Birthdays

Rem woke yesterday morning with a sense of purpose and importance, arriving as he did, to the grown up world of three. He presented the rest of the family with an evening of much needed amusement as he exclaimed with joy and appreciation at each dollar item his sisters had chosen for him from the bins at Target. He entertained us by singing one of his Kindermusik favorites, “Bumping Up and Down in my Little Red Wagon” as he relaxed in said wagon sent from Slidell wearing a plush robe and doing his best Hugh Heffner impersonation as each of us took turns taking him from room to room in the house. The cake he fantasized over for weeks met his expectations and he proudly pointed to the worms he made that sat curled in the dirt cake bearing a remarkable resemblance to the dead worms in the driveway that he suggested we use as models for the marzipan.


Rem’s savory birthday moments played alongside my vivid memories of that sunny day in May three years or a moment ago. Passed, unaware from sister to sister and grandmother to grandfather, back to father and again to mother, that little thing, folding in on himself and with a head full of dark hair, sleepily passed the first hours of life in the unabashed glow of a mother’s high. Those early minutes, as full as a Pollack painting and as equally difficult to label, indelibly pressed themselves into the limitless memory of my motherhood.

The more birthdays my children celebrate the more apparent it becomes to me that while parties and presents may be special to the celebrant, birthdays truly belong to parents. Whether carefully planned or surprisingly spontaneous, the consequential moment of birth forever etches into each parent an expression of the best of them together.

We travel from those moments, parents do, quickly, whether we want to or not. We travel in an out of busy schedules, trying parenting moments and the frustrations of unchartered waters. We race through precious family snapshots as we sing at the piano, hover around board games, jump from rocks in the frigid pools of mountain streams, celebrate triumphant bike rides. The quiet embraces as limbs grow longer than can be contained feel as fleeting as when those unwieldy limbs were swaddled in a baby blanket. Mothers, though always amazed at the speed of life, the passing of time, record life meticulously. I remember being awed as women easily recalled the births of their children, an anecdote brought to mind in the presence of a new born. My grandmother, while holding my babies, spoke of the births of her children as though they had just happened. Even friends whose children were older than me, recalled the moments with unusually fresh details. I understand, now, how present those memories are in the fabric of ourselves, wrapped about us no matter how far from those days we venture.

I am at the other end of the birthday reverie in early January of every year. I never can recall the exact time I was born but I know it was in the morning and when the phone rings I smile, knowing that my parents waited until that time, my actual birth moment, to call me. I thank them for having me but only they can relive my introduction to the world. Although I was fourth, they reminisce with alacrity and, if I ask, Mom will tell me which bed jacket she wore, what antics Dad played out to the oblivious baby and who came to see me in the hospital.

Birthdays belong to parents. We can stage dramatic parties to try to reciprocate the unbridled joy our children give to us or as they grow and take control, we happily turn our house over to large gatherings of girls for the night. But as parents, we claim forever, the source of those celebrations.

Three, it's a Magic Number

Yes, I've borrowed a phrase from Blind Melon's version of the School House Rock song that sometimes falls into the play list of lullabies I sing to Rem and used to be a dance number with the girls.  Before Lise came along, Craig and I often eyed each other over the bobbing head of blond curls dancing between us to smile knowingly as we sang, "a man and a woman had a little baby, there were three in the family, and it's a magic number". Later, Craig would walk in the door at the end of a rainy day to find his three girls still in pajamas, dancing and shouting, "Three, six, nine.  Twelve, fifteen eighteen..." And three, again, achieved significance in our family when Rem came along.  Craig attributes the birth of our third child with the fall of our parental empire.

"We knew victory," he explains, "when we battled in man to man combat. But," he laments," now that we have to resort to a zone defense under attack we are consistently defeated."

I do know that our children have shown us that we possess an incredible capacity for love.  They may not come wrapped and bedecked in ribbons but they will be my favorite gifts on Sunday, gifts that keep on giving as they take their place in the world.  Already, I see their magic spreading beyond the boundaries of our home leaving trails of pixie dust in their wake.  Luckily, the children also keep me grounded.

Rem approaches three (that number again) with an abundance of precociousness and dramatic flare. Opinionated (to the extreme) and stubborn (also to the extreme), Rem lives a one-man show as he wrestles in a constant tug-of-war between babyhood and childhood. He doesn't quite fit into his over sized emotions resulting in bouts of hilarity and uncontrollable laughter as well as bouts of anger and inconsolable sobbing. The two preceding personalities of my intimate acquaintance warned me of Rem's impending actions to keep me from romanticizing my role and effectiveness as mother: parental pauses.

Miren, once she first strung more than two words together, never stopped talking.  She continues to hone this skill only now, when she pauses, she sings.  Her toddler days were filled with unceasing questions, comments and stories with an uncanny ability, amidst the unrelenting chatter, to absorb everything around her. Each interaction left her with an intense hunger for more.

Miren's constant conversation proved a nice diversion that helped pass the time on long rides without other adults.  We wandered from subject to subject as we drove along familiar roads to visit family while Lise slept as long as the car stayed in motion. One trip to Atlanta found us talking about the story of Moses. I continued past the story of the baby in the reeds and into the story of the exodus.  Miren stopped me in mid-sentence, demanding an explanation of slavery. Carefully, I supplied her with the basics that I thought appropriate for a three year-old: forcing people to do work without pay and without choice, telling people where they could live, what they could eat, etc.

"Wow," Miren sighed, soaking it all in.  I think I felt proud of myself and of her in that brief sigh until she announced that she was a slave.  After a long parental pause I responded.

"No," I emphasized deflated. "You are not a slave."

"You make me do things I don't want to do. You make me work. You tell me what I can eat."

"What you do has nothing to do with slavery and everything to do with being part of a family. Everyone in a family works to keep the family running.  You're lucky to be able to be a part of a family."

Miren didn't answer.  The car slowed in Atlanta traffic and I put in a CD for Lise.
"I'm a slave," Miren snapped just loud enough for me to hear before singing happily along to the music.

Lise, a realist from birth developed the art of dead pan delivery by age two. We sat in our Kindermusik circle and watched Anne demonstrate how to turn the socks we brought from home for the activity into ducks. Soon, little quacking ducks joined Anne's but Lise refused to slip her hand into her sock.

"It's not a duck," she said when I asked her to try to make a quacking motion with her hands. "I don't want a sock on my hand." I slipped my hand into the sock and quacked along with the others.

When the activity ended Lise looked at the group.  "Those weren't ducks," she admonished. "You just had socks on your hands."

I also belonged to a playgroup in those days where mothers gathered on park benches for some essential adult contact while toddlers swarmed around the playground equipment and babies bounced from lap to lap. Lise, her face flushed from running, leaned against me between two other mothers and drank from a water bottle.  One of the women bemoaned the laborious job of mothering, the constant work that she struggled to get through each day that ended only to begin all over again.  The other woman concurred, wishing that she could have two minutes to herself on any given day. Lise looked up at both of the women and licked the water droplets that dribbled on her lips. "How hard can it be?" she asked, handing me the water bottle.  "All you do is sit around reading books all day."  I avoided the eyes of the two women as another of my long parental pauses ensued and watched Lise run across the playground to join her friends.

Rem is not as direct.  He uses a backdoor approach to cast his critical eye on my parenting abilities. He bides his time carefully and then pounces. The occasional quiet evening at home, our own pleasant, tranquil domestic scene, evokes a contentedness that outlasts the brevity of the moment. Smug in this rare, relaxed moment of togetherness that actually matches the image of family life I keep in my head, I sit savoring the sweet picture the children make in the warm glow of the living room.

Rem pushes a dump truck amid a pile of wooden blocks on the living room floor to simulate a demolition site. He looks thoughtfully my way and I move towards him to participate in his play. He decides to disrupt the happy mood with yet another reference to his other, more colorful family. He invites me to visit him at his black house where he realizes he'd rather be. He misses his blue mom. He loves her so much that he might just have to go back to his black house to live.

I smile with inappropriate jealousy and thank him. We’ve already been subjected to a host of adventures that Rem shares with his other, more colorful family. Rem interrupted stories of soccer and school at the dinner table to share his own stories of camping with his blue mom, black dad and green brother. Rem failed to remember any of the various activities he and I participated in together and instead, spun tall tales of adventures and devotion to the apparently more deserving relatives.

Over spaghetti, Rem spoke with relish of an airplane trip that ended with his green brother saving the day (he loves the term, “saved the day”) and safely landing his family in the driveway. “My brother loves to fly,” he announced, beaming with pride for his green brother, Poddah.  Rem’s colorful family is constantly being thrown in our faces. They are more perfect than we can imagine and involved in everything that we have done only in better, more successful, more exciting ways.


“I guess my black house is too far away to go now,” Rem laments as I later lead him to bed in the house that he shares with us. He pauses in the doorway to his bedroom, disappointment filling his face.

“Mommy will read books,” I offer cheerily.

“My blue mom has the best books,” Rem answers, reconciled to a lesser bedtime routine due to the inadequate selection of books. I hoped it would end there but it was not to be so. My endearing son sighed heavily when I began to sing our ritual songs. It seems that Poddah sings all of the songs I know better than I can and has a repertoire that far surpasses mine. The evening ended with Rem wishing again that he was at his black house sleeping in his red bunk bed with Poddah.  My parental pause lingered while I listened to the heavy breathing of a sleeping child beside me.

"Pack your bags," I shamelessly told him (and shamefully now recall) after a long tale about the swimming  pool at his other house that has made swimming lessons at the pool in our park unnecessary this summer. I didn't wait for the end of the story about the special kid-sized diving board that Poddah used to teach him to dive but told him to pack his bags and I'd take him to his other house.

"No," he answered, wide-eyed and speculative.  "I like living here. I think I'll stay with this family."  Long parental smile.

A Pretty Busy Spring

May knocks on summer's door loudly but with hesitation.  The yard unabashedly revels in a bright new wardrobe, puffing pink, white and red plumage as conceitedly as the birds pausing on the fence amid frenzied courting rituals. The dogwoods and red buds, fully leafed out, offer canopies of shade that filter the impact of the hardworking sun's rays as it cajoles the well-rested earth back to life.

  

Soft, small bursts of delight drift from the park into the open windows of the house along with the occasional steady beat of a tennis match in the court across the street.  Unlike the busy activity of summer, the park's tempered buzz reflects the more scheduled days of spring.

And while conversation often turns  toward the desire-laden, suggestive talk of summer, my attention remains focused on the spring calendar.  My pen still hovers near the top of the to-do list.  Elementary school drama production (all 4 performances). Check. Final Claxton showcase. Check. Middle school chorus concert. Check. The piano recital will soon follow along with two end-of-the-season soccer tournaments. Rem will receive his Kindermusik certificate while Pomp and Circumstance plays in the background.  The fourth grade trip, soccer tryouts, fall commitments and registrations will complete the list and then on to the blissful, carefree days of summer.

The pictures from top to bottom: Tam relaxing at the office door; the backyard in bloom; Lise in her school production; Miren celebrating spring at the Maddix's bed and breakfast; Rem in the backyard; Rem smelling backyard flowers

My Small Town America

About halfway between Baton Rouge and New Orleans along the east bank of the Mississippi River in St. James Parish lies a string of towns that will forever resonate in my memory the ideal notion of small town America.  A mix of sugarcane fields, swampland and oil and chemical refineries that light up the rural landscape at night, this storied setting of my father's childhood surges in and out of my consciousness like the rippling wake that passing ships send lapping at the levee.  Generations of families with fun names like LeBlanc and Bourgeois, Duhe' and Zeringue, live among each other intertwined by history, marriage and Catholic roots.  Schexnayders, too, speckle the landscape in numbers that represent the large families that spread the name from sons to sons.  My grandfather dug his heels deep into his ancestral land throughout his long life, dying within ten miles of the tobacco shed where he was born in Grand Point.  Memory resides alive and accessible in this place namely because of the resistance of its people to leave and the sense of community they feel for each other. My father slipped through the region's influential grasp on its progeny without cutting loose the strings that tied him there allowing me to experience the bond, palpable as a roaring bonfire, between people and place, that even a young child could sense.  The adult child continues to bear witness with awe even if an excess of fantasy infuses her station as an outsider looking in.

My father grew up in the town of Gramercy, a scattering of narrow streets compressed between the river and Main Street, in the shadows of the Colonial Sugar Refinery.  The McKim, Meade and White powerhouse rose majestically near the river on the site of the old Golden Grove plantation with a garden of distinguished company housing spilling along the grounds along with a company pool that opened its cooling waters to the locals in summer.

The Gramercy of Dad's childhood remains vivid in his memory and during long visits in Asheville, mornings on the front porch of my home pass idly as we sip coffee and cover an array of topics from current events to the lastest in grandchildren entertainment.  Our slow, thoughtful conversation always turns toward Gramercy, a setting both familiar and foreign to me. Dad weaves stories in the same house where I crowded with cousins around the same clawfoot table where he sat with siblings and passed around the same mouth watering home grown vegetables but from a time and place I can't quite conjure. The narrow street didn't always have a name and began as a path where Dad took turns with his brothers bringing the family cow to the levee to graze for the day and then bringing her back home again for the night. Dad's descriptions of the house always include a cistern and sometimes an outhouse. He explains the process of making and maintaining the mattresses they crafted with Spanish moss for the bed that he shared with his brother in a crowded room. I can't help but envision my Dad and my uncles as their adult selves sleeping together in the small, middle bedroom, telling jokes.  (Dad and some of his brothers are pictured here.  A short visit  with them together and it will soon be evident that they believe the only people funnier than each other are themselves.)

 

The Gramercy of my childhood centered around my grandparents' house. The porch swing where I'd sit with my siblings resembled the porch swing that my grandfather made that sits on my deck. We'd wait for aunts, uncles and cousins to pour from cars for Sunday dinner.  Relatives arrived in droves, kissing and posing unanswerable questions before heading inside to greet the older folks.  The kitchen, warm from the busy stove and oven emitted an intoxicating scent of cypress and Memere's cooking that wafted to the porch each time the door opened.  Aunts and great aunts along with a few uncles kept my grandmother company as she prepared meals for dozens and their heavy Cajun French accents filled the room with a flowing conversation. The scene could have been any one of a thousand Sunday afternoons at that house where the numbers increased to twenty nine grandchildren and then to even more as they began to marry and start families.  I envied the close proximity my cousins had with each other, making the hour and a half long drive from our house a cross-country trek. My aunts ran into each other at the grocery and the beauty parlor.  My cousins attended school and played sports together and my uncles helped to build each other's houses. They all saw each other at church on Sundays. And they seemed to know everyone else that lived there.

As a child I walked up the street where all of the houses faced the river instead of the road holding my Dad's hand.  The promise of climbing to the top of the levee that loomed like a mountain beyond us compelled me to accompany him as he visited with all of the old relatives who happened to be home. Aunt Inez and Aunt Ida remain vague images that dance in my head upon mention.  Dad prefers to reminisce about earlier times and the people who lived on the street during his childhood like Uncle Ben, Ta Tante and the grandfather who lived in the house on the River Road and fussed loudly in French whenever he saw Dad.

I followed my grandfather, tall and broad, still carrying vestiges of the ruggedly handsome man of his youth, through the rich, black rows of river silt as his large, gnarled hands filled brown paper grocery bags with creole tomatoes and firm, robust eggplants while my grandmother stood watch over large pots of snap beans with new potatoes and fresh butterbeans with shrimp in the kitchen.  Reluctant in later years to relinquish the feel of his fingers in the dirt, my grandfather would lean his cane against the fence and tend to the rows that my uncles mostly worked on his hands and knees. He'd thrust a grocery bag at me and encourage me to fill it with whatever I wanted to take home with me when I'd take the long way home from LSU to visit him. The house sat hauntingly empty  after my grandmother's recent death and neither of us wanted to be inside.

Dad recalls the countless adventures of his paper route that included out of the way customers in places that no longer exist where women sat shirtless on small front porches to cool off on hot summer days. I trace the inception of his dislike for dogs in stories that took him past long stretches of fields where clusters of houses now stand. Dad marvels at the distance he covered each day with the responsibility and freedom the paper route gave him.  He moves on to his time at the picture show, odd jobs he did for Old Lady Caire at the drummer's hotel, work at the Winn Dixie and his one hundred straight nights of work one summer at the sugar refinery that helped put him through college.

My mind navigates the area from the south where I grew up, and  follows the Mississippi River from the mouth to its source.  The river relinquishes New Orleans slowly and then intersects parishes with spiritual namesakes like St. John the Baptist, St. James and Ascension on its way to Baton Rouge. The sugar refinery, now Dixie Crystals, and the new bridge spanning the river announce the town of Gramercy in St. James Parish that spills into the town of Lutcher that spills into Paulina and so forth all of the way to Baton Rouge along the River Road. The series of small towns that line both sides of the river mingle with the oil and chemical plants whose structures extend tentacles to the river to signify a shipping industry still at work. Shell, Marathon, Kaiser Aluminum are some of the places that provided livings to generations of my family and are also possibly responsible for the health problems of the people who live  in "Cancer Alley", the area between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. 

Behind St. Joseph Church in Paulina lies a quiet village of its own, a silent testament to the area's past. A walk through the maze of grassy paths among whitewashed tombs, old marble markers and new granite ones reveal the same French and German names that might be found in a local classroom.  Occasionally on my visits home, Mom and Dad take me and the children to visit my aunts and uncles.  We can't pass the church without stopping. My children search for angels and centuries-old dates while I call on relatives with my father.  We find my grandparents, my godmother, my cousin and great-grandparents.  Dad points to his old football coach and relatives I never met.  I try to imagine him in the school yard playing or in his white First Communion suit as a pallbearer for a baby girl.  The day grows hot and we seek the comfort of air-conditioning.  The children, flushed and damp wonder if they'll die of heat stroke.  We are, after all, mountain people.

Sunshine, at last

Spring sounded as distinctly as an alarm clock as temperatures soared under blue skies, driving us outdoors amid bird calls so musical and rich that we took the collective result as spring’s prelude and definitively swept winter into the recesses of memory. The buzz of human conversation drifted from the park, the street and the back to back yards as the neighborhood shook off a fitful winter’s sleep and we threw open the windows in every room of our homes so that spring might rush in and push all stagnancy away.

First one and then more mowers, weed eaters and leaf blowers worked to remove the visible traces of winter’s ire. Craig created one of the piles of dead limbs, dried leaves and tired grasses that dotted the edge of the street waiting for removal by the city calling, “here, take the long, cold winter away.” Across the street the newly trimmed yards seemed greener and fresher while flaunting daffodils and pansies that, merely by implication, radiated with intensity and depth.

My family stretched with the satisfying sigh that often comes involuntarily after waking. They scattered in the sunshine, Miren with a book on the back deck, pausing to declare the day perfect, her family perfect, even herself perfect. Lise sat on the sidewalk near the street in the front yard sketching the first offerings of the season and chatting with passersby. Rem, with a newfound sense of freedom and even more energy than usual, commandeered a ship in the back yard, practiced fencing techniques with a stick, moved his pinecone friends to new locations and chased Tam, the crocodile until the dog-crocodile returned to the house for some long desired solitude.

The evening arrived slowly and though reluctant to relinquish such a day, the promise of its successors nudged me indoors where Vivaldi ushered in a spectacular spring night.

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.

Longing for Spring

Rem, Tam and I alone occupied the park this morning, savoring the unexpected warmer temperatures. Suggestive, cold breezes wafted through the park, warning of more approaching cold and forced us to focus on the present. Tam sat on her haunches at the edge of the playground area, her ears perked, and surveyed the dull landscape before her with optimism. This posture is beautiful in a Brittany so full of expectant and harnessed energy waiting to be released. Alert though she patiently stood, no bird or squirrel moved over the deserted ground or through the bare trees to instigate a chase.

Rem's repetitive play as a man on a Mardi Gras float from atop the playground apparatus throwing imaginary beads interested neither me nor the dog. I did, however, raise my arms occasionally as a parade spectator in a half-hearted effort to share in Rem's play. We leisurely followed the creek bed, an endless restoration project due to the persistent winter weather and felt disappointed at the abandoned appearance of all but the creek bed itself. Erosion mats hold the ground at bay and although difficult to circumnavigate, they lead to the newly formed pools in the creek as it meanders through the park.

The empty park only momentarily lifted my spirits and by the time we walked home, the temperatures had dropped even more. The yard presented itself as long suffering and tired. The lyriope lining the walks and empty beds retained the burdened appearance of bearing the weight of snow. Scattered, leafless stands of trees towered over muddy wallows that remained hardened most of the day. Even the trellis displayed a pitiful scene of yellowing jasmine that acted as a sieve to melting snow, dripping icy water droplets onto the walkway below. Tight- fisted rhododendron leaves, in an exhibit of exasperation at the continued frigid temperatures, fade the memories of once lush bushes that filled the yard. Everything looks heavy and misshapened from the continuous pressure of a winter landscape that loses its charm with each new snowfall.

Some years ago I acquired the habit of devouring and scribbling in well worn copies of nineteenth century English novels during my bouts of winter blues. I have been particularly ravenous this year in an attempt to abate an acute case of cabin fever. The restorative powers that I sought have actually had the reverse affect upon me. Winters seem more bearable from within remote, mysterious manor houses and across windswept moors than from my humble hamlet and surroundings. Immersion in the bleak plight of those destined to lives spent in poorhouses or debtor's prisons serves only to enhance the desolate view from the window where I sit reading. Even though the diverse, well-depicted Middlemarchers resemble the personalities of many of my current acquaintances, (I know my share of Bulstrodes and Causabons, a Fred Vincy or two). I am not rewarded with the benefits of such interesting story lines as befell the people of nineteenth century England.

I turn to my old friends who have patiently pushed me through my many phases over the last twenty-five years or so but they are not as true to me as I am to them. The Bronte's, Dickens, Eliot and Austen deviously toy with my waning spirit. Devoutly, I read page after page, longing for the next revelation, a deeper insight into each complex persona, a new understanding of the human condition - while mine suffers. The hours spent each afternoon in the car waiting for children does not afford the same environment for self reflection or growth as a cozy room of thinking yet idle characters happy for lengthy conversations over tea or after dinner (before the dancing, of course). My kinsfolk completely abandon me during the gloomy months of winter so there is no hope of filling the house with family and except for the occasional dinner with friends (that aren't postponed because of impending snow) my evenings are spent as an outsider envious of the gatherings and relationships that unfold in pages. Even Craig, so often willing to humor me, hasn't attempted to profess his love in a hand written letter carefully sealed with wax though I must certainly pierce his soul on occasion. The evenings turn to night and still I read fervently until I am enveloped in a melancholy that only sleep can break.

An enlivened patch of pansies, the sudden appearance of daffodils, the purple fuzz of the redbud trees will release me from my torment. Warm afternoons will raise my yard from its desolate winter's sleep and its unkempt beauty will once again become a haven for me and the center of activity for my family. A day or two that begs me to linger in the direct, warm rays of a revived sun and the gradual return to contemporary literature by way of Henry James (both a nineteenth and twentieth century writer, both British and American) and I will be restored.