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.
