And the Magic Word is...

“Poof!” Rem shouts to no one and everyone. “I am the Cat in the Hat!” Instantly transformed by means of a yellow hat and a Mardi Gras umbrella, he begins quoting lines from the book. “Have no fear! I will not let you fall.” And I watch him grab a book and put his foot on a ball to mimic the mischievous character before falling to the ground with a big grin. He embodies these characters of his with great conviction, never for a second believing that we could mistake him for anything other than the current personality he is portraying.


“Make that cat go away,” I improvise, as I continue folding the insurmountable load of laundry beside me on the couch.


“I will show you another good game that I know,” Rem says, jumping up before he vanishes.

Lise walks in and hands me homework to look over and sign. Rem, still wearing the yellow felt hat, returns to the living room with a Lego box and announces with great bravado that he will show us what is inside. He lifts the lid and eyes us expectantly as, out of the box, he explains, come Things One and Two. Lise reluctantly shakes hands with the invisible trouble makers before disappearing with her completed work.


The game continues until Miren, trying to practice piano, fortuitously cries that, “Our mother is near! I saw her. So do something fast!” Rem scrambles to retrieve his little push car and begins cleaning the mess and soon, we all hope, the game will end. Before I have put all of the laundry away I hear him shout again.

“Poof! I am Captain Hook!” He emerges from his room in a pink bathrobe with a foam sword sheathed in one of the belt loops and wearing Miren’s oversized straw hat backwards (the orange chiffon scarf dangling in front of his face). He is all fierceness and hilarity. He busily eludes the crocodile and searches for Peter Pan while trying to engage his sisters in a duel.


Later, Rem finds me in the kitchen and, discarding his pirate garb on the floor, reaches his arms upward so that I will pick him up.


“Poof,” he says, rather exhausted. “I am just Rem.”


After a long week of playing nursemaid to various family members (fate’s ugly retribution for my recent boasting of my family’s good health), I, too, want to say “Poof!”


Maybe I’d find myself in Paris, the feel of the city’s ancient and new dust on my skin, the smell of patisseries and boulangeries heavy in the air. I see myself as clearly as Rem sees himself in his many roles, sitting at a table on the sidewalk in the Marais, with the plat du jour in front of me and a carafe of the house wine nearly empty as Craig and I talk about our long, eventful day. Craig speaks with enthusiasm about the Pompidou Centre, the architecture and the modern art collection and we sigh over the works in the Louvre where we stood as close to the paintings as the masters themselves. Tired from the museum rush and the long stroll through the Tuilieres we still rise from the table anxious to meander along the Seine and enjoy the city as the moon ascends above the city lights.


“Poof!” Now I sit on the beach on an unusually warm October day. A book sits open on my lap but my eyes are fixed on the rush of water as it makes its way toward me over the sand. The ocean breeze, as it rustles through the grasses behind me and the rhythmic movement of water drown out any other sounds that may be floating in the air.The beach is empty apart from a dog running ahead of its owner some distance away, whose steps take them further and further from the scene until I feel quite alone and serene. I dig my toes into the warm sand and feel the mellow autumn sun’s heat press into my skin. Before long, I find myself ambling along the irregular, fluid edge of the water oblivious to measurable time and its constraints.


“Poof!” Rem wriggles free from my arms. “I am a fairy. And you are the fairy’s mommy. You have to find my magic wand!”

Home Tours

The promise of sunshine and Craig's casual mention of his plans for the day over a cup of coffee lead to Rem and I accompanying him to a current job site. The pleasant drive extends just long enough to feel like an excursion and Rem happily occupies himself with a pair of binoculars in the back seat. The home, near completion, greets us under a bright blue sky, most of the morning fog having burnt off of the slope. Craig brought me to this site once before in the evening after a nearby party. We walked through the skeleton of a house, just under roof, but still a collection of lines as if just risen from Craig's framing plan. And yet, I knew the spaces from the drawings Craig walked me through at length, even as darkness swept through the wood members that stood simply as a suggestion of the home to come. I am used to following Craig through spaces in his head and any amount of physical support brings a structure to life. The actual built spaces continue to surprise me in their amazing similarities to the earliest sketches but also in the revelations I never seem to anticipate.

Rem follows Craig from the yellow truck, forcing his hands into the mini-pockets of his toddler jeans to mimic his father as they saunter across the gravel drive to the house.

"Are we going to live here?" Rem asks, hopeful.

The scattering of ladders, empty buckets and unopened cans of finish and paint do not hinder my ability to fully see the home. The universal smells of new construction string together happy recollections of my own childhood and adult experiences of sheet rock and sawdust, wood finish and paint thinner.

Craig walks us through quickly before becoming engaged with the contractor and punch lists. Rem and I leave him and together search for Craig in the details of the house. The house, for this purpose, is for me at its most ideal: almost complete yet empty. Craig's vision still permeates, not yet obscured by the client's infusion of the personal accouterments that will make it his own.

Craig's own love of our mountains insures that the client will never lose his sense of this particular mountain setting. Roof lines, clean and pitched in harmony with the ridges beyond also allow the house to rise and fall with the slope, underscoring Craig's aversion to disrupting a site's character with excessive grading. I see Craig present in the prominent, dry-stacked, indigenous stone fireplaces that mark, in individual ways, the symbolic center of his homes. We admire the double sided fireplace that at once anchors all of the public spaces from its post in the living room and creates an intimate coziness for the screened porch on the other side. Rem likes that he can fit inside both. From the outer deck, I indicate the exclamation point, the monumental concrete cap.

Rem loses interest and we chase imaginary bears off of the stone floor of the screened porch and along the wooden bench of the outer deck. We pretend to picnic while enjoying the extensive view of the parkway and the layers of dense fog that linger in spots, suppressing valleys and the lower ridges from the blue sky we are already enjoying.

With the promise of a staircase to climb, I entice Rem back into the house and enjoy the play of light that the abundant glass ushers in. The living snapshots delight us in every room and I anticipate the change of seasons that will rotate through each window. I point to a turkey as it meanders through a stand of trees from one side of the house and catch my breath at the distant snow-encrusted peaks from a bedroom at the opposite end of the house. Craig refuses no one the pleasure of the natural beauty that surrounds the site and from the bathrooms and kitchen, too can the resultant joy of a dramatic sunset or the gradual gratification of the creeping spread of dawn be experienced.

Craig rejoins us as he snaps photos for a field report and Rem rejoices in his foresight to bring binoculars as they easily double as a digital camera of his own and he opens closet doors, snapping pictures for his own report. Too soon do we part. Rem sleeps as Craig and I alternately list the rest of the day's activities. Moments suffice for now. One day we will string them together into happy recollections and the rest, we'll smile over and wish we wouldn't have worried so much.