Today is the day my sister Rachel was born, some years ago.
Often people have thought us twins. This is her birthday, not mine, but ours are close enough that I don’t remember life before her.
She’s the stuff of my earliest memories.
We grew up in the country, deep enough in the woods that there were no neighborhood kids. At the bus stop, on the walk home, after school and all summer, it was siblings.
When I was in first grade and she was in kindergarten, we were cast in a high school Christmas play as the mice, because we were the smallest people in our very small school.
By 9th grade we were often in the same classes, doing the same things, hanging out with the same people. Once in high school, on the day of a pep rally for basketball game at home, she couldn’t – or wouldn’t; I can’t remember the details – cheer. I put on her uniform and jumped around in her place, doing routines that must have been recycled from a year or two before, when I’d had my own pompoms. I’m not sure our classmates immediately noticed the switch.
For the past several years we’ve been in different countries, so the twin confusion has slowed.
But now she is continental and newly employed.
She is uncommonly smart, even if on her recent visit home she did slow the car as we approached a hitchhiker on the highway “because we might know him.” She’s more fashionable than me but asks for my opinions nonetheless, which is very nice. Our arguments tend toward the inane, which seems to me much better than fundamental or otherwise great divides. She loves Grape Nuts more than anyone I know. She’s a star at Frisbee, math, spelling, foreign languages and the recorder. I don’t share any of those talents, but on a recent long ride in the car with some of our favorite relatives, we proved that together we can drive our uncle Ken to madness just as deftly as we did when we were tweens.
For all this and more, today I’m thanking our parents, and September 24, and wishing my sister a happy birthday.
Early Sunday afternoon I looked into the living room to see Jack perched atop two vintage jewelry boxes that have somehow stayed out of our storage container. He was on his toes with legs stretched out, fingers wiggling, working hard to get a grip on something just out of sight.
This is the mental and physical posture that for now defines our life at home.
He’s in a place where tiptoes are the difference between his haves and can’t-haves. The volume knob on the stereo, the spice jars on the kitchen cart, another piece of cheese from the cutting board. The light, the door handle, the faucet, the refrigerator door. He so loves to stand and stretch that our playtime has assumed a Richard Simmons quality.
His parents (that’s .5 parts me) are in a place where over-extension seems the only way to get a grip on those just-out-of-reach things that we’re aiming for. When our 8-to-5 is over, we want to come home as parents, friends and spouses. But we also come home to hard hats; until The Project – our home addition and renovation – is ready to live in, we’re still on the clock as our own contractors.
Jack uses footstools, boxes, the foot rails of wooden chairs, open drawers. If those fail or are taken away, we’re always within reach to lift him up or hand something down. Ladders, scaffolding, weekends, lunch breaks and the tiny bit of daylight at the end of each workday are the time-stretching, height-extending resources that keep us perpetually on tiptoes. We’re slogging through the things we can’t afford for a professional to glide through – caulking, gutting, and eventually insulating, flooring, tiling… . (When I get any further down the list than that, I get a little light-headed.)
Sometimes we have to wait.
We come to a new step only to be rained out, or struck by the flu, or skipped on the delivery route. (The waiting really is the hardest part.)
We knew September would arrive with a lot of progress and a long to-do list. And I’m still sure that all the sweat equity will make us more satisfied in the end with what we did, more sure that we earned the new space and convenience. For now we’re reaching, climbing a little higher as we’re able, taking a little help when we can get it.
Jack likes to check out the top shelves from across the room. Later, when he’s stacked two jewelry boxes to use as steps, he puts his arm up and fumbles for what he knows is there but can no longer see. Some days we have to stand back from the piles of lists and budgets and timelines for a wide-angle look at our undertaking and its many obstacles.
It’s still there, and we’re getting closer.
We’re very lucky to live near two state parks – one so close that we distantly overlook it and the other a half-hour’s curvy, lovely drive away.
After a productive day we left our hammers, caulking guns, gravel, dirt and scaffolding behind yesterday evening in lieu of the wider, safer scampering grounds for Jack at Devil’s Den, perfect for running and playing. We had to drag him away from a friendly duck, who must be accustomed to crumb-wielding toddlers. Jack was so excited by the bird that he forgot his fear of water (since our attempt at a beach vacation, he’s run away even from ponds and puddles). Which made the duck our hero, too.
It’s Monday, so Tracey Clark is showing and telling about her perfect day of work and play.
…any pear.
On Friday night, my weekend was shaping up to look a lot like this:
Jack and I were feeling under the weather. D, who had been in San Antonio since Wednesday, was having trouble getting back because of rainy weather that would also complicate our plans to work on our new siding (caulking and painting are both on our DIY list for The Project) and keep us stuck in our two-room house all weekend.
But: My husband made it home, albeit just before 3 a.m. on Saturday, and was still up a short five hours later to drink the coffee I’d brewed and climb up the scaffolding with his father, our volunteer help for the day, to work in the dry places under the eaves. My mother-in-law caught up with Jack. I made BLTs for everybody and felt useful. At quitting time, we went next door for burgers (inside) and my sister’s until-the-holidays sendoff. Ours was at least a spirited sluggishness.
Then we went home, where in the damp and the dark I realized I’d forgotten to dry our only set of sheets [left unpacked], which I’d washed at my mother’s. I missed my washing machine, and extra sets of dishes and linens.
But: D found an extra blanket and made the bed, and stuffed each pillow into a cotton T shirt.
On Sunday the sun still didn’t resurface, and we had to rain check a dinner+ play date with our friends, but we packed some more and drank hot tea and listened to damp-weather music and read books about how to tile a shower and a tub surround (both distant boxes to check off our DIY list), and I thought myself lucky to have a guy who matched my glum and sniffly can nothing go right? attitude with calm energy and ingenuity.
It’s made my dripping, gray day less bleak. It’s not raining on my parade (I’m not having a parade, anyway), and maybe it’s watering the trees for a bright-colored autumn. Or extending the summer green a little – keeping the grass growing higher, the goldenrod more golden.
It’s Best Shot Monday at Tracey Clark’s.
Two weeks ago, we took our baby on his first trip by plane. As I said before we took off, I was nervous. As some of you assured me, I needn’t have been. Jack sat quietly on my lap in the window seat and held his bottle, looked at the clouds, took the tray table in and out of its upright and locked position, slept.
This left me to my usual in-flight entertainment with Biscoff and the SkyMall catalog. For anyone who hasn’t recently taken to the skies, I’ve assembled a list of the highlights.
Top 10 Reasons to Browse the SkyMall Catalog*
- Truck Antlers. I assume you already have a visual.
- Hammacher Schlemmer Marshmallow Shooter. It will sail a marshmallow 30 feet, and for some reason has a red LED light that other marshmallow shooters don’t have. OTHER marshmallow shooters?
- Tissue Box Hidden Camera. This “totally covert” surveillance device “…looks like an ordinary tissue box is actually recording your every move!” No, that’s not creepy at all.
- Basho the Sumo Wrestler Table. Described as an “intricate sculpt with a wide stance.” And it’s made from designer resin!!
- Am I Adopted? Frame personifies your pet in the weirdest way yet.
- Garden sculptures menagerie. It’s hard to choose between the myriad options: meercats, hippos, a zebra, a big foot, a dinosaur, Big Foot, several key players from The Lord of the Rings. They’re sculpted in designer resin to look perfectly natural in your front yard.
- Your kitchen can have carnival style with SkyMall specialty appliances (popcorn cart, hot dog ferris wheel, snow cone maker, cotton candy spinner…). Consider side job as host of children’s birthday parties.
- Mademoiselle Floor Lamp. If your living room decor doesn’t yet include that memorable piece that will give your children come-to-life nightmares into young adulthood, this could be your answer.
- 6 & 12-card Auto Card Managers – George Costanza and his aching back will have nothing on you.
- The One Ring. For either $395 (gold-plated) or $650 (solid gold), who wouldn’t want a replica of a fictional ring that gradually and inevitably corrupts its wearer to an almost-evil madness? Perfect for anniversaries.
It’s that time (and Jack’s first time).
For fun and love of nursery rhyme wisdom (ruddy apple, ruddy cheek), I want to plant fruit trees – an apple, a pear, a peach, a plum, a cherry – so that one day we can walk outside and eat off the ground, 5-minute rules to the wind.
Mine is an apple-a-day kind of Monday. Others are sharing at Tracey Clark’s.
My sister Rachel, who’s lived in Spain for several years, has landed back on this side of the Atlantic. She made it to New Jersey in time to squeeze into the rented minivan that D, Jack and I, our grandfather and aunt and uncle all took to the wedding last weekend.
For Jack and his antics, this reunion of his mother with one great aunt and one Great Aunt amounted to triple the attention AND triple the threat. He was glad to have the audience; I was glad to have their help. And I was extra glad that Rachel managed to book the same flight we took home to Arkansas, where she’s visiting for a little while before she starts her big city job hunt.
The last time my sister was home for a labor day, it was no holiday weekend. She’d flown home from Madrid for the birth of my first child and her first nephew. She stayed home from the hospital (she’s a fainter) and was at our house when we finally showed up with him, all tiny and new and crying from having not been fed during his first half-hour in the car seat. She made chicken noodle soup, and my husband made grilled cheese, and that’s all I ate for at least the next three days.
We are glad she’s home again.
We went, we flew (it was fine!), and we came home. Having spent a whirlwind August en route to somewhere, we’ll now stay put for awhile.
Last weekend we were in upstate New York for my cousin’s beautiful country wedding. I love weddings.
They were married at the end of a rainy day, after the sky cleared and before the sun set. A big group of well-wishers gathered around them by the pond in the bride’s former backyard. There was a lot of love, a lot of relaxed merrymaking.
It was all so them.
