Blackberry Season

The summer we moved into this house (two years ago), I was working at the edge of the property, and I kept getting snagged on these huge thorn bushes. Finally I put on long sleeves and got the clippers, and I chopped them down three feet back into the rough. A few days later, my neighbor said, “Oh, I saw you chopped down those blackberry bushes…”

I was horrified. “Is THAT what they are?”

He laughed at my ignorance. “Don’t worry,” he said. “They’ll grow back.”

Actually, it looks like I did the neighborhood a favor, because in effect, I pruned them. The last two years we’ve had an abundant crop of wild blackberries, a gorgeous array peeking from amid the wildflowers at the wood’s edge.

Wild things

Wild things

Alex and I braved the sauna on Wednesday and brought in enough to satisfy the family for two days.

100_4553

With today’s gorgeous weather, I decided it was time to stop fooling around. I haven’t been down to the creek all year, because I’ve been intimidated by the logistics of getting two non-walkers down there and back. But enough is enough. I loaded Nicholas in the stroller, put Julianna on my hip, and went for an outdoor adventure.

Finally, Nicholas is awake for one of our adventures!

Finally, Nicholas is awake for one of our adventures!

While Nicholas stared fascinated at the leaves swaying in the cool wind, I sat down with Julianna at the edge of the creek. She’s newly discovered the fun of throwing things, so we started tossing rocks. Then Alex, who was watching a neighbor boy catch crawdads, called me over. I turned my back on Julianna for ninety seconds. When I came back, this is what I found:

She gives new meaning to the words "wet diaper"

She gives new meaning to the words "wet diaper"

After the woods, it was blackberry picking time:

Blackberry picker

Blackberry picker

My childhood was beautiful. I remember jumping off hay bales, climbing trees, playing pretend in the combines, tractors and trucks, the lofts and grain bins, and of course, the woods and the creeks. I remember badminton games with my sisters in the huge yard on still summer evenings, sunsets from the tin roof, lying in the big yard watching a meteor shower. And quiet. Above all, the quiet.

When we set out to buy a house to live in for the long term, I wanted to find a place where our kids could grow up, a place with acreage and woods and countryside—a place where they could experience at least some of the things I value so much in my memory—the things I long for still. That was why we picked a house with woods and creek behind it.

We’re far too close to the interstate to get stillness (except once in a while on a freak weather pattern) and bejeweled starscapes, but on days like today, I realize that my kids will have their own experience of nature—its fun and its holiness—and the fact that their experience is different from mine doesn’t make it any less precious. God willing, they will hold these memories just as dear as I hold mine.

Published in: on July 17, 2009 at 2:26 pm  Comments (1)  
Tags: ,

The Player Piano

When I was a little girl, my grandparents had a player piano in the basement of their split foyer on Epperson Street. We were far too small to run the foot pump, and Grandma was very particular about putting the rolls in herself, so the whole experience took on a mystique. I don’t remember a thing about the music itself—only that I thought watching the keys move on their own was the coolest thing ever.

When Grandma and Grandpa moved away, first to Kansas City and then to Detroit, the player piano departed my consciousness for twenty-five years. They must have had it, but I don’t remember seeing it again. After Grandpa died, Grandma moved back to the St. Louis area, but the piano was beyond salvation. She found a used one and had it fixed and moved into her condo.

I wrote music at that piano during the weeks I stayed with Grandma before Alex’s birth. Christian has practiced on it during three C-section stays. And yet for some reason, the fact that it’s a player just wasn’t in our consciousness until this weekend, when Grandma opened it up to entertain her great grandchildren. She sat on the bench with Alex at her side and Julianna on her lap and stuck in “Frosty the Snowman.” And suddenly this boisterous music boomed through the house.

By the end of the weekend, Alex knew everything there was to know about that player piano. He was running the foot pedals, flipping the lever to rewind the roll, and taking the rolls out himself. All we had to do was put the roll in and adjust the tempo.

Seven years of studying music gave me a whole new appreciation for what I was hearing. The rolls were recorded by one man, but they must have been done in two parts, because it was definitely a four-hand arrangement. So instead of sounding like a piano playing a song, it has the texture of an orchestra: bass, accompaniment, melody and obbligato. It’s a lot richer. We were listening to “Chim Chiminee,” and while the song goes on in the lower two thirds of the piano, the right hand takes off on this blisteringly fast set of cascading arpeggios. In the middle of “Take Me Out To the Ballgame” you get these ascending rolls—Chopin superimposed on a distinctly un-classical song. It was delightfully sophisticated. To the untrained ear it just sounds like good music, but unlike 95% of popular music now, the music was arranged to exercise the mind, not just be “ear candy.”

Don’t get me wrong, I like popular music. But it’s very rare to find pop music—country, rock, whatever—that delights the trained ear. Enjoyment lies in the words: word plays, puns, unexpected rhymes, beautiful poetry. But it was wonderful to listen to popular music that wakes up my musical brain.

It also occurred to me that without my children, I would never have had this experience. Adults don’t play. We have abig “stupid” filter on our brains, which prevents us from doing anything that makes us feel self-conscious. That filter frequently gets turned off when we’re with our kids—so we’ll spin a polka around the beer garden at Grant’s Farm, as long as we’re dancing with Julianna. But that filter tends to act upon things that aren’t embarrassing, too—things we classify as “waste of time.” That’s the only explanation I can come up with for ignoring the player piano for twenty years.

And of course, it wasn’t a waste of time at all. We had an unforgettable family experience, something special by which the kids will remember their great-Grandma…and that’s the best part of all.

Published in: on June 16, 2009 at 5:33 am  Comments (1)  
Tags: ,

Letting Go

Alex doesn’t nap much anymore. He goes to bed willingly enough, because he is tired, but he doesn’t usually go to sleep, and it’s not long before he gets bored and wants to get up again. I make him lie down for an hour, and then he can play upstairs. But he’s a very assertive young man, and he’s hard at work eroding the rules. Actually, there’s only one rule: Do Not Talk To Me While I’m Working. But he’s incapable of following it.

Erosion is my problem as well as a result of his pushing. I want to be a decisive parent who holds to her limits. But I also want to be reasonable, and this is a time of transition; we’re trying to find a new equilibrium that allows me to have “nap time” productivity even as the kids stop napping.

Anyway, Alex promised to leave me alone, so I let him go to the basement. But of course he came up and talked to me. He promised he would leave me alone and work his puzzle, but of course he wanted to share every triumph. There is nothing so discouraging when writing as having your train of thought broken every four minutes. Yet how can I gripe about my son wanting to share every part of his life with me?

Today his new idea was, “I want to go outside.” This opens up a whole new can of worms.

When I was a kid, Mom gave us a lot of time outside her direct supervision. By the time I was ten, I think, we were playing in the hay barn, in the woods, on the tractors, and in the shop. By twelve, I was riding my bike three miles to the orchard to work as a strawberry picker. At thirteen, my older sister and I were riding into town to shop, visit Grandma, and eat ice cream.

Now that I am a parent, I don’t understand how she had the guts to let us out of her sight. I puzzle over this frequently. I would love for my kids to be able to go outside and play without my presence, without me having to distract myself worrying about them. But how do you develop the placidity that allows you to let go of your children in a world where cars fly over the hill and spin out on gravel, where there is no shoulder on the county highway that leads to town…much less in a town where there are regular murders, a world in which child disappearances have become so commonplace that we have an alert system in place? We’re only talking about a ride of six houses in either direction. But what if some loon comes around the corner and snatches Alex? Yet I am resolved to avoid being a helicopter parent, and the only way to let go later in life, I think, is to begin doing it incrementally earlier. All parenthood is a slow process of letting go.

Well, I did let him go…but I only managed to work on my novel for three minutes before I had to go out on the porch and make sure he was okay. Five minutes later, I did it again, and was relieved to discover that the mother of his new friend, who lives six houses down, was outside with her kids, and that Alex had attached himself to them. But then I had to shout down the street, “IS HE BOTHERING YOU?” because of course, I still have two other kids sleeping in my house, so I can’t just run down to supervise.

That was the point at which I closed up the novel and set out to reflect on the difficulty of letting go.

And as I type, Alex walks back in. “Hey Mommy?” he says. “By the way…”

Published in: on June 2, 2009 at 1:45 pm  Comments (1)  
Tags: , ,

The Best Part of the Day

The best parts of the day are associated with bedtime.

 

I’ve heard people say that before, and found it incredibly irritating. I always thought, “If you didn’t want to be bothered with your kids, why’d you have them?”

 

Now, though, I think I rushed to judgment. It’s not just about having time for myself—though that’s definitely icing on the cake. No, naptime and bedtime are the best parts of the day for much better reasons.

 

It’s Julianna’s big, happy smile when she sees her bed. It’s reading books to the kids together. It’s Julianna’s tongue-out giggle, and Alex’s chirrupy, melodic one, when I read The Monster at the end of this Book in my silly Grover voice. It’s listening to Alex read to his sister—Brown Bear, The Bear Snores On, Ten Little Fingers—­and laughing when she decides he’s better as an object for hugs and kisses than he is as a reader. It’s the way she bounces when she knows it’s time to “make them all hide,” and the way Alex wriggles with excitement at his “walking in the woods” story. It’s “Mommy, eat us all gone!” and little girl hugs and little boy kisses and the feel of warm, silky skin.

 

Sleepy time is reset time. It’s the part of the day when (usually) all the angst and rancor of power struggles gets checked at the door, and what’s left is cuddles and hugs and love. And quiet…don’t forget quiet! Sometimes we have to cool down into quiet. As I said in my last post, bedtime is very physical, what with toileting and tooth brushing and diaper changing…not to mention wrestling. But we always diminuendo into quiet in the end.

 

Any time Christian wakes up in the night, he has to go check on them. (I’ve never felt the same compulsion, probably because I spend so many nights staggering into their rooms half asleep—to nurse, or drive the boogeyman away, or whatever.) When Alex was a baby, Christian had to reassure himself that he was still breathing. But these days, the mid-night check has more to do with watching the kids sleep. Angelic, peaceful…usually. Once in a while I get paged to “come see how your daughter’s sleeping!” Lately Julianna’s taken to conking out with the baby clutched on her chest. The baby’s at least half as big as she is; she can barely get her arms around it, yet she’s holding onto it deep into the night. So cute. And then there was this gem from Alex, probably two years ago already:

April 2007 (Alex, age 2)

April 2007 (Alex, age 2)

Waking up time is wonderful, too. Soft cheeks warmed by the pillow, chubby arms toasty from resting beneath the covers…ooh, so much to munch on! But even so, waking up is done gently in our house. Not like my mother, who I firmly believe took evil pleasure in tiptoeing into our rooms and yanking up the blackout shades in unison with a deafening chorus of “ROLL OUT THE BARRELS!”

 

At all other times of the day, I’m caught in a tug of war between housework and kids, teaching and fun, “me” time and play. But bedtime is sacred. The rush of tenderness surprises me at unpredictable moments, but never so consistently as at bedtime. There’s something so fragile and holy about children. At other times I may get distracted by the distinctly un-holy behaviors I’m trying to correct, but at bedtime I see my children’s true nature most clearly. Bedtime marks the passage of one day to the next, and of morning to afternoon, with a small taste of what God surely must feel for all his beautiful, holy, fragile, and wayward children.

Published in: on March 3, 2009 at 2:28 pm  Leave a Comment  

The Storyteller Revisited

When Christian was a kid, his mother used to tell him stories about “walking in the woods.” He started telling them to Alex about the time we moved to this house, and they’ve become a big part of our nightly bedtime ritual. Neither Christian nor his mother remember much about the stories she told, but ours have developed into a pattern, structured around the woods behind our house.

 

Once there was a little boy named Alex, who wanted to take a walk in the woods. So he ran down the hill and waded through the tall grass to the edge of the woods…

 

They almost all involve a nap in the woods, and Alex always comes back to tell his mommy, who is making dinner, what he did in the woods. Generally they end with some sort of meal and going to bed.

 

Last night, my throat was questionable, so Alex told me a walking in the woods story. “Once, there was a little boy named…Bob!”

 

“Bob!” I exclaimed.

 

He giggled. “Yeah, BOB! Bob…Dixon! Bob Dixon Basi! And he decided he wanted to take a walk in the woods. So he ran down the hill, but there wasn’t any tall grass, and then he heard…chop chop chop. And then he heard….ding ding ding! And he realized it was Santa Claus—and a helicopter!”

 

At that point, I knew I was in for a long one. Ah, my little storyteller, how you grow! J

Published in: on January 28, 2009 at 6:23 am  Leave a Comment  

Better late than never?

This weekend, we were late for church.

 

Now, you must understand, Christian and Kate Basi are not late for church. Ever. Okay, there are the occasional times when we’re on the in-laws’ schedule. But left to our own devices, we are NEVER late for church. Or for much else, for that matter.

 

Yesterday, however, I made the mistake of trying to make omelets…and Alex decided to be cantankerous…and Christian decided to read the paper before showering…so the net result was that the Basi family was late. Christian barreled down the Business Loop at almost 50 mph, trying to get us to church as soon as possible, while Alex made sour faces and grumpy noises in the back seat…a condition that intensified as we paraded around the back of church and forced him to sit and behave for an hour. Everybody knows us, and I felt incredibly conspicuous walking in. It really illuminated my dad’s militant devotion to punctuality when I was a kid.

 

Growing up, we went to 8:00 Mass. 11:00 Mass was for weenies. Dad spent his childhood getting up in time for a 4:30 a.m. milking, so as far as he was concerned, 8:00 was midmorning. They rolled us out of bed every Sunday at 7 and we left for church at 7:40, arriving 12-15 minutes later to march up the center aisle to the 2nd pew on the left side. That was the Sander pew. No one else dared take it. And every week, Grandma Sander beat us there.

 

We were always 5-10 minutes early, but managing that was no easy task. Poor Dad was outnumbered in his family of four daughters. He was always the first one ready—of course—and he got the thankless job of going out to warm up the station wagon (later, the van) on frigid winter mornings. Trouble was, once he was outside, he had no way to hurry us out the door. Mom was okay with time back then, but she has never been the paragon of punctuality that my dad is. So Dad motivated us the only way he knew how. He backed the car up to the door and laid into the horn. Repeatedly.

 

I can only imagine what our neighbors thought of that technique. J Good thing the nearest one was 2/10 of a mile away.

 

It occurs to me that one big plus to leading the choir is that even if you’re late for warmup, you’re still way early for church!

Published in: on January 12, 2009 at 9:17 pm  Comments (1)  

The All-Seeing Eye

When I was a kid, I swore I’d never forget what it was like. I would always be a sympathetic adult, not like the heartless grownups I encountered when I was young—grownups whose eyes used to slide over me and my outstretched hand at the Sign of Peace. Grownups who basically ignored my existence.

 

Now that I’m an adult, I always make sure I pay attention to the little people around me at church. And when I see people overlooking my kids’ attempts to connect, I intervene. Alex, go ahead and shake Mrs. X’s hand. Oh, Julianna, are you waving at Mr. Y? Adults notice and respond to that.

 

However.

 

Recently I have realized that I don’t have the slightest idea what’s going on inside my children’s heads. And frankly, I don’t really care. I know they’re going to tell me more than I could possibly process, anyway, and none of it is going to get down to the level that would allow me to understand what makes them tick.

 

I’m fine with that, but it does have its pitfalls—like forgetting that my most insignificant word or action is a matter of fascination and mystery to my children, and is therefore Totally Cool. It makes me laugh to see the things that become fodder for imitation. For instance: Alex gets into the truck with Christian and demands the spiral pad on which we record mileage and gas fills. “I have to write something on my calendar,” he tells his daddy earnestly. He’s channeling his mommy, who keeps all family events, commitments, and to-do lists on a big desk calendar.

 

“Daddy’s building” is a catchphrase in our house. The Jesse dome is visible all over town, and Alex never fails to notice it. When we go outside to play, he drives his jeep “to my building” (up and down the driveway) and then goes “to my work” (the computer desk) and pretends to work on the computer. A couple of days ago, I made the mistake of leaving my blog open to an “edit post” page. You can imagine what I found when I came back!

 

At 22 months, Julianna functions more like a 14-month-old, albeit one with a much…much…stronger personality. (It’s a constant matter of confusion and amusement for me, to see how she is and isn’t her chronological age.) So her imitations are much less sophisticated. Tonight at Burger King, Christian was laughing at the sheer volume of food she was stuffing into her mouth—in contrast with Alex, who has to be coaxed, bribed, or threatened to eat, and takes the smallest bites imaginable. “Are you done?” Christian asked. She fixed him with the glare to beat all glares and signed ferociously, “DRINK!” We gave her the cup, and as usual, she gulped as if she hadn’t drunk a drop in three days. Naturally, the next noise we heard was a resounding burp. “Shovel and guzzle,” laughed Christian.

 

“Just like her daddy,” I observed. (He eats faster than anybody I’ve ever met.)

 

They see everything. I know that. What I don’t know is what they think of it. They’re a mystery to me, as I am to them—as we all are to each other, come to think of it. But I tend to assume that people follow the same basic set of thought processes that I do, even if we come to different conclusions. Children, however….children are a mystery. What, for instance, goes through Julianna’s head, sitting in our two-person tub with water up to her armpits, when I turn on the jets? What is she thinking as her entire body freezes in place, as she processes this new sensation, just before she begins doing tai chi moves with her arms?

 

Perhaps I’ll never know.

Published in: on December 12, 2008 at 5:59 pm  Leave a Comment  

The View From the Home Place

It’s been a busy week. On Wednesday, my youngest sister arrived in north central Missouri, fresh off her New York bar exam. She was here for her last extended visit to the home place. On Thursday, my sisters and I hosted a fundraiser for Mom’s last state legislative campaign. On Saturday, the family threw a 60th birthday party for my parents (no fundraising in sight).

 

Saturday morning, the farm was abuzz with activity, but once the kids went down for naps, I went outside to commune with nature and the home place for a while. It was a perfect day for it; the wind was light and out of the west, so it was very quiet, and the temperature was about 80. Dad had used the brush-hog on the grass around the north pond, so it was an easy walk out to the dam.

 

From the far side of 30, the farm looks different. Some things really are different. The cattle lot is not only empty, but the fence is gone, the cracks overgrown with weeds. The straw barn has been demolished to make way for a hog barn (also empty now that corn prices are so high), and the haybarn, where we cuddled with newborn kittens on rainy March days, is now home to the combine and several pull-behind implements instead of hay. The white L-shaped house with a swing tree in its crook is now gray, with master suite in place of the tree.

 

But some of the change is in the eye of the beholder. I’m amazed by how small the north pond looks. That pond fills my memories of home. How many stories and Journal entries were written looking out my window, gazing over the water, as the sun melted into night? How many nights did I lay my pillow in the windowsill and go to sleep staring up at the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, and the North Star hanging above the cattails?

 

Another surprise is that the deadly hill on the back side of the dam, where we used to go sledding in the winter, is neither as steep nor as long as the hill on the side of my house in Columbia. It used to seem like a long trek out to the pond, yet I accomplished it in less than two minutes. (Although that could just be that we used to have to wade through neck-high grass.)

 

Sitting there in the poky grass remains, I gazed westward to the edge of the woods. The only sound was the pulsing of the locusts and other insects. I thought of other sounds that I haven’t heard since childhood, even on my visits home. The bullfrogs—where did they go? Why haven’t I heard them in any other body of water? I can still hear the laid-back grunting in my memory, but never in reality, not since leaving home. Likewise the “aa-ooooh” of the coyotes, which ceased sometime when I was in high school, even at the farm.

 

There’s a song that says, “Who says you can’t go home?” Well, you can. But it’s not the same. You live, you grow, you get wiser, you get dumber, you have kids, you discover new facets in your soul, and when you get back… you discover that it’s no longer the place you left behind.

Published in: on August 10, 2008 at 6:59 pm  Leave a Comment  

Sweet Corn Days

Today has been one of those hot Missouri summer days when any outdoor activity, even walking through the woods, makes your body pour sweat out of every pore. Days like this, when I was a kid, we were up at six to work in the garden, bringing in the produce. Then, when it got hot, Grandma Sander would come out and help us cook, can and freeze. Tomatoes. Green beans. And of course, sweet corn.

 

We’d sit outside with blankets over the big galvanized tubs, shucking, cleaning, gouging out the wormy spots, saving the good ears for eating whole, and cutting the kernels off the cob for freezing. It was gossip time–and munch time. I never could resist eating little wafers of corn, four or five rows wide and perhaps the length of a domino. Delicious! Just something about those rows of raw corn still stuck together, but off the cob–cool on the tongue on a hot day, smooth and bumpy on one side, sweet, wet and rough on the other.

 

Tonight we ate sweet corn from the farmer’s market. I had to cut Alex’s off the cob for him. Being three years old and a city boy, he doesn’t want anything to do with corn dominoes. He wants his vegetables broken apart like real corn–you know, the kind from the freezer. So I relieved him of the burden. Tough job, but these are the sacrifices we make as mothers.

Published in: on July 21, 2008 at 2:02 am  Leave a Comment  
Newer Entries »
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 328 other followers