Don't turn your back on this one

This happened while Peter was about five feet away, washing dishes.

No pictures

I've been meaning to say something here about how, despite the evidence of recent posts, our life is NOT in fact all Victorian morality tales for infants, but then we took a turn for the still-more Dickensian; we all succumbed to colds, which started out with fever & chills, developed into tubercular hacking, and in Peter's case, pneumonia. The whole, dreary, weeks-long episode appears to be on the verge of closing, although with its last gasp it apparently exhaled a noxious miasma of stomach flu upon us.  Dad used to quote a friend who said that having young children at home was like living over an open sewer, and it was amusing at the time. Just at present, however, we are not amused.

Memento mori

Last week there was a sale at Opportunity (or Oppity-Tunery, as Henry says, which sounds straight out of Mary Poppins) House: Knick-knacks half price. I went off the rails and bought four little English cottages, 25 cents apiece. They are rather crude tourist items that pander to the most spoony Anglophilia and I am absurdly pleased with them. I put them on my dresser along with my perfume, the Korean marital ducks from Tommy, the Wandering Turtles from Carol commemorating the births of Henry and James, and the Bad Thoughts Monster Susan made me. (Because I believe a high dresser is a most important platform for maternal juju.)

This morning, Henry begged me to honor my promise to test them for lead ( and that's a whole other story) so that he could play with them. I did, and they passed, so I gave them to him to play with, carefully. He got in the crib, to protect himself from James's incursions, and laid them out this way and that, chattering.
"Here are the houses," he said. "By the cemetery."
They do look like houses that would sit by an age-old, elm-spread cemetery, but surely Henry doesn't have these associations?
"By the cemetery?" I asked.
"What is a cemetery, mama?"
"Oh, it's a place where people's bodies go after they die so the people who love them can go and be near them."
Henry began to look worried. "And then they get up?"
"Well, no, when people die they don't get up again."
Worry, worry, worry. And then he said, "But isn't Daddy old? My Dada?"
"Oh no, sweetheart, Daddy just likes to say he's an old man, when he's feeling tired, but he isn't at all. He's not old."
Which seemed to do the trick, for now.

They aren't just houses, they're finger puffets.

Moving day

Thursday was a big day on the near west side; a small limestone ranch was being moved from the vicinity of Tenth and the Bypass to a snug little spot at Eighth and Oak, a block and a half west of us, to be fixed up and sold by Bloomington Restorations Inc.'s affordable housing program. Awesome!
Although it took two and more maddening hours for Henry to agree to get dressed in the first place, once we arrived at our little neighborhood park and could see the house entangled in branches at the bottom of the hill, he was hooked.

A truck, pulling a tractor trailer, pulling a house on a flatbed! So much goodness!

Chainsaw!

I like this picture of the house's determined little face, chugging gamely up the hill in spite of the gaping hole in his temple.

The truck was actually in motion here.

The whole operation was so noisy and so thrilling that Henry needed to hold my hand for anchoring.

There it goes! We had to go home to welcome our lunch guests, but we later learned that just a block away from this point, the house got enmeshed again in branches.

James didn't care so much about all the hoopla and went home early.

The house around the corner. Henry was taken, too with the little tree trimming truck following behind, dubbing it "cute."

Another great point of interest: the naked guy who came out on his porch to snap pictures with his phone. (He was, in fact, wearing pants, but Henry was mightily curious as to why he came out "naked.")

Scything down a wayward branch.

I was amused that they had to take down the speed limit: 30 sign.

What I want

Henry showed me that a cut on his thumb he has been tracking for several days has healed, leaving just a pink mark.
"I'm fine, Mama. Look!"
I became portentous. "Do you know what Henry? That is what I want more than anything else in the whole world. For you and James to be fine."
Henry submitted to a kiss. Then he said, "But Mama, don't you want a ball of yarn?"

I, said the fly

Death has been on our minds.

Henry sees changes in his brother and speculates about the future, about the changes in store for us all. "Are you and Daddy going to get littler and littler?" he asks."Will you be like Baby James?"
"No," I say. "We only get bigger and bigger. We won't ever be babies again."
He keeps prodding.
"We'll get older and older," I say, trying to sound bright and matter-of-fact. "And one day we will die."
"I don't want you to die, Mama."
"Well, I don't want to either, but -- (big, psychologically healthy smile) -- everybody dies."
"Don't die, Mama. I don't want you to die. I don't want Dada to die." (Sometimes, lately, he tries out talking like a big kid and says "my Dad.")
"It's OK, sweetie. It will probably (I can't bring myself to omit that unreassuring word) be a long, long time from now. When we're very old."
"I don't want you to die."

Later, after Peter is home from work, Henry spontaneously tells him, "I don't want you to die." Another time, as we are standing in the kitchen doorway, he tells me confidingly, "I don't want Dada to die because I like him so very much."

Last winter, not so long after Dad died, I was walking out of the library and a little boy was standing by the door wailing, "I want my Daddy, I want my Daddy." A security guard was trying to comfort him, telling him his Daddy was on his way. The boy was beyond comfort. It was clear the boy and his father had lost each other among the bookshelves. I remember very clearly that horrible Roadrunner feeling like scrabbling in thin air when I was out in public with one of my parents and suddenly looked up to see it was a different leg or grocery cart or whatever I had attached myself too, and now I was far from home and ALL ALONE. I thought that as sick with uncomprehending sorrow as I was, for those five or ten minutes, that little boy was grieving more intensely than I.

Last evening, I was refilling the bird feeder and saw a bird lying dead in the snow in the yard. I said something about it to Mom, who was trundling the boys home from the Banneker Center, and Henry heard me.
"I want to see, Mama," he said. I let him through the gate, telling him he could look, not touch. He bent over at the waist like a Suzuki recitalist and walked in a slow circle around the bird. "What is it?" he asked.
"It's the body of a bird," I said.
"Why did it die?"
"I don't know. Maybe from the cold. Maybe it got hurt. Maybe it was very sick."
"What is going on with its eyes?"
A thin blue membrane, like inner eyelids, appeared to have closed up and met in the middle of the bird's eyes. "That's just something that happened when he died," I offered.
Henry bent down even lower.
"Maybe he will get up soon," he said after a few moments. "I think another bird will call the doctor. He's sick. He's very sick." We went inside, and Henry asked for a glass of milk and snatched a toy from James's hands.

There are overlying patterns in the way I feel and think about my dad. It is wavelike: Strong, semi-regular washes of grief come and ebb and come and ebb, sometimes stronger but generally, over time, dispersing their energy. There is also a cycle: At first it was hourly; 1 o'clock was the worst time. Then it was weekly. Tuesdays were worst.Then the 26th of each month, and now it is January again, icy and gray. Sometimes it feels as if Dad were here, hoisting himself up my front steps to pick up a box of wine he'd had shipped to my house, or to bring my pregnant self some chard and sweet potatoes from Bloomingfoods, just the other week. Other times he seems like someone I read about or heard about, not someone I knew, he is so far away. I am not dreaming about him very often. The last time I remember, he was behind a very thick pane of glass, like a cold frame, fogged over, telling me he loved me. I thought the other day: Dad has been dead for almost a year now, and then I thought that made it sound as if being dead were an experience he is having, which is often how it feels to me--but, feeling austere, I forced myself to reword it: It was almost a year ago that Dad died. I wonder whether Henry, who was barely verbal last January, and doesn't know what a year is, is under the influence of its cycles, too.

James's new hat

Hat on.

Hat off.