my own reasons, at this time, since those few morning hours are well-spent laughing uninterrupted with Chas, helping him learn to pour rice down a funnel and into empty cups, feeding the chickens, reading books and brushing little teeth. I like this time alone with him. But the situation is not ideal for all of us, and I’m left feeling guilty at the end of the day that I just can’t figure out what’s best for my child. After all, isn’t this really my job? I can’t seem to get the hang of parenthood; it constantly throws me curveballs.

I wonder, staring across the house while I do dishes: how do some parents exhibit such
conviction in their decisions? What makes me so neurotic? Is it all a matter of self-esteem, for my part, or is it just pigheaded perfectionism? With the huge parent market out there, it seems that keywords such as “THOSE CRITICAL FIRST YEARS” and “HOW TO BUILD YOUR BABY’S BRAIN” and “DON’T YOU WANT WHAT’S BEST FOR YOUR BABY?” have anchored in my brain, flailing wildly around the canyons of doubt, to echo, “DON’T FUCK THEM UP! IT’S ALL UP TO YOU! DON’T FUCK THEM UP!” Even though my teeny rational brain, tucked away in my frontal lobe somewhere in a fold, is meanwhile repeating the mantra in a soft whisper, “It’s not up to you, how the kids turn out. I mean, it’s your job to give them security and love, but they will evolve for themselves out of experience—it’s not what you hand them, it’s how they process what they’ve got to work with.” Or something like that. It’s hard to tell, because I can’t really hear it under all that screaming.

So…I guess the pivotal part of my job becomes clearer amid the conflict: staying sane.

We’ve lived in this rental house for a year now, and the place is finally beginning to fit like a glove. Though a temporary rental (we begin building this year on a lot down the road), we have given it our patina. We have adopted and lost two pet fish here, but also begun raising the chicks, who have, for their part, done a tremendous job connecting us with the outdoors. In mid-July. In Texas. Which seems entirely difficult, given the heat, but by God we have learned to enjoy it and sweat it out. By the bucketsful.

Today in a tube dress, straw hat, pigskin gloves and flip flops, I cut and nailed rolls of galvanized builder’s cloth to the pesto-colored poultry tractor. As I tatted away in the shade, the little chiquitas chased each other for earwigs, sometimes peeping quietly by my side, asking for a wing. Boo, the bold one (because they really do have different personalities), flit perch-by-perch to my neck, where she inquisitively pecked at my moles and freckles. The other two weaved around the timber, little Buffalo shortshanks they’ve become, content to scratch around my workspace, dusting themselves occasionally in a patch of dark topsoil, peeping their quick, velvety peeps of contentment.

I’ve gotten to know the deer, who rarely make themselves seen anymore, much less sleep with their twin baby fawns out in our front yard (they did this daily, last year) but still continue to eat the runner beans, flowerheads, morning glories, sweet potato vines and god-knows whatever gourd/pumpkin/squash seedlings I tried to grow from seed. They continue to surprise me, sometimes grazing feet from me as I jog along the trails, with their fawns stumbling close behind them and at other times, sneaking about like elves in the moonlight, grazing tiptoe across the lawn.

I am finally proud of the boy’s room. Finally, because it has never felt, no matter where we have lived, to be their own– it has always been a post between travels: en route from the bathroom, to fetch a toy before going to the living room; the halfway point between breakfast and brushing, where they can dilly dally five minutes while I clean, playing with forgotten toys. Never has their room been theirs in the sense of belonging until we added the bunk bed. That was two weeks ago.

In the time that’s passed, since the purchase of the bunk bed, the room has taken shape into a sleep playground and a place to stay and play. The quilt my mother made during the 1972 summer Olympics (when she was pregnant with me) is now draped over the top bunk rail, making Chas’ lower bunk the sleep fortress. Before naps I lay there and read to them as they scramble over me like lion cubs, and I, heavy with exhaustion, lay there and read. At night, I sit at the foot of the bottom bunk, reading Grimm and Anderson by the light peeking out of the closet. I’m surrounded by goose down and log pillows and quilting and childbreath and the warm pads of feet resting against my legs. Ford is content to lay in the bunk above while I read “because there are no pictures in the book” but also because he delights in his new space to sleep. The sleep king, who has to be awakened in the morning because he is so heavily renewing his energy during the night.

When I pause mid-Ugly Duckling, I ask “Ford?” and listen for an answer. Only the soft sound of a stuffed nose: slowly in, slowly out, waltzing in the summer nightmusic of the air conditioner, turning pages and other little snores here and there (I think Damon must be asleep, too, now). I reach over to rest the book under the bed. The floor beneath the bed has become a charter library: The Story of Pooh, The Story of Ping, Aeson/Grimm/Anderson classics, Baby Animals, Hedgie’s Surprise, Make Way for Ducklings, Blueberries for Sal. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek makes a cameo appearance.

The place feels like home in the way I’m starting to settle in: a mixed bouquet the color of sunrise on the kitchen table; the way I can make stovetop coffee blindfolded; clothespin artwork to the back deck’s lattice, and hang my jewelry to a piece of driftwood in a windowsill in the bathroom; I smile to see Damon shepherding his harware in the garage, replacing stagnant unused stuff with the stimulus of welders and grinders and routers and saws, all in singlefile attention. Some people settle in quickly to a new domicile, but I think we’ve grown jaded to constant change. After all, we lived for a year in a 22-ft. trailer. With a baby. We want a sense of permanence so badly against the the tech industry flux. Here, we can at least afford to stay; it’s now only a matter of believing that roots are, beneath all our lingering doubt, indeed growing.

I was a free-range child, roaming on foot and bike throughout the neighborhood like most kids did. We were barefoot with scabs on our toes from the Big Wheels, flags forever flapping behind us on our bicycles. We came home for popsicles. There was a corner of the yard where we corralled box turtles, but we were always hunting for more. But we sold other reptiles: anolis were 10 cents; geckos I sold for twenty-five cents in class. I kept them in coffee cans. Back then, I thought the smell of the coffee cans was gross, like metallic urine.

Free-range days continued once we moved to Houston, but the experience matured quickly. I discovered perverts in fourth grade when a man approached me and asked me to follow him to his van. Sitting on the bench opposite me and my brother, he smiled confidently and touched my hand. Asshole. Sadly, he was only the first jerk to taint my adolescence, but I’m still alive and I was never seriously molested as a child. But I read stories all the time about those less fortunate than me.

I can smile as I look out the window at the boys in the backyard. They run half-naked around the house, building mud volcanoes on the deck, lava plumes in the rivulets running off into the woods.
What will I do when they’re able to bike around our neighborhood? What will I do when I can’t supervise them?

I arrive in Houston at six o’clock, scarf down a plate of italian sausage and spaghetti and my parent’s house, and escort mom to the Gees Bend exhibit at the MFAH. We have an hour before the museum closes and I get momenntarily lost navigating my way to the museum’s new addition, through the same corridors I used to browse with a trail of small children in my teaching days at the Glassell School, across the street. It’s embarrassing and I smile to an Asian security guard who doesn’t seem to remember me this time.

The glossy terrazzo floor reflects little observational discussions, the tapping of fancy shoes and the muted cast of each bold, vibrant quilt in this collection. And boy, are they something. If the colors and assymetry of the quilts don’t immediately make you smile, look closer.

If you have a sensitive conscience, then you have questioned the way we live today: the overlooked luxury in each car parked in the driveway and the way you can choose your way each day, the piles of fashion magazines and the excess clothes, garages filled so full of crap because the house is spilling over and space is limited– this is the typical American family way of life (not that I am the exception) and this is a way of life that starves people of happiness and groundedness and peace. I think about this a lot and was brought to tears when I listened to an interview with one of the quilters as I scrutinized a soulful patch of denim in a quilt, a piece taken from a pair of worn-out blue jeans, that included the dark blue ghost of a pocket, the reminder of the fabric’s former life. I wanted to run my hands along the seams, feeling the backbone of handiwork and sweat and conversation that birthed these colorful objects. I cradled the idea of reuse, inspiring the happy purist in me.

I thought about the stiff smell of rows upon rows of fabric bolts, the angst of shopping for the perfect hue, specialty scissors and quilting stores with basketfuls of fat quarters in every imaginable print: cats drinking milk, cats dancing, cats pouring milk, cats stargazing, cats chasing balls of yarn, cats chasing mice, cats napping, cats making me dizzy with a cascade of possibilities, for some reason(pardon me if cats are your thing–and I still think cats are cool). I thought about my own sleeping, shelved monster of a fabric stash. I thought of the closetful of clothes in my bedroom that I will never wear again but refuse to give away, holding them for some special deconstruction but not finding the time just yet. And so they sit there, looking stale. And smelling about the same. I think I vowed right there to boycott the purchase of any more fabric from a store or supplier for a good, long time–at least until I can manage to recruit much of what I already have. You know the old adage, Waste Not, Want Not. I mean, I value the use of new fabric for projects (and man, can some of you SEW!) but for now, I will value myself more if I downsize.

Plummer Pettway 1918-1993 “Roman Stripes, variation (local name: “Crazy” Quilt) cotton twill, denim, cotton/ polyester blend, synthetic knit (pants matieral), 86 x 70 inches.

These isolated women had only the outgrown and worn-out clothes and bolts of local fabric (I think Sears once gave them bolts of the avocado fabric that shows up in nearly one hundred of the collection’s quilts). One of the quilters, in the interview I was listening to, struggled as she tried to convey what it was like not to have much of anything to work with. Work shirts, blue jeans, feed sacks–nothing was wasted. Nothing.

I smiled to read little excerpts about the children, sitting on the front porch beneath the quilting table, watching the needle poke through the underside of the quilt. I told Ford about the way the children (who became the artists of these quilts) picked up scraps of fabric that had fallen to the floor and began making little quilts of their own, right there on the floor. “We didn’t have much, but we was happy” echoed similarly among them. And I still get tears to remember one woman share her surprise in knowing that someone else besides herself appreciates them, not to mention put them up on a wall.

Missouri Pettway, 1902-1981. Blocks and strips work-clothes quilt, 1942, cotton, corduroy, cotton sacking material, 90 x 69 inches. Missouri’s daughter Arlonzia describes the quilt: “It was when Daddy died. I was about seventeen, eighteen. He stayed sick about eight months and passed on. Mama say, ‘I going to take his work clothes, shape them into a quilt to remember him, and cover up under it for love.’ She take his old pants legs and shirttails, take all the clothes he had, just enough to make that quilt, ahd I helped her tore them up. Bottom of the pants is narrow, top is wide, and she had me to cutting the top part out and to shape them up in even strips.” –both quilt images from Auburn Universitys: Quilts of Gees Bend in Context’s website.