In 2000, the experts told us it would take on average about one year to conceive, after throwing the pills in the trash. I googled (on Yahoo, at the time) “trying to conceive” and followed my nose to babycenter, which suggested the use of a basal thermometer to predict the time of ovulation. On the way home from Point Reyes, I stopped off at the Long’s drugstore in Mill Valley and found a ten dollar basal thermometer on the bottom shelf. Smiling at the clerk, I stepped back out into the rain and into the world of possibility. I felt control and the hand of science on my shoulder.

Some mornings I awoke at six, to journal, and I’d forget to take my temperature until I was already comfortable on the sofa. Irritated, I’d drag myself back into the bedroom and wake Damon up with the tiny BEEP BEEP BEEPing. Then, I’d turn the corner, reach into the medicine cabinet, and pull out my chart. I’d have to squint my eyes to plot the coordinates.

Other mornings, I’d open my eyes to bright sunlight, staring at the ceiling with fatigue. The chart made its way to the bedside table, out of convenience, and the beeping and recording would commence. Those were dreamy mornings, before children, when the sun could rise up high in silence. When the scrub jays would wake me up, rasping among my zoo of potted geraniums, spilling over the balcony.

It only took one month, one spike. One night? Clockwork. Looking at Ford, as he sleeps with rosy red cheeks and a tangle of blonde curls beside me, I can’t say I wish it had taken longer. But it was a year-long program, and we took the weekend workshop. It wasn’t supposed to be this easy, and I, torn between pride and guilt, hysteria and fear, stood there staring at the pink line in the bathroom for ten minutes. The countertop was cluttered with tears and cosmetics, the pregnancy test commanding my focus. I looked up, smiling with red eyes and a wrinkled forehead, naked in every way, and carried the test to Damon. And the last thing I remember from that night was him, holding me and laughing, wondering why I was crying, running his fingers down his chin as he does when he’s trying to make sense of someone else’s imperfect logic. This time, however, with a hint of pride. We’d done good.

SPT

The lake today breathed a joyful sigh of peace before spring break arrives, next week, to slosh her with boat fuel, beer and music. Polly and I stood thigh-deep in the cold water, prattling about this and that, while Atticus and Ford rollicked on and off the diving platform. Chas and Tabitha teetered chest-high in the wakes from the occasional ski boats, the water slapped playfully against the banks and the youngsters, who didn’t seem the least appalled. What I thought was a minnow and then maybe a tadpole turned out to be a mayfly larva, swimming like a snake an inch below the surface. As I lifted it out of the water atop my palm, it walked along walked along my hand with surprisingly deft strength against the water’s surface tension. In order to take a closer look, Ford did something I cannot do anymore: he lifted the insect between his fingers and carried it away.

Most children enjoy letting slugs wander across their arms, caterpillars creep over fingers. Dad brought a jar of grasshoppers for the kids to play with last summer. Chas sat and picked them, one by one, out of the jar, letting them crawl all over himself. When I was Ford’s age, I remember picking up insects in this matter-of-fact way. I had Stag beetles, tarantulas, and pet grasshoppers, large, shiny red-on-black grasshoppers that I kept in mason jars. And then one day, I picked up an earthworm. It was cool, pinkish-brown and very long. I wondered at it’s sleekness, imagining that it could stretch to great lengths if it wanted to. So I pulled it gently between my fingers until it cracked in two places, exposing its tragic red insides to me. I remember dropping it, as I have seen Ford abandon his kill, only I felt sick. I still feel sick. I wonder what Ford feels, when his fingers erase another small life. Lifting him over the bank, as we were leaving, I noticed a very small gossamer wing on his arm.
(Sigh.) The mayfly?

It is midnight in early March, and I’m hearing what I can’t bring myself to believe: a mockingbird serenading outside on the telephone pole.

“Mom, where are we going?”
“We’re going to the store, so you can get a new hat and so I can get some yoga pants.”
“Why are you getting new pants?”
“Because Daddy says I look silly in those grey lounge pants, you know, the soft ones.”
“YOU DON’T LOOK SILLY! YOU LOOK AWESOME!” he yelled from the backseat. He yelled!

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.

The house is thick with testosterone, even when they are all sound asleep. At night, the clean scent of my lotion cuts through it like a warm knife through butter. In fact, I can barely smell a thing, it’s that subtle. But Damon will sit up in bed, half asleep, and declare, “I can’t take that smell! You don’t understand, it’s killing me.”

I’m outnumbered by men, three to one. And that’s not including the dogs, who (for the love of God) are not here right now. The boys are getting older, though, and more willful. Chas is already throwing flailing tantrums, of the head-bashing variety, when his brother takes the basketball away from him. Ford, for his part, is already a little man.

I was carrying my open laptop into the bedroom today and found him lying on my bed, watching some afterschool, non-PBS-type, commercial-interrupted cartoon show. I stood there, frozen in the doorway. And he just lay there, staring at the tv, oblivious to the screaming going on in my head. And I couldn’t help notice that his hand was, as usual, in his pants.

“Ford, this show has guns. You know how I feel about guns! I hate them. Guns and greed are the root of all evil.” Well, except testosterone, right?

“Well, Mom, you’ll just have to keep your eyes on the laptop, then, okay?”

Ford was his usual, curious self today, with the questions about Black Holes, wormholes and portals, wanting me to read A Brief History of Time to him so that we could dissect current knowledge together over peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. And then he sat still for a moment at lunch to ask the question,

“Mommy, does the sun love me?”

“Of course it does,” I replied cautiously, “Does the sun follow you around all day?”

“Yes.”

“And does the sun go to sleep with you at night?”

“Yes.”

I thought about this all day. How he takes apart our concept of the universe into fragments and puts the pieces back together (Big Bang theory, bits and pieces scattered, cooled, then formed planets; the sun is a dying star, etc) and reviews it out load (he did this with the digestive system to his pediatrician at his second annual checkup). I thought about the frequency of questions, these days, that I am unable to immediately answer. I thought about how uncomfortable I feel, anthropomorphizing the sun. I took a deep breath and started to paint. In a few minutes I felt much better.

As I pulled out of the parking lot tonight, I noticed the moon on the hill, squinting through the atmosphere in a sleepy haze. As I kept driving, damned if it didn’t surprise me in the way it followed me home. There was nothing usual about it. The sky was the color of the asphalt under my high-beams. Nobody else was on the road. The air, balmy and warm, smelled metallic and a light southeast breeze blew into the car at the stoplight. Winding my way home through the hills, the moon swung playfully left, and then right. It followed me out of my car and down the driveway and up to the stoop, before hiding behind the junipers. It tucked itself in, an hour ahead of the rain that followed. And then, Ford’s naive question made perfect sense.

At the park, Ford helped himself to another child’s sand toys while I was spotting Chas on the gym. I watched him engineer his play and block out the rest of the world, as I often try to do when I’m, say, typing on my laptop. So serious! I stood there smiling at him.
The other child’s mother, when I glanced up at her face, was smiling down on him also. Then she bent down to hand Ford a shovel.

“What’s your name?”
“That’s not important.” he responded, like a calculator.

A perfect fit into this week’s theme for Studio Friday: “PLAYTIME.” Even if it’s posted prematurely.

I am sitting atop a five year-old blue area rug as the timid, gangly librarian greets us with her friend, the fifty year-old once-purple spider puppet. Her eyes are so tiny that I find myself searching for the person beneath them, and out it peeks with a nervous giggle as she shifts her weight in the chair. Awkwardly, I encourage Chas to sing the Itsy Bitsy Spider; it’s surreal to be repeating this same archaic fingerplay with my children. I’m tired of this, and I’ll not reminisce about this moment when I am sixty-four. The Itsy Bitsy Spider has hung around the waterspout way too long, it needs a new venue, to broaden its horizons. I suggest setting sail for the Spanish riviera.

Ford is being patient as I tolerate the spider song. He understands the pain; I think he feels it himself. He tumbles in breakdance acrobatics around the three other mother-child pairs, threatening their two year-oldness with his four year-old rebellion. One mother flinches as Ford jumps in her face. What is he doing?! But wait! This is his method, and it’s difficult being completely objective when reacting so easy. But I call him closer. He jumps back in my direction, clearly to tell me off, and I find myself flinching.

“These songs are not my kind of songs. My kind of songs are…,” his straw-colored curls bounce and his eyes flare, “the White Stripes, and the Strokes, and Beck, and Kings of Leon….,”
Blood flushes to my face, and I find relief when I realize these mothers probably have never heard of Kings of Leon, much less trained their ears to understand the slurred lyrics (not that Ford has),
“…this music is na-nee na-nee BOH-ring…”