Landscaping: I Need a Miracle

Behold, this is the result of a mere weekend's worth of yard work, and I've still got tons to do, based on the mess I've made that was intended to eventually improve things. In short: Landscaping is hard, as evidenced by the top of my forearm pictured here, which is pretty scraped and scratched up from pruning various bushes, trees, and shrubs. This is the result of watching too many DIY home improvement shows that convince you that, in an afternoon, you can undo everything a Colorado winter has done to your property. Contrary to neighborhood suspicions, I have not been trying to find a new injection site for intravenous Miracle Grow. Yet.

Now that I've begun what I've come to call one of my dumbest undertakings ever, I realize that I could use a miracle. Keep this on the down-low, but I suspect I may be getting one. Note this image of the underside of my forearm. Note the eyes, nose, and mouth that have appeared there in scabby relief. My guess is that, by the time I'm done with the whole yard--lawn, garden, and trees--we'll be able to make out the image of a religious icon in startling detail. I say that because this kind of thing happens to me all the time.

Take, for example, this photo of my full back tattoo:





It's a depiction of my cat, Fluffy, chasing a ball of yarn, but if you squint your eyes, you can see the faintest resemblance to the Virgin Mary.

And then there's this: The ashtray I sculpted and inscribed for my mom at summer camp one year that looks an awful lot like Jesus' own mother (with cherubs). We finally had to put it away, since balancing a cigarette on what appears to be Mary's lap was freaking people out.


Now here's the dilemma: Just like the holy cheese sandwich a Vegas casino bought for twenty eight thousand clams, these items are on sale now at eBay at rock bottom reserves. But what am I supposed to do with my arm? Certainly not more yard work.

Four

I.
You were born on September 23^rd, 2004 at 9:50 PM mountain time. “Hey, it’s Bruce Springsteen’s birthday too,” we said, laughing and singing "Born to Run" in the delivery room. You are four today, and I’m already doing that thing that parents do when they realize that in the blink of an eye, you’re going to pack up your 2017 vegetable oil-powered Subaru and speed away into your future because you’re THAT excited about what’s next. I’m a little misty, I’m a little verklempt. I realized on your 2^nd birthday, the only one in which you would double your age in one year, that you weren’t going to stay little for very long. At the time, this was really good news. Today you’re twice the person you were last year, even if you’re only one year older, and I find myself trying to slam on the breaks. (See also: Good luck with all that.)

II.
I couldn’t be prouder of you. You’re already the kindest person I know, with a self-awareness that I didn’t possess…ever, maybe. My friend Carol calls you “the future president of the United States” and says you’re the oldest soul she’s ever known. This is what friends are for, to tell you that you’ve managed to produce the finest person since Thomas Jefferson (who was born on my birthday, by the by.) But these are the things that stick with me: You can make friends anywhere, even if it’s a dog, or a bug, or a kid who doesn’t speak English. And you are able to give an unapologetic voice to your needs. As a woman who is guilty too often of torturing herself for needing anything at all, I can’t tell you what a relief it is that you’ve always been able to tell me what you need, and ask for what you want. I’m trying not to mess that up.

III.
That day I was trying to hurry you into your car seat, and you looked at me, tearful, and said, “I’m fragile today” made me grateful beyond measure for your way with words. What a relief that you can at least tell me what’s wrong, or what’s right, even if I fail to listen right away. The night I was trying to get dinner made, despite your whiny requests for milk, for a snack, for some paper and markers, you finally said, “I need attention.” Dinner waited that night, our schedule got all messed up, and nobody died; in fact, we were all better off for it.

IV.
You’ve decided lately that your old man is OK. In fact, you’re pretty sure he’s cooler and funner than the rest of us. I knew this day would come; it doesn’t make it any easier, though. After four years of your unabashed worship, it’s downright painful to pass on the baton, even if it does make bathtime, bedtime, and life in general a little easier. I have my own plans, that’s true, but the day you decided to join “Boy Team” as you call it, I considered setting them on fire. You are joining the legions of all the other creatures I’ve brought home who have adopted the habit of ignoring me until sick or hurt, at which point you all come limping back to me. That’s OK. Let the record show that, no matter what, I will be your Doctor Quinn, Medicine Woman. I will be the president of your fan club. I will be your teacher, your student, your sidekick. And I will continue to uphold the doctrine your father and I carved into stone the day we learned of your existence: We will love you, whoever you are.

The "P" Word

Ours is a household with loose rules. We try not to sweat the small stuff, parenting-wise, so that Sophie, Alex and I are together and present, instead of arguing over whether it's OK or not to wear your Crocs to bed. It's not for everyone, but this is the way our family is. Sophie takes great pleasure in picking out her clothes each day before school to create a very unique look that I like to call Boca Raton Bag Lady. Further, the rules are: You can pretty much wear what you want to bed, as long as you sleep; you can pretty much have whatever you want for dinner as long as you eat at least some of it. Wearing seatbelts in the car is non-negotiable, but, hey, you can use any word you want at home, as long as you don't cuss at school.

And then today, the chickens came home to roost.

"Mom," Sophie explained to me today, "you can call big girl underpants 'panties.'" I think I may have lost consciousness for a moment.

You see, for reasons I can't explain, but that probably have to do with a certain series of obscene phone calls that plagued my childhood home in the early '80s, I can't bear to hear the word "panties," much less say it. Even typing the word gives me the heebie-jeebies, and I'm probably going to have to spend the rest of my night with my fingers resting in a bath of sulphuric acid. ("You're soaking in it!")

No one is sadder than I that a new reign of censorship has begun between my daughter and I. Here we are, after three and a half years under my careful tutelage--"These are your underpants"--arguing over the P word in the backyard.

"No, honey, actually you can't call them panties," I said, wincing. "They are underwear or underpants or even undergarments, but that's all." And thus a new rule was born: You can call them panties, as long as you only do so at school. I can't wait for her teenage years; I'm considering getting it over with and taking a pickax to my eardrums now.

No Move is Good Move: A Primer on What My Problem Is, Part IV

If you're new to the No Move is Good Move saga, you'll find part one here, part two here, and part three here.

Our rental house on the hill was owned by a couple that I’ll call, for the purposes of talking trash about busybody people with too much time on their hands, the Smiths. And because their real-life professions probably had nothing to do with their annoying-as-fuck behavior, let’s say, just for the purposes of my own small-minded entertainment, that Mr. Smith was a stunt body double for Woody Allen, and Mrs. Smith was an amateur wrestler on the GLOW circuit.

It’s true that the Smiths were nice and all, but they weren’t giving their property away. The monthly rent wasn’t even close to a bargain, but all their busybodying was contagious, and so we looked up what they paid for the place. Turns out that what we paid for rent against what they were probably paying for a mortgage meant that they weren’t making a killing either.

The place was textbook Boulder, in that it was a totally random mish-mash of fixer-upper and state of the art. It was a schizophrenic mess, that house, and if the place could talk, it would exclaim, “We’re hippies, man!” one second, and, “We’re yuppies, darling!” the next. Right off the bat, I was incredulous that The Smiths paid about $980,000 for it; that just seems like a lot for no more than 1,000 square feet from the ‘50s and a fenced yard. In the kitchen was a million-dollar stainless steel Viking stove cozying up to crappy formica counters and a butcher block island that was so big that you couldn’t get around the kitchen without sucking everything in. There was also a stainless steel dishwasher with a broken top drawer that required a special tool to keep it shut during loading and unloading: A plastic baby spoon. Whenever someone was kind enough to help me around the house, I would hand them the spoon and train them on how to jam it just right between the rails and the drawer. “Here, you’ll need this or you’ll go crazy trying to unload that thing,” I said. And then there was our crappy old refrigerator—cream colored, not stainless—which we moved from our house in Ned because, well, we were going to need a fridge in the house, and it didn’t come with one already installed.

There was a beautiful, if one can call a furnace beautiful, brand new, industrial grade furnace in the basement. It had blinking lights and a computer inside, and I was wont to call it Kit on the few occasions that the pilot light went out. Because instead of getting down on my hands and knees and taking the thing apart and finding a fireplace match and pressing a button or turning a valve while trying to hold the flame steady in the belly of the beast without setting the whole place on fire, all I practically had to do was ask the nice furnace, in the parlance of everyone’s favorite rapper, to check itself before it wrecked itself. Thank whatever gods are available right now that we had that furnace, too, because there was no insulation to speak of, and most of the windows were bare and of the original, single-paned variety, which would have been fine in a milder climate, but it was the dead of winter and I swear I could feel the wind blowing right through the pores in that old glass.

I’m often reminded how small of a town Boulder is, and one of those reminders came when our babysitter showed up shortly after we’d moved in and said, “Oh, I’ve worked in this house before, but back then, the floor was warped to hell.” Apparently, there’d been some kind of leak all over the hardwoods, which eventually righted itself with time and Colorado’s patently dry conditions. I wondered, though, what kind of mold or mildew was living beneath us, waiting to strangle us come spring.

Our lease came right out and said that we were not allowed to pock the walls with new holes. Fine, we were leaving in six months and left our prints and art in a box in the basement for the next move. “And don’t paint anything,” it told us. No worries there. But what it really, really did not want us to do, under any circumstance was for us to flush tampons down the toilet. To do so was strictly verboten to the point that even Mrs. Smith mentioned it herself a few times. I figured that she’d learned some hard lessons after a few full moons with two daughters in her house. It’s true that calling the Rotor Rooter Man can hurt, but I am a grown woman who’s smart enough to appreciate the necessity of keeping sacred the marriage between aging plumbing and tampon responsibility.

That summer we learned that, in addition to praising the furnace, we were to fall down with gratitude for the central air conditioning. All the windows were painted shut, which we would have been willing to remedy with a crow bar had we failed to notice that there were no screens covering the windows. And so there was no fresh air in the house, ever, a phenomenon that resulted in the daily practice of leaving the backdoor wide open all day. When Alex would come home at night, he’d find me in the kitchen, cooking dinner with a can of Raid in one hand and a flyswatter in the other, and Sophie in a little beekeeper’s suit, remarking that she enjoyed the taste of Deep Woods Off with her green beans.

So, we were moved in to the house with a lot of flaws, but a sick location, and because I would rather give myself a lobotomy than spend my good money on blinds for a house that wasn’t ours, we put tin foil over the windows in Sophie’s room to make it dark and we called it good.

In hindsight, it wasn’t choosing to rent a house with bad mechanics that was “our bad.” In hindsight, we were lucky to find that place. In hindsight, we had some good times and a few bad ones that had to do with being sick all the time to the extent that we took more than one trip to the ever-popular urgent care clinic. (Hello, mold!) In hindsight, I was just more than sick of renting.

Next time in No Move is Good Move, we'll find out why.

No Move is Good Move: A Primer on What My Problem Is, Part III

If you're new to the No Move is Good Move saga, you'll find part one here, part two here, and part three here.

To add to my mounting panic over our nest-less existence, those were the months that marked the beginning of the end of Sophie’s career as a baby who slept like, well, a baby.

From her second month of life, Sophie sleep in her crib, every night, from 6 PM to 6 AM, and that was the problem: We had it too good. “This is it,” Alex and I said, congratulating ourselves during quiet, unhurried dinners, “we’ve got it made. She’s a sleeper, thanks to our stellar parenting and undeniable good looks.”

We moved to Boulder. Two weeks later, we went to Mexico. Two months after that, Sophie broke her collarbone on the babysitter’s watch, an episode that disturbed us much more than the bout of pneumonia she caught about as soon as her tiny bones mended. I would put her in her crib and stroke her head, either for an hour or until I’d rubbed off a good portion of her hair—whichever came first—and try and make dinner before she was able to figure out that she had accidentally fallen asleep. There would be night terrors sometime between midnight and one, and at least three other teary awakenings on a bad night. She would ask for—demand—milk each time she woke, and by morning, had drunk enough to add up to a volume that justified keeping a cow on the premises. And as if there was something a mere doctor could do about it, Alex and every relative I have implored me ask our pediatrician for ideas.

“You moved?” asked the pediatrician, as if he’d never heard such nonsense, “Oh, well.” He wrote the word “moved” in Sophie’s chart, and said,“That’ll do it.” He told me that a move can mess up a baby’s sleep schedule for as long as six months, and so can an illness, an injury, and a big change in routine, like starting day care, which she did in between bouts of the Bird Flu. Accepting that we’d sent our daughter’s schedule straight to hell in a basket bearing a nice pink bow, I told Alex to buck up. “We’re never sleeping again.”

Of course, I was wrong. We would sleep, but with a child in between us who apparently was dreaming that she was executing a triple axel toe-loop combo. In exasperation one morning, Alex looked down at the two of us in bed, Sophie occupying ¾ of the king-sized bed by lying diagonally, her feet in my face, and said, “This must end.”

We all deal with challenges differently. I usually hide under the covers of whatever bed is available with a box of strawberry Pop Tarts (frosted). Alex threatens to help, usually in the most condescending way possible, which is what he did the night he suggested, “Do you want me to read a book on this stuff or something?”

“Sure, go nuts,” I said. I went to my office and retrieved a half-dozen books with so many bookmarks and wrinkled Post-It Notes thrust between the pages that they resembled little paper porcupines. “Which philosophy do you want to subscribe to?” I asked him. “There’s Ferberizing, there’s the almighty American Academy of Pediatrics.” I tossed them onto the coffee table as I summarized. “On one end of the spectrum, there’s Dr. Weisbluth and his all-cry-all-the-time approach and the Sears clan at the other, who openly come right out and ask you, ‘What’s up your ass? Jesus. Just take the kid to bed with you.’” I shrugged and said, “I’m paraphrasing, of course.”

It was out of the kind of hand-wringing, hair-pulling, crazy-making, all-encompassing desperation that only severe and extended sleep deprivation can cause that I’d turned to the experts in the first place. Knowing that they’re just trying to help while they make a good living, I know that there’s a problem with relying too much on them. The problem with experts is that you can’t really call them up at 3:24 AM to say, “The best thing about not sleeping is that Bosom Buddies is on now.“ The problem with experts is that they may or may not have changed their minds about something they’ve written between having written it and having decided that maybe it would be better just to give the kid a big slug of whiskey.

The problem with experts is that, while I’m listening to the second half of an hour’s worth of screaming and crying that will no doubt escalate to the kind of wailing that eventually culminates in a vomiting jag, the good doctor is probably in his study, deciding what to bring to the next Rotary Club potluck. Just as he’s asking the shadowy figure of his wife in the doorway, “Do you think Swedish meatballs are too salty?” I’m wondering if it would be wrong to just put my head in the oven, next to the dinner that’s four hours late.

And then, of course, the problem with experts is that sometimes I just want to do things my own way. Because sometimes, unlike a certain ’80 sit-com, I like to think I know exactly who the boss is. (Of course, I’m almost always wrong.) Bossing aside, I do believe that ninety percent of the time, we know what to do with the crises in our lives, no matter how big or how small they are. We can trust our instincts, we can trust ourselves. Although she would win any day of the week in a cage match against Major Houlihan from MASH, and although I often wonder if astronauts can see the stick up her ass from space, the pediatrician’s nurse took me aside on Sophie’s fifth day of life, and told me that she had some advice about advice. She poked me square in the chest and said, “Now that the baby’s born, everyone wants to give you advice, but the best advice is already built-in. It’s in you.” She was telling me what I had already concluded after years of near-disastrous dates and relationships and experiences. Those experiments in substituting my judgment with someone else’s have served me well in the form of painful lessons that hold up over time. Nurse Ratchet with the Rave home perm reminded me that there’s hard-won wisdom in me, and damned if I was going to forsake it because I’d spend $24.95 on some yahoo’s thesis.


To be continued, unless you beg me to stop.

No Move is Good Move: A Primer on What My Problem Is, Part II

If you're new to the No Move is Good Move saga, you'll find part one here, part two here, and part three here.

With just a few days between closing on our house in Ned and not having any place to live at all, I found what seemed like the last house in town with a yard and a short-term lease option. We moved into a pea green shack, the last one that hadn’t been razed or remodeled right in the center of Boulder County’s most expensive zip code.

We liked pretending that we were, like the bumper sticker says, keeping Boulder weird. We liked pretending that we were the bad element on the street that was keeping property values down. We liked pretending that we were representin’, that we were keepin’ it real and sticking it to the man, forgetting that it’s all relative. To some people, we are the man. But it was an easy act, considering that the historical mansions and monolithic homes occupying every square foot of third-acre lots hovered over us in every direction. Across one street sat a ten thousand square foot building that had been converted from an old schoolhouse into a single-family home. It was stunning, yes, but it had no driveway, much less a garage, which meant that after driving your Bentley home, you were parking your rich ass on the street, dahling. On the other corner, a palace that looked like a resort hotel—a dark one, as the family who owned it was rarely there. Not only does money not buy love, it looks like it doesn't buy good sense, either.

We laughed when we realized that were not used to getting fully dressed before going outside to flip the burgers on the grill, but according to our new neighbors, Rick and Kitty, neither were the last people who lived there. “We didn’t care they were naked, and neither did they,” said Rick in the thick Long Island accent that refused to resign even after fifteen years away from the coast. A few months later, Rick was bitten by a raccoon during his evening dog walk, thus ending the lesson that Boulder was already plenty weird without us.

The truth is, that million-dollar Boulder cracker box that we rented was where we reconnected with the old friends who dreaded the winding canyon drive to Ned. It was where we walked to dinner dates on the Pearl Street Mall, and found a preschool for our little girl—a place where she felt loved and appreciated and safe, and where her teachers called her Soaf without us telling them that's what we called her. It’s where we made new friends walking down the street; I guess even multimillionaires take their kids out for some fresh air now and then—on the days when they’re not having it imported on the backs of chinchillas, that is.

And when I wasn't marveling over the neighbor who went to jail for installing the wrong kind of garage door (at least she had a garage), I was looking feverishly for a permanent home for us in Boulder. The sticker shock was unbearable, and eventually, so was our REALTOR. A whole spring season of house hunting later, she was pulling all the stops, using all her powers, to sell us…something, anything to rid herself of clients so demanding that they wanted a house that was actually standing for their three-quarters of a million dollars.

“Well, it’s nice and all,” we practically said on our last outing with her, “but this house is on fire.” And she just about said, “Oh, ALL the houses in this neighborhood are on fire. I live here, and two of my bedrooms are on fire right now. You have to give up something if you want to live in this neighborhood.”

And she was right. We did have to give up something: Her.

Stay tuned for the conclusion, part three of No Move is Good Move: A Primer on What My Problem Is, coming next week. Probably.

No Move is Good Move: A Primer on What My Problem Is, Part I

When I was seven or eight years old, I drew a picture in crayon of a tropical island only big enough for one palm tree and me. “I love Hawaii,” I told my dad. I missed being there, and so did he, even though we’d just returned from a vacation on the island of Kauai. “I’m homesick,” I told him.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “We’re home right now.”
“I know,” I said. “And I’m sick of it.”

Famous last words.

Last week, my dad turned 82. He’s only ever lived in two houses: the one he grew up in, and the one I grew up in. When I left that home for college, I moved once or twice a year; by the time I graduated, one of my life goals was to own things without worrying about whether or not they would fit into the trunk of a Camaro. I was a natural at digging my heels in, growing some roots, and I spent the next five years renting an apartment located in a neighborhood in steady decline. One of my neighbors was one of those high-priced call girls with a full-page ad in one of the weekly alternative newspapers; another was a drug dealer with a full book of business. A stray bullet from a sale gone bad or a psychopathic John with the wrong address might have done me in, but I had furniture. Damned if I was going to strap my second-hand sectional to the roof of my econo-sized Toyota.

After that, it was three years in the first home I’d ever owned, a town home in a better neighborhood with a huge park across the street. I kicked out my boyfriend and adopted a dog. I was set. “Write down my phone number and address,” I said to every friend and relative. “And use a pen.” I was there, and there I was: that kooky dog lady with a Pier 1 credit card and a mountain bike and that’s all I needed. And this lamp. And this paddle ball game. And that’s all I needed. And this remote control. Uh-hem.

When Alex and I married, we bought a home in the mountains, a move I agreed to make without a lot of fuss, considering I never thought I would own a free-standing, single-family home with enough space around it for a few dogs and, judging by our neighbors down the dirt road, two or three llamas. We lived there, in a crunchy little town called Nederland, for six years. The locals called it Ned, and we came to call it that, too, as a term of familiarity, endearment even. Ned was our friend; our flaky, weird friend who was loveably erratic in his behavior and most of all, valued a don’t-tread-on-me lifestyle above all others. As people who wanted to be left alone with their thoughts and dogs and mountain bikes and skis, we loved Ned and his collection of Viet Nam veterans, hippies, hermits, and real estate cheapskates. We loved him even during the winter, when the triple digit wind speeds kept us up nights.

Our first year there, we spent many evenings watching the way the wind would distort our reflections in the double-paned windows as they flexed and strained between the gusts and us. "I wonder what those people up the street who live in that tee-pee are doing right now?" I said to myself. Our second year there, we held contests to see who could make the house hotter with the wood burning stove. (I won with an indoor temperature of 89, despite the minus 25 conditions outdoors.) Our third year there, we survived the hundred-year snow storm by skiing to town for the barbeque the grocery store hosted as a way of kindly disposing of the meat that was going to expire anyway. They wouldn’t have power for their refrigerators for no telling how long, so why not?

It's the place where folks keep their dream-catcher-hammock-kinetic sculpture studios-slash-cannabis-growing-rooms in the front yard, and their dead grandfather on ice in the back. We knew the police chief personally. We watched a semi-organized uprising against those pesky laws that forbid drunk driving. We noticed that Ned is a very active incubator for stupid restaurant ideas. We never locked our doors.

And so on.

During year six it happened: Alex said, “I think I’ll take the baby for a walk to town.” Just like that. He said he was going to have a stroll, get some fresh air, take his time. I had just been diagnosed with Grave’s disease, and remember replying with something like, “I have Grave’s disease,” adding that I was going to curl up with a good goiter and have a nap.

Alex returned looking triumphant. He said that while he was out, he ran into our realtor, Candace, who said the time was right for us to sell our house. Inventory was low, but the market was about to flatten out, so we could make some money if we acted fast. “So,” he said, looking smug, “I listed our house.” Our house was on the market. For sale. Available now. If memory serves, I think I went back to bed. Two months later, we did something I wasn’t prepared to do: we moved downhill to Boulder. Flatlanders again we were, and soon I had to admit that such an act was so crazy that it just might work.

Stay tuned for next week's installment, the continuation of No Move is Good Move: A Primer on What My Problem Is