Category Archives: Family

Community, Family, Friendship, Parenthood

(Middle) School’s Out Forever!

June 18, 2013 Wildtrumpetvine

This morning, my daughter caught the middle school bus for the last time. She’ll return barely four hours later (early release at 10:20, classes twelve minutes long.) I packed her last eighth grade lunch yesterday (no more washing of the thermos and tupperware salad containers for a couple of months). Actual school work, of course, ended a while ago. The final week is a mere formality, a period loosely filled with awards ceremonies, desk and locker cleanings, movie-watching, yearbook signings, and saying goodbye.

It’s hard to believe that all those highly anticipated school events requiring so much preparation are now in the past. Guys and Dolls, in which D played the faithful Mission girl, Agatha, is ancient history. The music department’s competition at Busch Gardens: barely visible in the rearview mirror. The same goes for Mayfest Playfest, a day of short plays written and performed by local middle schoolers throughout the county. Standards of Learning exams in reading, geometry, civics and science: duly completed and scored. (Eight years ago, when D began elementary school and we first heard of the SOLs, my husband found the acronym hilarious.) The eighth grade dance: over. Year-long projects: researched, written, presented, evaluated and returned. Exams: completed and graded. End-of-year orchestra concert (featuring a beautiful rendition of I Dreamed a Dream): it’s history. The final, quite comical performance by the drama class (30 Reasons Not to be in a Play): c’est finit.

When D returns home very shortly, she’ll be accompanied by a crowd of friends. I’ll drive them to the pool, and summer will begin.

When school resumes in the fall, our only child, our baby, will be a high schooler. H and I graduate to another, if not more mature, then at least more elderly parenting bracket.

Seventy-six days of summer stretch out before us. Once, ages ago, that sounded like an eternity to me. Now I know how quickly the season will pass. Every year, I vow to appreciate these precious days, to relish each one for what it brings. I don’t really like the expression, but I’ll use it anyway: I’ll try to be present for these fleeting days of summer. They will vanish in a flash, as always. We’ve been waiting in line 180 days for our turn on summer’s roller coaster. The cars are pulling up, and soon we’ll be inching up that first hill. This season, I will pay attention and enjoy the ride. I hope you do, as well!

GuysDolls3001 — My daughter and a fellow actor as Mission Girls in the school musical, Guys & Dolls.

earrings005 — D made these “Lazt Day” earrings (no more s’s in the abc beads) in 6th grade. She has worn them once a year ever since.

Family, Parenthood

Daddy Again, on Father’s Day

June 16, 2013 Wildtrumpetvine

0163 — My father with his mother, in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, ca. 1950.

When my parents married in the fall of 1955, there were many among my mother’s friends who expected the union to be short-lived. My father simply didn’t look like the marrying kind. He was boyfriend, or perhaps movie star material, but not husband material, they said. He was not the kind to be faithful, they warned her. He would move on. He wasn’t the type to settle down. It seemed less than likely that fatherhood would be in his aspirations.

That was fifty-eight years ago. Mama and Daddy have stuck together through better and worse, richer and poorer, through sickness and health. They’re a team. I think it’s safe to say that the critics were dead wrong.

Had it been up to my mother, my parents might have postponed the whole childbearing thing indefinitely. After six years of marriage, the leanest days, when dinner might mean a shared can of ravioli, were behind them, but they were far from financially stable. No matter what, though, Daddy wanted a baby. He wanted a little girl. And when I arrived, he loved me to distraction. So much so, that, for a while, he avoided work. This made for a stretch of marital “worse,” one that was worked out in due course.

I find it hard to imagine a more devoted father or grandfather. There may be no one on earth who celebrates my triumphs, or suffers my heartaches, to the degree that my father does. He feels the same way about my daughter. Her joys are his joys, her trials are his trials. There is no battle he would not wage for us, should it be necessary. We know, without a doubt, that he stands resolutely, enthusiastically, steadfastly, in our corner. His unwavering love is a gift that adds immeasurable warmth and color to our lives. Happy Father’s Day, Daddy!

00142 — Daddy and me at my wedding, 1995.

Daddy with my daughter, Centennial Olympic Park, Atlanta, 2006.

(For more about my father and the other father figures in my life, see posts from October 2011 and June 2012.)

Family, Nature, Parenthood

Barred Owl Update

June 7, 2013 Wildtrumpetvine

Soon after the chicks first flew, the owls moved on, probably into the nearby woods. The next spring, they tried to return to nest in the same tree. We heard their cries, which by this time we had learned to translate as Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you? We caught sight of them in soundless flight.

They didn’t stay, much to our disappointment. My husband climbed a ladder to look into their former home, and saw that the shelf that had supported the nest had collapsed. He and D built an owl box together as a father-daughter project, in hopes that we could lure our feathered friends back again. In the photo immediately below, the box is visible in its first position on the tree. The owls evidently found it unsatisfactory. Maybe it wasn’t situated high enough, H thought. The following spring, he risked life and limb to attach the box much farther up in the tree, as shown in the second photo below. I remember my alarm when I returned from an errand one windy Saturday morning and saw him standing on a tall ladder by the tree, the owl box balanced precariously on one shoulder. Despite H’s grand gesture, the owls said No, thanks. They have not returned since, we are sad to say.

The immense old tree that sheltered our family of owls no longer stands. On a sunny Easter Sunday in 2011, we were eating dinner with my parents on the back porch when we heard a thunderous crash. We followed the sound to the front yard, where we discovered that half the tree had simply fallen to the ground. We knew it was nearing the end of its life span. Its hollowness was what had made it especially attractive to the owls. Still, it was painful to see so much of that massive tree splintered in pieces on the lawn.

On the tall remaining section, the never-used owl box was unscathed. Creaking sounds could be heard emanating from the tree. It couldn’t stand for long, and it was a danger, obviously. The next day, I watched with a heavy heart as the tree was slowly, painstakingly removed. It took a full crew and a huge bucket truck to reduce our dear big maple to a stump. The tree was ninety-one years old. Like the other five that once accompanied it, it had been planted in 1920, the year the house was built. I had recently spoken with one of the daughters whose parents had built the house. In her mid-nineties when we talked, she shared vivid memories of growing up in her family home. I told her how magnificent the maples were. She replied that she distinctly remembered the day she helped plant them, “from switches.”

Of the six original trees, only two remain. One day we will plant young trees in place of those we have lost. For now, though, the owls’ former home will be marked by a slowly deteriorating stump. Every tree company in northern Virginia, it seems, has stopped to give us a good price for stump grinding. We always say no. Unlike the owls, we find it hard to move on.

On the left, one of our two remaining silver maples. On the right, the stump of what will always be for us the owl tree.

Community, Family, Nature, Parenthood

Cicadas!

May 15, 2013 Wildtrumpetvine

They’re coming. Cicadas, in extraordinary numbers, will soon be waking from their seventeen-year naps. Really? It hasn’t been seventeen years since they last overwhelmed our area. I know this for certain. An intense cicada season is not forgotten. Our daughter was five, nearly a preschool graduate. Time does fly, but she’s only fourteen now, not twenty-two.

We hear it’s likely that the DC area will see more cicadas than usual this year. Various broods hatch every seventeen years, and this year’s Brood II is not the one that deluged us here in Northern Virginia in 2004. Fairfax County lies on the outer limit of this coming brood, so we may not feel the impact as strongly as places farther south. We’ve heard from my husband’s brother that the big, lumbering insects have indeed been spotted in their neighborhood in Richmond. Our daughter’s young cousins have never been party to a cicada invasion. I hope they enjoy it as much as she did.

D has always had a soft spot for oddball creatures. I admire her ability to find beauty where many cannot see it. She took an immediate liking to H’s pet box turtle, with us since we married, and before that, with H since he was a boy. Speedy (H was twelve when he named it) lives in a spacious glass box in our basement. He dines on raw ground beef, blueberries, and now, thanks to Kiko, canned dog food. Occasionally he gets the run of the basement or one of our larger bathrooms. D maintains that Speedy is terribly cute, although few would agree. As a toddler, she befriended the numerous toads that make their home each spring in our yard. She named them and discussed their differentiating traits of appearance and personality–how she could distinguish Squeaky, say, from Emily. As I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, she loves all the bizarre aquatic life of Cape Cod bay, including the spider crabs and the slimy moon snails. See Our Summer Village on the Cape, September 2013.

D’s five-year old self welcomed the cicadas enthusiastically. She picked them up, but gently, carefully. She enjoyed letting them amble along her arms, even on her face; she often had one perched on her nose. She loved their segmented, transparent wings, red bulbous eyes, stick-like legs, and coal-black armored bodies. I agree that each full-fledged cicada is a majestic specimen, and I find their uncertain, drunken flight very endearing. But I don’t care much for the nymph stage, in which they first appear after their long gestation period. They tend to tunnel out of the ground in unsettling droves around dusk, each cicada leaving a perfectly round, approximately half-inch hole in the earth. D didn’t even mind the look of these initial wingless, moist, pale beige creatures. Unattractive, I would call them. Or better yet, just plain icky. D wasn’t put off by the discarded exoskeletons that clung to tree branches, reminding me of some dreaded dermatological condition, or the pile-up that accumulated around the bases of our old maples. She wasn’t bothered by the noise, a sound like the roar of a hundred generators and power mowers. And she wasn’t even offended by the smell of pervasive decay, rather like the scent of rotting shrimp, that marks the winding down of cicada season.

It will be interesting to see the scope of this coming invasion and how it affects us this time. Will it be really be an onslaught? Will D, at fourteen, be as eager to mix it up with the cicadas as she was nine years ago? And what about Kiko? While he thrills at the hunt for the single buzzing cicada in the grass, this will be his first major brood year. Will he try to gorge himself on the insects, as some dogs do? Considering his finicky nature and dainty habits, this seems unlikely.

The Cicada Clock is ticking. Recent mornings here have been unusually chilly, but surely spring-like weather will arrive before long. Will the warming earth send these Rip Van Winkles of the insect world out just in time for H’s family’s Memorial Day visit? We were together, memorably, nine years ago for the holiday. As we watched D enjoy the kiddie rides at our local carnival, cicadas hitched rides on our clothing and in our hair. Occasionally a particularly clumsy new flyer would careen into one of our faces. Will this year’s start to summer bring with it another such noteworthy interspecies reunion?

Family, Holiday, Parenthood

For Mother’s Day

May 12, 2013 Wildtrumpetvine

Happy Mother’s Day to all the dear mothers out there. No matter what the attached modifier may be–whether young, old, grand, great-grand, or in-law–may you all be appreciated and honored by those you have nurtured, by those whose hearts you have touched, by those whose lives you have helped mold into meaningful shape. May women who mothered the children of others be included today as well, because their love and support may be equally powerful and equally cherished.

My mother, as a young woman. Because she’s smart, funny, warm and loving, she tends to be surrounded by young friends who wish she were their mother. I am glad to share her, but even more glad to be able to call her my own Mama.

Mama, in 2005, with my daughter, who made me a proud Mama, too.

Family, Walking the Dog

Evading the Terrible Thunder Monster

April 18, 2013 Wildtrumpetvine 1 Comment

One morning last week, when the sky was still dark, we were awakened by a sound we hadn’t heard in several months: loud, rumbling thunder. Kiko had been asleep on the floor between my bed and his. As I expected, he was sitting up, looking around uneasily. I could read his little doggie mind: Oh nooooo! Is that what I think it is? The terrible monster is back! It didn’t die! Where is it? Will I see it this time?

Kiko has only one real fear. In the presence of snarling, threatening, enormous dogs, he holds his head up, cool and composed. He has never met a person who frightened him, although he barks with some alarm at those who insist on wearing large, unflattering shoes with shorts. As a puppy, he was afraid of garbage trucks and wheeled trash bins, but now they do not phase him. Thunder, however, is another story.

That morning, he quickly vanished from my room. When he returned a while later and jumped up in bed with me, his fur was wet in spots. Strange, I thought.

At the slightest suggestion of thunder, Kiko begins a frantic, unsatisfying routine. First he searches for visible signs of the approaching menace. He stares intently at the windows and darts from door to door. He recognizes flashes of light as extremely bad omens, likewise the appearance and sound of rain. Once his worst fears are confirmed, he seeks a better place. Unfortunately, there is no better place. He attempts to maneuver himself into confined spaces: closets, under desks, behind arm chairs, even behind the toilet or in the angle of the open refrigerator door. Once, when we had removed the kitchen trash bin from its cabinet, he sought refuge there. But no place is ever safe enough. He is soon on to the next spot.

If all this fails to console, and it always fails, his last resort is physical closeness with one of the pack. As I’ve mentioned before, if all is well, Kiko doesn’t need to be in your lap, or in your face (he’s not a kisser, unless you’ve just eaten cheese). While very social when we’re out walking, at home he prefers solitude and the freedom to enjoy a variety of spots for unencumbered relaxation and sleep. He’d rather you not disturb his rest by joining him on the sofa. He may begin the night downstairs in the playroom. Toward morning, I may find him sleeping in his bed in the corner of my room. Occasionally he stretches out on the foot of my bed, but he never remains there long.

Only thunder prompts him to get close, and then he can’t get close enough. Usually he is too nervous to sit or lie down. If he catches you off guard, he may try to stand on you, perhaps on your chest or neck. This is extremely unpleasant for everyone involved. Or he tries to sit on your pillow, which I will not allow. Wrapping him in a towel or the bedspread offers some solace. I considered buying a Thundershirt, but those I’ve seen appear to be hot and heavy. He’s already panting excessively; I could imagine a thick, binding coat leading to spontaneous combustion.

As I readied breakfast for our daughter that day, Kiko stuck by me like glue, huddling in the space between my legs and the kitchen cabinets. When I opened the dishwasher, he considered getting in it. The thunder continued, so I turned to the only remedy that verges on effective: Xanax. Prescribed by the vet, it takes the edge off, so he is less distraught. It allows him to cease roaming, lie down and minimize the panting and shaking.

When H appeared for breakfast, I asked if he knew why Kiko’s fur had been wet. He did. When Kiko had left me, H had been in the shower. Frenzied desperation seems to endow our dog with a near-magical power to open any door. Suddenly, there he was, in the shower with H, trying to dodge the drops. This was a first, even for our weird little dog. He hates getting wet nearly as much as he hates thunder. When he realized there was no escaping the water, he began pawing at the shower door. Once released, he dashed upstairs to find me.

Nothing else had worked. He had abandoned all dignity and was prepared to snuggle. I had been expecting him, so he he missed the chance to stand on my throat.

Kiko0021 — Did I just see a flash? Did I hear thunder? Here it goes again!

Community, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friendship

Prayers for Boston, Prayers for our Country

April 16, 2013 Wildtrumpetvine

It’s happened again. Another harrowing national tragedy. This time in Boston, during that city’s much-beloved marathon, on Massachusetts’ annual Patriot’s Day, a day of holiday and celebration.

More innocent lives were lost yesterday, April 15. More bodies were maimed, more souls damaged, more children left without a parent, more parents’ lives ravaged by the loss of a child. Another beautiful day in April, forever marked by catastrophe and sadness. Today is the six-year anniversary of the Virginia Tech shooting. This Friday, 18 years will have passed since the Oklahoma City bombing. As in the 1996 bombing at the Atlanta Olympics, a jubilant time in the life of a city has been twisted into ugliness, a blood-red-letter day of mourning. As in December’s horrific mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, children are among the victims. As on all these days and on September 11, those of us still standing are shakier, less steady.

Perhaps somewhat guiltily, we are relieved that it wasn’t our time. Not yet, at least. But we know it could easily have been us. It could happen to any of us. And increasingly often, it does. Our family was concerned, in particular, about friends from our church. The daughter was running the marathon, and her parents were there to cheer her on. Luckily, she is young, strong and very fast. We learned through Facebook that the family was unhurt physically.

Now, as a nation, we will pause. We will mourn. Many of us will pray. We may find ourselves at a loss for how to proceed. But then, as we always do after such calamities, we will rally. We will come together in love and support of those who died, of those runners now missing limbs, of those who have lost loved ones, of those who will assist friends and family as they face years of surgery and difficult recovery. We will stand up and say that we refuse to get used to this. We refuse to accept such violence as the natural order of things. And through our shared strength and determination, we will show that no matter what, the power of goodness will win out over evil. Immediate proof of this is demonstrated by the many people who stepped in, selflessly and heroically, to do everything they could to help injured strangers.

My prayers will continue to go out for all those impacted by this tragedy, and for all Bostonians, who, I would imagine, take personally this despicable strike against their hometown.

Crafts, Family, Holiday, Parenthood

Egg-Decorating, Continued

March 30, 2013 Wildtrumpetvine

Because we fared well with our first batch of decorated eggs this season, my daughter and I pushed on. We experimented with natural dyes, without success. Boiled red cabbage suffuses the kitchen with a pungent smell and yields a vibrant reddish-blue color in the pan. Yet eggs left in this liquid for an extended period emerge an innocuous, industrial shade of gray-white. The same is true for beet juice. This might not be the case if we had boiled the eggs slowly with the vegetables, as we have done, with good results, to make our reddish-brown onion skin eggs (See post from April 2012). Surprisingly, only frozen blueberries mixed with water imparted a substantial but subtle color (a dull gray-blue, seen on the egg in the top center, above).

D and I soon turned to the stand-by, store-bought egg-coloring kit. We wanted to try some easy techniques that did not involve paint or markers. Outside in the biting March wind, we foraged for interesting bits of foliage and flowers. We arranged a sprig or a leaf on each egg, wrapped the egg tightly in cheesecloth, tied the ends with yarn and immersed the egg in the dye. We had used the cheesecloth technique before when decorating some of our onion skin eggs. (Pieces of old nylon stocking, recommended by some, did not work for us; they didn’t create a secure enough hold.) This cheesecloth process produces messily impressionistic images, as on the eggs above, instead of clear-cut stencil designs, which suits us fine.

My daughter created this interesting design with nandina leaves,
wrapped very tightly to show the weave of the cheesecloth.

We made bolder patterns by simply wrapping rubber bands
tightly around the eggs before dyeing them.

For this design we used a sprig of pine needles bound with a rubber band. It reminds me of waving seagrass in front of a beach fence.

We made polka-dotted eggs by applying stickers before dyeing.

We used a variety of stickers for the eggs above. Our failure to remove the stickers immediately after dyeing made for the only stress of the evening. We spent considerable time trying,
with incomplete success, to scrape off the shredded stickers and the gooey residue.

We used tape to create simple rectilinear designs. It peels off far more easily than stickers.

Happy Easter-Egging!

Crafts, Family, Holiday, Parenthood

Painted Eggs

March 28, 2013 Wildtrumpetvine

This year, my daughter and I continued our Easter-week egg-decorating tradition, but we kept the techniques simple and our approach low-key. We dyed these eggs using the tablets from a basic egg-coloring kit and decorated them using acrylic paints or markers. I am happy to report that no family members were harmed, either emotionally or physically, during the decorating of these eggs, which is more than I can say for some years.

For other approaches to egg-decorating (and the upheaval they have provoked), see several posts from April 2012.

Family, Friendship, Parenthood

Dark Secrets: Our 8th-Grade Movie, Part I

March 12, 2013 Wildtrumpetvine

I find it a little alarming that my daughter is fourteen, and half-way through eighth grade. It’s alarming because my memory of being a fourteen-year-old eighth-grader is fairly clear. I remember many of my eighth-grade thoughts, and they weren’t so very different from my current middle-aged thoughts. This brings me face-to-face with the uncomfortable realization that my baby is no longer my baby. She’s my only child, so in a sense she’ll always be my baby. But from here on out she will be traversing the continuum from nearly grown-up to nearly completely grown-up. Can anyone ever claim to be truly grown-up? Maybe after the death of one or both of our parents? Or does this make us feel like old, lost children? More alarming thoughts, which I won’t dwell on now. Today I want to think about our movie.

I loved 8th grade. The snags of our newly-formed middle school were working themselves out. (See Middle-School Memorabilia, February 2012.) Once again, we were in classes with many of our old elementary school buddies, and we had the added bonus of meeting new friends. Some of these friendships took root thanks to an experimental, unstructured class that replaced language arts and social studies. As our independent project, my friend Katie and I made a movie.

She and I loved the movies. We dreamed of writing, directing, and perhaps starring in our own films one day. The logical starting point was our own Super 8 short film. Of course it was Katie’s family that had the camera, not mine. They had real cameras, ones with complicated knobs for focusing, as well as movie cameras, film projecters, even special movie lights. The were high-tech. I was wowed. I come from an anti-camera, anti-tech family. On Christmas morning, we would look around for the Kodak Instamatic. If it could be located, it often lacked film, flash bulbs, or both. One Christmas, our only pictures were taken by our next-door neighbor. Old photos from the 1940s on were tossed at random in the drawer of the coffee table, undated and unlabeled, a practice that inspired me to take the opposite approach, to document, organize and archive.

Katie and I favored the genres of comedy and horror. (See Movies with Friends: From Frogs to Rocky Horror to Toco Hill, and other posts from March 2012.) Our movie, we quickly decided, would be a campy, silly horror film, set in the 50s. As kids growing up in the 70s, we were fascinated by that Happy Days era, which seemed so distant. Because Katie’s mother and mine had saved most of their clothes from that time period, our costumes were immediately at hand. We also had lots of comical wigs and odd accessories that begged to be modeled.

We spent Saturdays and school-day afternoons writing the script. To us, it was side-splittingly hilarious. I have several copies of the final four-page script, typed by Katie and mimeographed at school. It was a silent film, so the narration and dialogue were hand-written in a flowery cursive and filmed, panel by panel. Our working title was The Underground Horror, later finalized as Dark Secrets. It began promisely enough:

The date is 1957. Leonora Fieldcrest had just moved into old Ravencroft Cottage on Shepherd Lane. Knowing that the apartment in the basement was rented to a certain Dr. Marc Welby (whom she had never met), did not hinder her. Perhaps
she should have thought more carefully.

Our set was the home of our friend Rebecca, who would play Leonora’s “old school chum” and spunky gal reporter, Amanda Duff. Not surprisingly, Dr. Welby (we considered this name choice an example of our use of sophisticated irony) was up to no good. He was building a creature. His laboratory was a squalid subterranean room, the door of which had been painted, years before, by previous homeowners, with the ominous warning: Operations Shack! Scram! Rebecca’s basement (really a cellar, rudimentarily finished and typical of the 1930s-era homes in our neighborhood) simply cried out for us to film a horror movie in it.

Katie took the role of the creature, and I played Leonora. We recruited two boys from our class for the male roles: Dr. Welby and Leonora’s butler. Everyone in old 50s movies had a butler, it seemed, and we needed another guy. Katie filmed the scenes she wasn’t in. Her older sister took care of the others. Rebecca’s younger sister and her friend served as gaffers and gophers. We relished tossing around such film jargon. Because the next-door neighbors had a cute little dog named Buster who was always underfoot, he was granted a role as Leonora’s puppy.

The entire cast, pictured above, from left to right: Amanda, Leonora, the Creation, standing menacingly, Dr. Welby, and the butler. It’s unfortunate that not a single still photo related to our film was in focus. I haven’t seen the movie in years, but I’m sure it’s not this blurry. I’m uncertain of the source of these pictures. Evidently they were taken before Katie got her very own good camera; at which point she became the primary photographer of our collective youth, known for her creative (and clear) photos. She has enjoyed a successful career as a photo-journalist for the Indianapolis Star newspaper.

Dr. Welby, at work in his Operations Shack. He laughs in a villainous manner as he puts the finishing touches on his Creation, whose red plaid skirt is visible.

Me, as Leonora, with Buster the dog.

Amanda, just arrived from Kansas (on her bicycle),
hands her little suitcase to the butler.

One of our funniest jokes (we thought), was the awfulness of Dr. Welby’s basement “apartment.” Here, Amanda and Leonora snoop around while the doc is out, observing personal mementos on the table beside his bare foam-rubber mattress on the floor.

At Amanda’s insistence, the two friends sneak into Welby’s inner sanctum. Leonora brandishes an Indian juggling club. Ace Reporter Amanda wields her trusty, if anachronistic camera,
perhaps the source of some of these blurry photos.

A blog about motherhood, marriage and life: the joys and frustrations, beauty and absurdity, blessings and pain. It's about looking back, looking ahead, and walking the dog.