Skirts and Scaffolding

 

When my daughter was in preschool, she came home one day looking very smug and superior.  “Did you know,” she said, “That Luca doesn’t know what scaffolding is?”

That marked the beginning of the end of Luca.

Immersed in all things having to do with construction since she could carry tools and hand them to her father, her favorite Christmas gift one year was a push-along tractor and her favorite TV show was Bob the Builder. She’d willingly go to the house construction site and chat up the few workers that showed up to do things that we just absolutely could not do ourselves (like drive a cement truck to pour the foundation). So, her knowing more about things like scaffolding than poor Luca didn’t surprise me.

Showing that she was a modern women – one that can build a house and rock a pink tutu - she remained a very girly-girl, unwilling to leave the house without a dress on until she hit first grade. And most of her favorite toys were more in the Barbie realm that the tractors. One Christmas, while visiting her grandparents, she found a very old wooden doll that belonged to her grandmother. The entire trip, that doll did not leave her sight, and rarely her arms. She slept with it, ate with it, held it during story time, and ended up bringing it home with her because it would be cruel to rip a baby from her new mother’s arms.

Despite his shortcomings in construction lingo, Luca remained her favorite boy at preschool and she invited him to her fifth birthday party. One other boy got invited to keep Luca company and all the kids had great fun at the gym where they jumped and swung and bounced to their hearts’ content. When it came time to open presents, she eagerly reached for the one Luca brought.

Luca’s eyes shone with anticipation almost as bright as hers. His mother confided in me that he’d picked out the present himself. The birthday girl ripped off the paper and pulled out a matchbox car. Luca grinned and told her the name of the car. Her eyes scrunched up like a skeptic and she reached into the package again. One by one, she pulled out five matchbox cars, all Luca’s favorites. 

“Five cars, since you are five,” he said.

“Thanks,” she mumbled as she reached for another package.

Luca didn’t notice her lack of enthusiasm. He’d done what so many guys do – picked out a gift he would love to get himself. And now couldn’t imaging that it would be met with anything other than utter happiness and awe.  I couldn’t really blame him for this particular gift, though. I mean she did go to preschool and talk about scaffolding. Cars didn’t seem that far off. And, he’d obviously put some thought into it, which couldn’t be said for the other kids who just brought what their mother picked out.

Later, I saw him playing with the other boy with the cars, while the girls all talked to each other on matching pink fuzzy phones that were all the rage that year.  I thought about saving one of the phones and wrapping it up for Luca’s birthday, but figured his parents really wouldn’t appreciate that.

On the way home – thankfully she waited to get into the car – the birthday princess huffed, “Why did he give me cars?” 

“Because he likes them.”

“But it’s my birthday!”

Oh, how to explain the world of guys? Where even to begin? At least I thought I had a long time. And to some, preschool to fifth grade might seem a long time, but for a mother it is a blink of an eye.

The boys now already way scarier (for me) than innocent little Luca. The more grown-up princess came home the other day with a golden bracelet around her arm.

 “Where did you get that?” I asked.

“Jake,” she mumbled.

“Jake? Why did Jake give you that?”

“Because he likes me.” 

Dammit. If only Jake had stuck with the matchbox cars.

Mid-life Tractor

Several of my male friends have kicked-off their mid-life crises.  They are scurrying around doing things like buying new sports cars, getting divorced, getting married, getting girlfriends, getting fit, changing careers, or shaving off all their hair and attempting to swim the English Channel.  You know, normal stuff.

My female friends don’t have time for mid-life crises.  We’re all too busy with lives – our own and those around us – to pause for a crisis.  We figure when we hit 90, we’ll finally have the time.  We just hope our bodies can keep up with our minds at that point.

My husband’s mid-life crisis, of course, didn’t approach normal.  He didn’t want a car or a girlfriend (as least as far as I know), or even to swim the English Channel.  What he wanted was a tractor.  He tried to disguise it under the umbrella of his life-long dream to build a house, but I knew it was really all about the tractor.  Ever since my three-year old daughter used to prance around the house singing, “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy”, I’ve recognized that scary gleam in his eye.

He finally convinced me that we needed to build a new house.  Well, not really, but he convinced me to just give in on the subject. My main reluctance wasn’t around the stress of moving or of the added expense. The real issue is that when my husband talks about building a house, he’s not talking about sitting in a cushy architect’s office followed by weekly visits to the job sites, where you bring pizza and beer to the workers and walk around pointing out how you are going to arrange the furniture in your new living room. What he’s talking about is strapping on a tool belt, going to the lumber store, coming home with a pile of lumber, and digging in.  Unfortunately, I’m not kidding.

After months of searching, we finally found a piece of property that met our needs – close enough to school, work, and the grocery store, but still far enough out to feel ‘country’.  Neighbors close enough to help if you happened to cut your finger off with the table saw, yet not so close as to watch your TV through the side window.  As we stood surveying our new property the day we bought it, my husband turned to me with glee, “Time to buy the tractor.”

Of course, I’d stepped into the deep pit at this point.  I stood on a ledge about half-way down, the walls too smooth to climb and the top just beyond my grasping fingertips.  There was no way back up. The only hope was that a passage way out existed at the bottom.  I plunged the rest of the way in and we bought the tractor.

It arrived a few weeks later and suddenly it was impossible to imagine how anyone could possibly survive without one. (At least if you were my husband).

“Wow. We never could have planted 200 trees without a tractor. See how much we need one?”

“Or, we just wouldn’t have planted 200 trees.”

“Amazing. We never could have carried these boulders across the field without a tractor.”

“Did we really need to move the boulders?”

“You don’t have to rain on my parade… Hey, speaking of parades – do you think I should decorate the tractor and ride it in the neighborhood 4^th of July thing?”

He spent the next few weeks using the tractor to dig out the foundation for the barn which would become its new home.  Gushing about how it would be impossible to dig the foundation without a tractor, the irony of not needing a barn if we didn’t have a tractor was completely lost on him.  I let it go.  I figure when I’m 90, it’s gonna be pay-back time and you know what they say about pay-backs!

Wow - I got an award!

Wow – my tiny blog got an award!  ED Martin has given me the Liebster Award. 

Liebster is a German word that means beloved or favorite. This is an award from fellow bloggers given to blogs that have less than 200 followers, hopefully to increase traffic to that blog. 

 

To accept the award, you are supposed to pass it on to five other deserving blogs and, some say, tell five things about yourself that your readers might not know.

Dr. Tanya Feke has a very cool blog that combines movie reviews with topics about staying healthy and staying/becoming positive.

Monique’s Musings is a fairly new blog by a recently published writing friend of mine.  She writes middle grade – without any vampires or werewolves or magical creatures - and has a very nice series of books going.

Neal K’s blog is totally different. And, he might have more than 200 followings, I’m not sure. Neal writes mainly about internet security and image analysis.  He’s a very stealthy guy and is always interesting to read.

In the tradition of ED, I’m stopping with three.  Most of the other blogs I follow have much bigger followings – but if you know of a good one, let me know and I’ll append it.  I’m sure that must be fine by the rules!

Now, three things about myself that aren’t too boring or too embarrassing. 

-          1. When my daughter was born, I decided to take a picture a week of her to mark her first year. I called them “Friday pictures”, since she was born on Friday. She’s eleven now, and I can’t stop. I joke with her that when she goes to college, she’ll be required to send back a picture every week. Either that or I’ll have to capture one from video Skype. It does make you realize how precious few weeks we really have!

-          2. My thumb is as brown as they come. I kill off things others say are weeds (like mint, for example).  Last year, I managed nine zucchini and a miniature pumpkin out of the garden. In spite of it, I’m still going to try again. I’d really like a nice crop of herbs…

-        3.  Because I’m from New Mexico, I know that green chile is its own food group.  I get jittery if I don’t have at least one bag of the green stuff in my freezer.  Soon, I'll post a few easy recipes for green chile. If you haven't fallen in love with it, you should.

Thanks, ED, for the prize! Now, I suppose I should advertise this blog a little better to see if I can get a few more followers :-)

Oh no! A Cat!

Animals love me. They love to follow me around, jump on me, lick me, basically torment me in any way that they can. I know they mess with me and then get together in their secret animal groups and have big laughs about how they screwed with the human. The human who really doesn’t like them. The human who would rather live far apart from them. The human who is me.

One of my early memories is running away from cows that my great-grandmother kept amidst the laughter of my country relatives. These days, seeing videos about cows attacking bicyclist and even deer going berserk, makes me think I wasn’t so stupid being scared.

Of course, I don’t really like even the more “normal” cat and dog and rabbit pets.  Does that make me a bad person? I’ve really got good reasons, believe me, I do.

Long ago, during one of my early babysitting jobs, my two little charges told me I needed to let the dog out so it could pee.  I opened the door and let the dog out.  The girls’ owl eyes grew large as the dog bounded over the fence and disappeared.  They had neglected to inform me, it seemed, that the dog actually needed a leash on before it went outside.  Luckily, my mother was home, just two houses down the street.  She came and drove the oldest girl around the neighborhood until they found the dog and brought it back. While I did babysit there again, I always insisted the dog be put outside before I got there.

I also made the mistake of bunny-sitting for a friend one week.  The rabbit’s people gave me instructions to let the rabbit out for exercise every day.  I asked several times just to be sure.  No, the rabbit won’t jump over the fence. No, you don’t need to put a leash on it. Just let it out. It will explore the backyard for awhile and then you can put it back in its cage. I didn’t ask about the woodpile. I didn’t know I needed to.  I let that rabbit out of its cage and it bounced back behind that wood pile as fast as its bunny legs would carry it.  In the time before cell phones, I didn’t know what to do. I knew if I left, the rabbit would disappear forever. I knew if I stayed, I’d never be able to catch the stupid rabbit and return it to its cage. Luckily, my mother saved the day again. I’d been gone so long, she sent my brothers to find me. They got out the hose and flooded the rabbit out of its hiding spot. I’m not sorry to say that was the last exercise the bunny got that week. I never rabbit-sat again.

My daughter, of course, did not inherit my animal-hating gene.  She practically came out of the womb asking for a pet. I thought fish, and even a couple of water frogs, would be enough. But, her eleven-year-old self informs me that you can’t pet a fish or hug a frog. And, she’s got an ally in her father, who has secretly wanted a pet for awhile now.

So, this weekend, as part of my husband’s big birthday mid-life crisis (more about mid-life crisis in my next post), the two of them went out and brought home a cat. 

I begrudgingly agreed to live with a cat, but I certainly don’t want to have anything to do with the cat. It is their cat. The cat, of course, sensed this from the moment she walked in the door. I saw it in her eyes. I was doomed.

That first day, the cat spent a wonderful afternoon being shown around to the people who came over to celebrate the big birthday. She purred, sat docilely, seemed to enjoy petting and didn’t want to explore at all. I saw her wink a few times in my direction, although everyone else seemed oblivious to her devious nature.

That night, husband and child put her in the bathroom, along with food, water, toys, a litter box. Everything a cat should need.  They said good-night, happy with their choice of a wonderful new pet.

I got up early, as I usually do, and my now-old husband turned over and grumbled, “Check that the cat didn’t screw anything up.” I sighed, walked in the bathroom, looked around, and saw… no cat. The bathroom isn’t that big. There aren’t many places to hide. There was no cat.

I woke up my husband who grumbled some more about how blind I must be. He stumbled into the bathroom, looked around, and then shrieked, “Holy, crap. The cat’s gone into the ducts.”

The cat, indeed, had gone into the ducts. After prying off the board and grill over the air vent, the cat had disappeared. My daughter, woken from the noise, crept into the bathroom and asked, “Where is my cat?” Then her eyes filled with tears as she whispered, “I only had a cat for one day and it’s already gone.”

I imagined the worst - a dead cat up in the ductworks.  Probably somewhere way up high, hard to reach. Probably somewhere that involved cutting out the most drywall and making a huge mess. Something that would take weeks to fix once the horror of a dead cat had been removed.

Since we put in all the ducts ourselves – and I slapped duct seal on them for hours in below zero weather in a house with only walls and no heat one winter – we had pictures of all of them and knew where each one went. We spent the morning taking down air vents and peering into ducts, hoping to see a cat. No cat. We took a broom stick and pounded on the ones that are still exposed since we don’t have all the ceilings in place. Still no cat. My husband even took apart the furnace to make sure the cat hadn’t fallen down into it. Again, no cat.

We settled down around twilight, trying to decide the next step, which probably involved cutting a hole in a duct somewhere (but where?) to widen the search a little bit. I flipped on the TV to a random show and we all heard a loud bang. The sound continued even with the TV muted. The cat was up there after all – and very much alive.

My husband raced to one end of the ducts, exposed to the air. He placed a can of smelly cat fish underneath it and waited. My daughter ran to the bathroom, a wide smile on her face, and waited. After a few more moments, filled with thumps and bangs, a slightly dusty cat emerged. She took a drink, checked out the litter box and seemed completely at home. And, I swear, she winked at me.