WFDC Clothing Exchange, John Taylor Gatto, Networks and Community

Someone sent me a link to an article by John Taylor Gatto, a NYC public school teacher (at one time?), former speaker at AERO conferences (Alternative Education Resource Organization), advocate, I believe, for the unschooling approach to life and learning. http://www.homeschoolnewslink.com/homeschool/columnists/gatto/lesssch.shtml  I read the article with great interest, and it arrived a day after an essay forwarded by the AERO newsletter by Matt Hern, which encouraged readers to ask deep questions about democratic and/or free schools. http://democraticeducation.com/essay-hern.htm Both articles have my wheels turning, making me question again all those ideas of real and ideal in raising and educating our children (and ourselves) and in shaping our places of care and learning, our communities, our societies, our lives. Lots of things stirring the pot again, great conversation which started with asking one of the after school kids what is your job for Thanksgiving and after winding it’s way through a conversation with his mother and his former day care providers, first the husband, then the wife of the team, both friends and colleagues, to a rethinking again, of how we feed our children and what little pieces I might change. Going to be looking for a bread machine for starters. Let me know if you have one to share!

This piece is short and rambling, as I am off to SVS for carpool, no Veteran’s Day holiday there for some reason, but good time to be with the carpool crowd and to think and my son is not disappointed at all, nice to know. And the other piece I will write before putting on my shoes, grabbing a banana as breakfast for the road, and hopping in the van, is that the day care clothing exchange, which has developed over years by folks, including providers, putting bins of outgrown clothing on the porch to share with others, and now includes a mom who has offered to deliver unclaimed items to a local shelter for homeless families, is my piece of John Taylor Gatto’s ideal for this week, the sense of community he described, and family, that is the ideal, where relationships are supportive and emotional life authentic and people young and old are treated as whole beings living in relation to whole communities, the clothing exchange is a little piece of that for me, makes me feel like an auntie, my daughter like a cousin, and because growing up I had that extended family, that neighborhood of support, and it is not the way my kids or I live, far from where I grew up, I am thinking about how these ideals can be remade in modern life, how we can make places that raise and educate children which replicate the kindness and depth of the best of families without taking away the individuality and idiosyncracy of each person. More later, if I find time. Busy, busy, busy.

 

Flubberized, from boredom to surprise just by slowing down

On Friday the kids wanted to make flubber again. My little gal, who had been home with fever on and off most of the previous two weeks, looked a bit limp still, and I could not possibly say no to her request. And then of course, my two fours, who always love flubber, and who, if I had remembered clearly, had the most spectacular time only a couple of Fridays ago with flubber, when our eight taught us the miraculous trick of blowing flubber bubbles, and I fell in love with flubber again myself then, too, taking pictures and laughing out loud along with the kids, well, of course those boys wanted to do flubber again, too. So, we did, but I went reluctantly to the gallows, having done flubber so many times with so many kids in my life that I could not imagine having fun this time.

For me, flubber is a science trick we learned a long time ago when we participated in a training at the Boston Children’s Museum for family child care providers. There was money then, and they paid for a bunch of us providers from all around the Boston area to come to the Museum at night, paid for fabulous trainers, the museum staff and others, paid for lovely meals, for museum memberships for each of our children’s families, and for buses, my god, buses, to transport our little children to the Museum three times over the course of our training. From that experience, I believe the longest surviving remnant in our program, besides the strong memory of flusher times, is flubber. One of the museum staff made it with us one night when we were there alone, without kids all the providers did the hands on stuff, and Liana and I loved the flubber, loved the simplicity of ingredients, white glue, water, borax, color for kicks, took the recipe back to day care and some years later, I think, it took off with kids. One year we made it millions of times, then it went nearly dormant awhile, then came back last year full force.

We have done flubber so many times the last two years I put the recipe on the wall in the project room. In Sharpie on a piece of tag, I have written, and drawn pictures to show younger kids what to do, Put  2 T. (tablespoons) glue in a bowl. Add 2 T. water. Stir. (Here there is a spoon in a bowl). Add color. (Here there is a small dropper bottle shown tipped upside down with a drop going into the bowl). Add 2 t. (teaspoons) borax solution. Stir.

We have done the recipe so many times it is hard for me to imagine what could be surprising today. I drag my feet, gather supplies from the kitchen, measuring cups, bowls, and from the project shelves, measuring spoons, plastic spoons for stirring, and from the supply cupboard, gallon of glue. I set up for the kids, pouring glue into smaller measuring cups, giving each child a plastic bowl and spoon, starting the project by showing them how to measure the glue by dipping the tablespoon measure into the cup of glue and dumping it drippingly into the plastic bowl, doing the same with the water. Then the kids mix, wonder what next, one exclaims, “Color! We need color!!” and of course we do, but in our case, we seem to need streams, not drops of color, making our flubber so deep blue and red the kids exclaim and give the colors deep names like night.

The kids stir and stir and stir, still no flubber. “More color!” they exclaim with glee, and they add so much it is like midnight in their bowls. And their excitement is contagious, I go from bored to flubberized, their enthusiasm my borax solution. But to them we are making flubber all the time, even without that magic ingredient.

And here the kids start to wonder. “When is it going to be playable?” says one, or some such thing. I actually got out pen and paper and scribbled down the kids’ words for a long time during this part of the play, but my words are so messy I am not sure I could recreate them any better here if I got the paper than if I just do my best from memory. (I also got out my camera and took a million pictures, even dropped it again, and it may be broken, even after the snapping back together trick I tried yesterday, the zoom was jerky and seemed not within my control, but the snapping made it better, I think.) “We need more glue!” and they add more glue. “We need more color!” “Yeah, more color!” and they add more color. “More water!” and they add more water. They stir and stir and stir and stir and at this point, I am astounded. I remember just now as I am retelling that the first moment of astonishment actually came much earlier, when I put the gallon of glue down on the table next to my four, he said to me, “Why are you putting that glue there?” !!!! This one threw me for such a loop (I think it was so unbelievable I must have actually blocked it out!) I had to walk to the kitchen to get the bowls with my eyes so wide, calling to Liana “They want to know WHY WE NEED THE GLUE THERE!!??” You would think I would know by now that children need millions and millions of repetitions to learn hard things, but still I was astounded that my four, who loves flubber, who has been with us for what Liana reminds me is going on four years, has not fully registered that to make flubber you start with glue. But of course, kids still don’t really register after years of making applesauce how the apples go from hard to sauce, they will still say things like, “they melted” or “we mushed them with the musher (the food mill)”, they seldom believe me when I say it was the cooking that made the apples into sauce. But then I remember reading Howard Gardner and his studying of how we all learn science, and his reminder that most of us live with these misconceptions, don’t really ever learn or understand how the basic science around us works, and as I write this, I think, I don’t either, while I know the apples are cooked, and remember something about cell walls breaking down or chemical changes, I would be hard pressed to give a truly scientific explanation of how apples transform to sauce, mostly magical thinking even here in the mind of this teacher who for many falls of life, nearly all those I can remember, has made applesauce from scratch. So, no real surprise on the glue, but it put me in a playful mood to see how much more there was to learn.

Which is why I held off on the borax solution, until our fours persisted, “What else do we need?” “What more do we need?!” and at last my eight, steadily pounding at different pieces of wood, I later learned, splitting them down the middle in frustration, not intent, called out, “Borax! You need Borax solution!” to which the fours began to chant, “borax, borax, we need borax, borax, borax, we need borax!” And from there it was all an experiment, no more recipe, no more teacher lead activity, they added borax straight from the bottle, no measuring spoons, and saw what would come, discussed the ways one might vary the experiment (more glue, more water, more color, more borax solution), drew conclusions (more borax makes it stiffer, more borax makes it too hard to blow bubbles with flubber), made judgments (more borax is not necessarily better), and tested hypotheses (trying to blow bubbles with many different versions of flubber, to see if the more borax flubber did or did not work for bubbles, how well, how poorly).

And then, just when I thought it could not stray further from my limited imagination of flubber as boredom, something new happened again, our homeschooling family arrived, and for the first time, these French kids and their mom discovered flubber, and they had a blast, too, covered the drop cloth with glue and water and borax and flubber, made tie dye flubber, stretched it out in a film between their hands, exclaimed over it’s potential for next Halloween, compared it to the french slime of the mother’s childhood and the dimestore slime of mine, made hot pink and lavender purple flubber, and cleaned, and cleaned and cleaned the table cloth, working hard as only good self-sufficient learning to farm and keep bees and raise chickens and build coops and someday build a house from scratch homeschoolers can do.

So, that is my story of flubber, of how a teacher/caregiver who has been working with kids her whole adult life can be surprised and have her energy revived in just one moment with children. Kids do that if you let them, if the day is open to surprise we can all keeping serving and saving our way through life, a concept I thought about a lot this winter, after reading about it in my Ode, Magazine for Intelligent Optimists, the idea that through good work a person can both serve others and save oneself, to turn the ideal on it’s head like that was helpful to me, to stop trying so hard to save others, but to work instead to serve others, and in the process, to hope to be saved myself, has worked much better, and it has turned out to be more fun:)

 

Sunday Morning Quiet

Yesterday was a full day with people, kids in the am, and chores with them, banking with Ben, homework with Jonah, then swimming at the Y with Isabel, who is most proud to have moved up another two levels for her next round of lessons to a flying fish/shark, then Poetry and Science and Music in a pub, all three linked back through the day care for me, all friends performing and speaking and running the pub also former or current day care parents or folks I met through those connections, then home alone for the evening, to bed early, tired after a full week, and up so, so early this morning for a nearly full day alone, such a contrast I have trouble starting the day, though there is plenty to do, much of it day care related work, attendance for the Food Program on the computer from October, then November, and shopping for the week’s food, cleaning the house, which is also the day care in the afternoons, and there is personal stuff, too.

What I have been thinking about is all over the map this morning, thinking for hours already, wondering what to write, where to write it, if I should write at all, or just get going on the day. The talks of the poets and their words swirl in my head, all about nature and hope and struggle and giving up and then giving in to the moment and looking out again with compassion, very familiar words from an older man whose poems I also admired when he read them, and words from the younger poet, not so discouraging, but harkening more back to his country roots, to the prescience of his stepfather, a Native American man who was also a hunter and in charge of reforestation on the reservation where this man was raised, his poems about calving, and about a lanscape in Western, MA, both familiar, too, and then my friend talked about the science she does studying environmental chemicals and their effects on cancer, breast cancer mostly, and about the line she and her group walk between activism and science and how they do things differently, treat their scientific subjects like real people with the power to make change who are worthy of respect, and the last thing we shared was her certainty that my dad’s leukemia could have been related to his work and training as a chemical engineer, yes, Benzene, she tells me with strength in her voice, is clearly linked to leukemia, you could have sued, but of course, I couldn’t, at six years old, or in the 1970’s when probably none of this science had been completed or certainly no one in my world knew of it or knew how to or probably even would have sued. Nothing to do with that death but live with it. (After a day of thinking, I want to add, to be grateful for friends who are doing the science and advocacy that may keep other six year olds from losing their fathers or mothers to cancer.)

Which leads me to what I had been thinking of on this quiet morning, kids with their dad for the first round of our newly alternating Saturdays, first day to wake up without the kids on Sunday morning in a very long time, going to take some adjusting, and some feeling of the loneliness, as my other friend reminded me last night. And that is why I thought probably best not to write. This blog is nearly one year old, started as a way to explore the possibility of creating some new ideal place for raising and educating our children. Well, here I am, nearly one year later, creating some new place for children that seems far from ideal, some use the words broken home, which I hate, hate, hate, now that they apply to mine, and also because they hurt, and because there are lots of ways for families to come apart, and somehow broken seems to imply that the only way to break is through a divorce or separation, but I know, and we all know from experience, that families break in all sorts of ways, as do schools, and child care programs, and nursing homes and health care systems and communities and governments and neighborhoods and nations, all the things we humans invent to take care of one another, even things like gangs must also break, and jails and prisons, having been raised in an extended family in which many of my uncles worked at Attica prison in the era of the riots, I remember how badly that place intended to rehabilitate our worst offenders could break, and my uncles were some of the best men I ever knew, charged with holding the place together, on some small level, and of course, it was too much, too much. I wonder how any of us can hope to hold an institution, whether family, neighborhood, community, school, prison, government, health care system, nation, together, how to hold together even  a sense of one’s own life and continuity over time in this day and age when very few of us recognize our lives growing up in the lives we live with our children today, how to do that, when we move from continent to continent, from country to city, from state to state, from South to North, East to West, how do we keep that sense of groundedness, that sense that we know what is right and wrong, that we are whole, sound, connected, known, cared for, secure? I think that we don’t, on some level, and that the fear that has taken over so much of what we know and do today, on the very basic level for me of the rules I must follow in sanitizing dishes in my own home with bleach for feeding the day care children, or for allowing children freedom of movement in the house or neighborhood (or not), and on the more abstract level of needing all sorts of evacuation plans for various states of emergency, documented, in writing, shared with parents and with the authorities, but none really logical or even illogically sensible, at some level we have lost our ability to rely on intuition, on ourselves, on our families, our neighborhoods, the physical and natural and social environment that supports us is less present, less visible to us, or changing in some way we have yet to grasp, and it is scary, oftentimes, requires yoga or meditation or spiritual practice or overwork or cigarettes or drugs or credit card debt or gigantic plastic homes to make us feel ok, too much stuff to do and have and hold, but holding necessary for our simple sense of peace.

 

challenge/change of course? – NaNoWriMo

For now, I am busy with a challenge. My son Jonah spent much of his summer writing and knows I am learning to love writing, too. One of his online friends told him about National Novel Writing Month, and he told me, challenged me to try it. We are both doing it, though he won’t sign on as my Writing Buddy, and I have no idea what he is writing, nor do I plan to share what I have written with him. It’s a cool thing to try, writing 50,000 words in one month, same month as every other normal thing in life has to get done, plus a few bonuses. I have never tried anything like it, never tried to write a novel, have only written fiction in college in the form of short stories for writing class, none of which I can find now. It is amazing to see what comes out when you just start writing, no prompts, no agenda, no audience in particular, no plot, only one character who was fully undeveloped, but whose name happened to pop into my head when I thought to take on the challenge, and then stuck. Every time I have a few minutes I write a few hundred words, and so far I am on schedule. For the first day or two I was cruising, took a dip for a few days after that, now may be on another roll, we’ll see, busy afternoon, busy week ahead.

What I remember hearing this year that I think of now is how interesting it is for an adult to try to learn something new. John Holt talked about learning to play the violin as an adult and how doing that gave him insight into how children learn, how people learn, and also what I remember in his description is how much that violin meant to him as an adult, how much pleasure and satisfaction and challenge he found in that self-set goal and pursuit. Now I think, there must have been something for Holt in finding new potential, in renewing one’s sense of childhood, when all avenues were open to us, and when little by little they were closed to us, or we closed them to ourselves.

When I was a little girl, for awhile I wished to write and illustrate children’s books. I can still remember how much I loved books, how my mother would take me to the basement library room in the town next to ours, where I ended up going to junior high and high school, and mostly I remember Beatrix Potter books, and the feel and look and weight and heft of them are as familiar to me now as they were then, and also as familiar as the story, words, and letters. Somewhere along in early childhood I imagined myself a writer and illustrator, and I remember trying to write  a story, on that wide lined light weight manila paper, with space on top for a picture and lines below for neat writing, divided down the middle by a dotted line to show you how to place the letters. My story was about a goat, I think, and I found it hard to tell something interesting, may have decided then and there I had nothing to offer in the world of children’s books. Later I tried again, in college, to tell my stories, and struggled with themes in my life that as a young adult I could only see in a linear fashion, and did not have the time or patience to tell from the beginning to the end in the level of detail I felt they deserved. My son was like this one summer. His teacher asked him to keep a summer journal and midway into the summer he had a meltdown, he had written nothing because he could not imagine telling the story of his summer in minute by minute detail. My daughter had a similar experience this summer, starting a letter to her teacher about her summer, but telling all the details in the first part of one day, getting up, brushing her teeth, getting dressed took so long to tell she did not finish telling about just one day.

Some time in one of my writing classes the teacher told me to stop worrying about stopping, that where we stop in telling a story tells us something, that stopping mid story, (or what appears at the time to be mid story) can often be better than trying to finish telling something to what might have appeared to be the true end. I am trying to remember that this time. Tell the story as it comes, don’t try to keep it all linear, stop when it feels right, start when it feels right.

When Mary Oliver spoke last month someone asked her about her writing, and she gave a very disciplined approach, write at the same time every day and your creative side will know when to come out, is more or less what she offered, and don’t rely on your emotional state to carry the writing, writing professionally can become independent of one’s feeling in the moment is I think what she was trying to say, and pay attention, also was a message from her, look closely, with empathy, and that will give one’s writing authenticity and weight.

Lots of good ideas, fun to try and learn something new and to take time to step back and reflect. I debated sharing this piece of private news on the blog, figuring some might think it would detract from my teaching, or from other things in my life, others might wonder what I was writing, which feels too private right now to share, that I might feel unwelcome pressure to keep going or to meet the 50,000 word challenge, that maybe there are better ways for me to spend my time this month, and that I might be judged or feel guilty about this choice. The organizers of NaNoWriMo seem to know this. They suggest telling lots of people, and they remind the writers not to put pressure on themselves to write anything in particular or worthwhile, but just to get in the flow, to see how it feels to live in the imagination, to practice the art and craft of writing and to see how it feels. So far, so good here. Let’s hope I feel that way at the end of the month, my birthday present to myself this year, if I do it, will be a completed, or 50,000 words at least, of my first novel, probably not ever to be shared, but a great practice for learning something new.

P.S.

Funny that when I go to post this piece I reread the title, challenge/change of course? and realize that I had intended to write saying I might not continue the blog this month while I am trying out the novel, or that I might not continue the blog at all, and that mid-writing I changed course, decided to think about the writing as a way to continue thinking about learning. Go figure, writing is always surprising me these days, and I guess I talked myself into continuing the blog, at least for now.

 

Unstuck by Flubber!!

Oh, dear. I was prepared again to be bored to tears by Flubber, woke in the morning feeling stuck, am now wide awake and wishing I had been wearing a helmet cam for the last half hour. We made flubber again, thanks to our two, who is returning from a week of fever. We did flubber  to my chagrin. I envied Liana openly as she sat on the couch with two toddlers reading toddler books and I slowly gathered materials for flubber, beside the woodworkers. But then it was fun, again.

And I have taken pictures and scribbled notes, but now the homeschoolers are here, and I must show them flubber for the first time!!!

Later I will tell you about how we turned flubber from a recipe into an experiment, right now I am living in the moment, wide awake. No packaged curriculum for me, even when wished for by the children, mixing it up the only way to go.

 

Stuck

Something has gotten me stuck here, not sure what it is, maybe the upcoming anniversary of this blog, maybe the reality of life as a separating single mom, maybe a lull, maybe All Saints Day or woodworking and plumbing, maybe writer’s block, maybe National Novel Writing Month, maybe the broken camera, maybe something else. I don’t know. Feeling stuck a little bit, not sure what to write, though ideas come and go all the time, not sure of myself in some way that feels new, not sure where to start, where to go, where I’m headed. Will get unstuck I am sure, might just be November, slowing down for fall, for my birthday month, in anticipation of the holidays, with the decrease in light, don’t know. Feels a little scary each time the slowing down happens, hard to remember the light returns, the energy comes back, the light bulbs in the kitchen and around the house in the lamps now on for so many hours of the day are no stronger than the light bulbs in my mind, which will turn back on again soon.

For now, time to get the kids ready for school, to start the day with them, then with Liana, the day care kids, the parents, the homeschool kids and mom, later my kids and the kids in after school will arrive, then there will be chores to close the day care for the weekend, takeout Chinese for the first time in months for dinner, my daughter’s suggestion, afterwards a movie, play on demand from Netflix, as the one that came this week I had already watched, then tomorrow, the plumber and banking and house chores and kids in the morning, poetry in the afternoon, music in the evening, good to know there will be work, relaxation, potential for inspiration, and that there are people up ahead who might surprise me, take me somewhere new.

p.s. As I edited this, the network went down, there were beeping sounds around the house, as though the electricity went out for a moment and came back on, weird. now it’s back. premonition? sign? gotta wonder, always, on the meaning of things.

 

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woodworking and plumbing

Today the kids did woodworking, again. Our three would like to do it every day and he is very good. He is joined by several others, boys and girls equally interested and skilled at this point in time, though some days the boys dominate this choice. Kids now pound nails, saw, often all the way through the wood, drill, drive screws into the holes, glue. Some years they love to sand, this year not so much.

What I have been noticing is how even the youngest kids can now work competently at the workbench. On Friday we had a group of mixed ages from three to eight working at the bench and the three was watching the eight so closely even his voice and mannerisms sounded like his mentor. The older boy was making a table, which ended up sturdy enough that he could stand on it, and the three decided after hearing about the older boy’s plans that he would make a fort. He also watched the older boy saw, and adjusted the tempo and style of his sawing to match the older boy’s, then managed in that way to saw straight through a piece of wood, something that had been hard to do until then.

At the bench on Thursday were a girl and a boy, a three and a four, who have become friends this year. The girl chose a piece of cherry branch, which we clamped to the table, and a hammer and a nail. She carefully held the nail straight while she pounded it tap, tap, tappingly with the small hammer (small but real). The four said he needed help, could not hammer the nail into his wood. His friend suggested he could do it, that he need only hold the nail for a long time and keep on pounding with the hammer.

In this way, it seems to me that the skill level of the group grows over time. Years ago when we first got the workbench, we used it very little. My own kids were little and I had hoped it would become a fixture in our house where their grandfather was living and working a lot with wood. It didn’t take off much then, though my son Jonah made a few things and my daughter liked to work with tools. Then a few years later we had the older brother of this three in our group and he loved the woodworking so much that we invited his grandfather, a carpenter, to come and show his tools, and around that time our teacher Alice had arrived, with her own set of woodworking skills and experiences working with wood in her family day care, and the combination was the beginning of a long era of increasing work at the bench. For several years we kept the workbench on the back porch or in the basement most of the year. I had once hoped that after school kids would use it there when they arrived home from school. And we were nervous, I think, to do woodworking with our youngest ones. We always had older kids using the workbench in the summer, and several return each year with new skill and enthusiasm.

This year, perhaps for the first time ever, we decided in August not to put a crib in the place where the workbench lives all summer. Instead we use a fold up crib in the room with the other nappers, and it is fine. Our three would have been too sad to see the workbench go, and we wanted to keep it out for our homeschool group on Fridays. It was a good choice. We use the workbench nearly every Friday on our homeschool day and the last few weeks, we have used it another day or two each week. Watching the kids complete the tasks, drill and then drive a screw, or hammer several nails into two pieces of wood to attach them, glue things onto one another intentionally, make a house or a table even, I am thrilled. This is what I had been hoping for nearly ten years ago for my own kids, and even though they have not become carpenters I am working with a whole group of kids who are.

Today there was a plumber who came to investigate a leak which was making a puddle in the basement below the bathrooms. When he came, I had to take him to the basement and to the first and second floors to figure out where the water was coming from and how the problem could be fixed. My three, who loves all things house related, asked to walk along from the first to the second floor. How could I refuse? He walked along while the plumber and I discussed the problem, made hypotheses, tested them, discussed the work, the scope of the job, the timeline. My three had a very serious expression the whole time, and stood so close behind the plumber as he investigated the toilet I wondered how the plumber would react.

We talked about the job at breakfast, and then on the way to the park. I got a call on my cell phone from the plumber discussing the job. I shared the news with my walking group and my three wondered about it. The plumber had to cut a hole in the wall in order to check his hypothesis that there was a leak in a water pipe or in the shower, the hole was to be in the wall of the project room, where we normally eat meals with half our group. I wondered aloud if we might not have water for the afternoon and if we might not be able to sit in the project room for lunch and if there would be a hole in the project room wall when we returned from the park.

My three wondered how the plumber would cut the hole in the wall and when I said he would use a saw, the three wondered if the plumber was “Interested in Woodworking”. Well, I thought aloud that the plumber was not so interested in woodworking as he was in the pipes, but that someone who was interested in woodworking might have to finish the job, or really someone who was interested in plastering, I should have said.

I thought about this three and about apprenticeships or internships and I wondered where he will go in his life with this interest in wood and woodworking and tools and houses. Last week when we talked about another three’s ability to stay at her nana and papa’s house without her parents, because of her lovey, I asked this three if he had a special toy or blanket or something which helped him to feel relaxed.

“Yes,”  he said at first. “I have my Mommy.”

“What about if Mommy is away?” I wondered. “I have my house,” he answered promptly. “It’s made of wood.”

 

All Saints’ Day

Last night when we got back from Trick or Treating, just me and my younger two, oldest one out late with friends, I went to the basement to check on a plumbing leak I had discovered earlier on a mission from my teen, searching for the pumpkin carving tools, found a leaky pipe instead, puddle on the floor, piles of wet things included the ice cream maker my mom just brought from her basement, the chocolate fondue maker my friend gave me for my birthday a few years ago, the box holding my daughter’s outgrown stuffed animals, fortunately only pooled there on the plastic lid, and last wet thing a soggy Gap box, one end with spots of black mildew, relatively dry inside, box rescued just in time.

I had forgotten about the box in the rush to get the kids ready for the holiday, found it on the stairs when I went down after the busyness of the evening to turn out the lights I had left on in the cellar, and to see how big the puddle had grown. Puddle was not much bigger. Had put more things from my mom’s basement there to catch the drips, canning kettle catching some, added the black enameled roasting pan and it’s deep lid beside the kettle, as the drips were coming from a wide circle of wood, this part of the basement a repair job done when we bought the house, botched by a relative of the sellers, coming back to haunt me. On the stairs on my way back up I found the box again and brought it up and put it on the kitchen table, center of all things family, and took off the lid. First thing on the top a photo of my godmother holding me as a baby, bald head, looking a lot like Isabel, and her daughter, my cousin Joanne, as a very young woman, looking at me with adoration. My kids have rarely seen photos of me as a baby or child, and loved this introduction to the box, wondered at my relatives, noticed how much I looked like Isabel when we were each babies. Later in the box, my kindergarten picture did that again, short bobbed blond hair, smiling face and eyes much like my girl’s.

The box was full of cards and report cards and a very few photos, and artwork, and a few school papers, all saved by my mom and delivered to me awhile back for me to store, stashed in my basement, I am ashamed now to say, without a look, and with too little regard, very grateful now for the leaky plumbing, for discovering the box before it was destroyed, for the chance to share the box with my kids after trick or treating, for their interest in my past, for my mom’s dedication and care in saving and delivering the box, for the pictures and words there to remind me how much I was loved, by whom, and how.

Piece I discovered after the photo of me and my godmother (who died a few years back) was a note card from my Grandma, who also died that same year, or very close to it. The note card was of a small mouse on a leaf, and I thought for a minute I had that same set of cards when I was a kid, but it must just have been similar, and the words inside were so familiar, too, my grandma telling me about her day, about the weather, that she was sorry not to have visited, would soon, to see the wallpaper my mom and dad had hung in my room, which I still can remember, loved to spend the time before I went to sleep and after I woke up looking at those gray kittens, rolling and playing on my walls, to count the different versions of the kittens and to discover the patterns in the paper, and I wondered as I read the card, was she writing before or after my dad died, and did she refer to that wall paper hanging to remind me of my dad or just because.

And the other thing that struck me was what a goodie two shoes I was, and how religious, struck my kids, too, and when I went to bed, I talked about going to church for some reason, and they asked if I would go today, and I said, no, not today, but maybe some day soon, and then I woke this am and somewhere in my inbox there was a reminder that it was All Saints Day, and I was so glad when I thought about what to write here that I had celebrated last night with my kids at the kitchen table with the box. Happy Sunday, again. Many ways to celebrate besides Mass and church, discovering them one by one each weekend, marking them here on Sunday part of the ritual, too.

 

Halloween Fever

House looks like a tornado hit it. Middle boy is sick with fever. Big boy, teenager, is out with friends, taking the train to his trick or treating destination. Girl is pulling together a fancy version of a pilgrim from the dress up bin, Grandma’s nightgown gets yet another life. Sick boy is debating going door to door or just sitting on the porch with the candy bucket, costume is in progress as I type, what should I write, H1N1 virus? And I wonder what will the neighbors think? He is using fabric markers from the day care and a painting t-shirt with a picture of the Grand Canyon turned inside out (from my trip cross country after college), twenty years in my cupboard, finally turned into a costume. Maybe I’ll just draw a pig on it says the boy, as the girl debates hair in or out of the white fabric kerchief, debates cutting off the trailing torn layer of filmy petticoat with scissors. I have always been grateful for children who expect little of me for Halloween costumes and school projects and here they are.

Pumpkin is carved on the table, big boy arrived around 1 pm from his Halloween dance turned sleepover at a graduated friend’s house, to help with chores, eat lunch, talk, play music, cut the top off the pumpkin, shower, whisk himself into his bat man gone mad costume, wearing another of my odd treasures, a fuzzy animal print jacket, and another, a fancy pink men’s shirt with french cuffs. I catch only the corner of his cape with the camera as he runs down the stairs to catch the bus to the train.

The kids will trick or treat with their dad around the block while I pass out candy on the porch, glimpsing kids we wonder about all year long who appear this once, in real life, but disguised, not the neighborhood I grew up in where every kid was a playmate, but familiar just the same.

Best sign off to get the last few pics of the kids getting ready. Fun to take pictures this year of the process, house wreck be d—–, for now, just have fun. Trick or treat!