Spring Forward, Postscript

Posted on March 19, 2012 by Steph

The real test of our new morning rules came this past weekend. All last week, June came into our room at 6:30 or later; one morning she even alarmed me by waking me and saying, “It’s 7:55,” when it was in fact 6:55, a perfectly reasonable time to wake given when we need to be out the door. But keeping herself quiet until 7:00 on weekend mornings proved more challenging than 6:30 on weekdays. On Saturday she was in our room twice between 6:00 and 6:30 and I had to go into the kids’ room another two times during that time period to tell them to quiet down. Finally, they went into the living room and read to each other, alternating pages from a Mercy Watson book (http://www.mercywatson.com/#books). At breakfast, after a stern review of the rules, I praised the kids for deciding to go into the living room, because it had gotten much quieter after that.

“That was Beth’s idea. You should be complimenting her,” Noah admitted. (She must have given them this advice while I was in the bathroom.) So much for leavening the criticism with praise, I thought.

Sunday morning wasn’t ideal either, as once both kids were awake at 6:15 they couldn’t resist talking to each other, and they only occasionally remembered to whisper. Under the old system, June was coming to our room and Noah was reading so they rarely encountered each other, but now that she’s staying in the room with him, they interact with each other and their interactions are rarely quiet. So we still have to figure out how to make the weekends work, but it’s early in the transition and I am not giving up on my vision of sleeping uninterrupted until 7:00 some Saturday or Sunday morning in the near future. I am ready to offer bribes, if necessary.

And speaking of transitions, the garden in the back yard has basically started without us. We have a cluster of daffodils there, an oddly frilly variety, which appeared for the first time several years ago, presumably planted by a squirrel. I’ve relocated some of the bulbs to the front yard, but I never manage to find them all. In fact it seems there are more of them there every year as I manage to separate the ones I find from too close neighbors, which makes them proliferate.

We also have broccoli and lettuce, both remnants of last year’s garden and the lemon balm and black-eyed Susan are starting to come back, too. The lettuce just sprung up on its own. While lemon balm is known for its hardy and even invasive qualities and we’ve occasionally had black-eyed Susan come back, I don’t think of lettuce as a perennial; we’ve been growing it for years without ever seeing this happen. It must have been that the exceptionally mild winter spared the roots of a couple of the plants.

The broccoli I planted in late October. I bought six plants on a whim when I saw them at the hardware store. I knew broccoli can be a fall crop and I was sad about the garden being almost over and thought it would be fun to extend our growing season. When I got home, I looked up some information about growing broccoli and discovered it was really too late to plant it in our area, but the plants looked sad and droopy and root-bound in their little pots and I thought they’d be happier in the ground, so I planted them, expecting they’d die before they produced any florets. They grew a little in the next month or so, and then they stopped, going into a holding pattern for much of the late fall and winter. They didn’t get any bigger and they didn’t die (except for one that gave up the ghost in January or February). And then they started to grow again, and all five remaining plants have produced florets. The biggest, most vigorous plant started to flower the other day so I harvested from it and the next two biggest. We’ll eat homegrown broccoli on spinach tortellini tomorrow night to celebrate the first day of spring.

As we change seasons, I want to celebrate it all, the transitions we work to make happen and the ones that emerge unbidden, but no less welcome.

How Does Your Garden Grow

Posted on May 30, 2010 by Steph

Mary, Mary, quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells, and cockle shells,
And pretty maids all in a row.

English nursery rhyme
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary,_Mary,_Quite_Contrary)

June was lucky I discovered the decapitated tiger lilies when I did. I was on my way out the gate to pick her up at school on Wednesday morning when I glanced over in their direction and realized with a sick feeling exactly what that little pile of buds I’d seen in front of the house earlier that day had been. I hadn’t given the buds much thought. June is constantly picking flowers and leaves and collecting pebbles and acorns. The whole outdoors is her garden and she is always harvesting.

I had the whole fifteen-minute walk to swallow my fury and get it under control. It wasn’t her fault, I told myself. She didn’t know those stalks weren’t weeds. She didn’t know she shouldn’t pick them. She didn’t know that after the daffodils, the tiger lilies are my very favorite flower in our front yard. She’d left half of them intact, but that was small comfort. I didn’t say anything to her about the tiger lilies at pickup, or as we walked home. We stopped at her favorite acorn-collecting place and while we were there the Yellow Tulip and her mom and little brother caught up with us. They walked the rest of the way home with us, and when we got home I ran up to the porch to fetch a cucumber seedling I’d promised her mother. We’d started our garden in pots back in mid-April and I ended up with nine healthy cucumber vines and ten watermelon vines; I gave away eight of the watermelons and four of the cucumbers so we would not be over-run with more produce than we can consume this summer. I had a better idea of how many cucumber vines to keep, as the watermelons are an experiment. Every year our garden gets a little bigger. This year our new crops are blackberries, cherry tomatoes, corn, okra and watermelon.

As soon as the Yellow Tulip and her family were out of earshot I led June over to the tiger lilies. “Do you see these?” I pointed to nearly a dozen broken stalks.

“Yes, I picked a lot of those!” she said cheerfully.

I explained patiently that she should not pick any more, that the remaining ones will turn into beautiful orange flowers but the ones she broke off will not. She theorized that they could grow back. I said I didn’t think so and I told her from now on she should check with me or with Beth before picking anything other than dandelions in the yard. I collected the buds and put them in water on the kitchen windowsill in hopes that at least a few would bloom that way. Noah saw them when he got home from school and asked what they were. I told him. Maybe she should ask before she picked anything in the yard, he suggested. Later that evening Beth tried to reinforce the same message. June must have gotten tired of hearing it because she was not receptive. “This is how it is,” she said. “I will do what I want.” Four can be a very trying age. So far I haven’t ended up sitting down on a sidewalk in public and crying as I once did when Noah was four, but it may just be a matter of time.

Thursday June brought Beth and I bouquets of authorized flowers from the yard—white clovers and purple thistles. I put them in water next to the tiger lily buds. I’d like to think it was an act of contrition, but that might be overly optimistic.

Yesterday we picked mulberries. June had noticed the mulberries ripening on a walk to Starbucks two weeks ago and had been planning this outing ever since, waiting for the berries to reach the proper level of ripeness and deliberating over which basket she would take. After Sesame Street was over, we left the house, June swinging the multi-colored paper towel-lined Easter basket and chattering excitedly. On the way to the appointed trees, she wondered, should we pick berries before or after our visit to Starbucks? (I wasn’t going to get that close without a cappuccino.) Maybe after, I suggested, so we wouldn’t have to carry the berries as long. No, before, she said. I wondered why she’d asked in the first place, but I went along with it.

About a block before we reached the trees, which grow right outside the brick wall surrounding the Langely Park shopping center, we saw another mulberry tree on the lawn of an apartment building. June considered it, but I said no. There were men pruning bushes and trees nearby and I didn’t want to get in their way. She asked if she could have just one berry so I picked one for her.

Finally we arrived at the official mulberry-picking trees. There were a few branches low enough for her to reach or for me to tug gently down to her level, but mostly I had to hold her up. Soon the basket was lined with berries and her face was smeared purple. We went to Starbucks, came back and as we passed the trees again she suggested we pick some more, so we did. Then we passed the apartment building and one of the men who had been pruning saw her basket and said she could pick some berries from their tree if she wanted. I thanked him and said we had enough. Come back anytime he offered and identified himself as the owner of the building.

That night at dinner, I sprinkled mulberries on Beth’s and my salads and put a little pile next to June’s cucumbers and carrots. She didn’t eat any of them, but the next morning she was begging to go pick mulberries again. I told her we needed to finish the ones we’d picked before we went for more.

Later in the day June went looking for mushrooms in the yard. She likes to cut the stems off and leave the caps on colored paper overnight so she can see the delicate gill patterns the fallen spores leave on it. There were no mushrooms to be found today, though.

I did pick some lemon balm and cilantro. We planted these herbs last year and we have some volunteers in the garden, a little bit of cilantro and a lot of lemon balm. Ironically, I never picked the lemon balm last year, which is probably why it’s back and so profuse. I had no idea what to do with it so I let it go to seed. I picked about a half dozen leaves and tried them in iced green tea this afternoon but it didn’t change the taste of the tea perceptibly. I need to do some more research on it. Cilantro is less puzzling. It topped our black bean chili tonight.

We also have lettuce ready to pick. It has looked edible for a couple weeks but we decided to let it get well established before we picked any. I think this is the week we’ll stop buying lettuce at the farmers’ market and start eating our own.

It’s exciting to be able to pick a few things from the garden, though right now mostly it’s a locus of futurity. We have sunflowers about half as tall as June, zinnias starting to shoot up, tomatoes flowering, and cucumber, watermelon, okra and green been seedlings all looking healthy and hopeful. And just tonight Beth, Noah and June planted corn while I did the dinner dishes. There’s also second bed of lettuce and cilantro planted and basil, just starting to poke out of its pot as well as some cleome and delphiniums struggling in theirs. It’s unclear how well they will do as we planted those flowers a long time ago and most of them didn’t germinate. The edamame and broccoli we planted in April never sprouted either, but that’s okay. We’re amateurs and the garden is one big experiment. Some plants die; some flourish; some meet untimely ends at the hands of a little girl quite contrary. And as Beth reminded me as I was moping about my poor tiger lilies, there’s always next year.

Dandelions Gold

Posted on April 18, 2009 by Steph

We should not mind so small a flower—
Except it quiet bring
Our little garden that we lost
Back to the lawn again.

So spicy her carnations nod—
So drunken reel her Bees—
So silver steal a hundred flutes
From out a hundred trees—

That whoso sees this little flower
By Faith may clear behold
The Bobolinks around the throne
And Dandelions Gold.

By Emily Dickinson

“holy mother, now you smile on your love, your world is born anew, children run naked in the field spotted with dandelions”

From “Kaddish,” by Allen Ginsburg

Spring is losing its tentative edge. We’ve had a lot of rain recently and finally some warmer temperatures. The dogwood in our front yard is blooming and the neighbor’s azaleas are just starting to show some pink. The sunflowers and zinnias we planted in pots two weeks ago and brought in on cold nights are sending leaves up through the dirt. The cucumbers and beans are not doing as well. Beth thinks I didn’t aerate the soil well enough when I planted them, but the good news is we started so early there’s time to start over with new seeds. Beth just put lettuce and spinach in the ground today and she’s been industrious about tearing down and uprooting the vines that tend to take over the edge of our back yard.

In addition to things we’ve planted on purpose and the weeds we are trying to eradicate, we have our volunteers, plants we didn’t plant but which aren’t exactly unwelcome either. There’s a stand of daffodils that’s come up in the back yard two years running and is now finished blooming. I suspect a squirrel transplanted the bulbs from someone else’s yard. Last year I meant to move them to the front yard where more people can see them but I forgot to mark the spot and lost track of where they’d been after the greens had been mowed down. This year we have a yellow fish on a stick to let us know where the daffodils are, once it’s safe to dig up the bulbs. And of course, we have dandelions. Their little golden heads are popping up all over. We have a dandelion-neutral gardening policy. We don’t plant them, of course, but we don’t try to get rid of them either and I’ve been known to let the kids blow the seeds across the yard. I think that’s a basic childhood right.

As I walked to Noah’s school yesterday morning, I noticed the trees along the creek are all covered with their new, delicate leaves. They look like tall women in pale green dresses. I am not tutoring on Friday mornings any more. I gave it up as a lost cause after no one came to three sessions in a row. I decided my time would be better spent in Noah’s classroom, so I asked Señora C if she could use a hand and she said come on over. When I arrived at the classroom at 9:30, she looked frustrated. She’d been planning to have me make a lot of photocopies, she told me, but the copier was broken again. This reminded me that Noah’s afternoon teacher had mentioned the photocopier is constantly breaking down and I’d promised her I’d email the principal about it and express my concern but I had not yet done so. I filed that thought away for later. Señora C set me to work punching holes in handouts and putting them in a binder. She told the students who were finished their work to turn it and go to play in centers and she told everyone else to keep working. About a quarter of the class, including Noah, stayed seated or lying on the carpet filling out worksheets and the rest of them wandered over to play different math and science games with each other.

Señora C asked if I could tackle an organization project. There were piles of handouts all over a long table against the wall and half-filled cardboard boxes on and under the table. I tried to grasp the system but as I went through the contents of each box I couldn’t figure out the theme and what else what might go in the boxes. I was afraid of making it harder rather than easier for her to find what she wanted so after a while, I begged off.

She handed me an instruction sheet for the children’s science homework for the weekend and asked me to go to the office and see if they would let me use the administrative copier. I took it downstairs and asked. The answer was no, but the secretary said the machine was being repaired right then and should be working in an hour or so. I brought the message back. Señora C glanced at the clock. It was 9:50. I was leaving at 11:00. It didn’t look good. She vented a little about how frustrating the copier problem is. I completely understand how she feels. If I’d had this problem when I was teaching it would have driven me crazy, never knowing when I could give homework. I noticed the computer on the table and asked if she had access to a printer and she said yes. Then handout was pretty short so I offered to type it for her. Her version of Word was so old I needed to ask how to do the accents and tildes, but it didn’t take me long. She instructed me to send enough copies for her morning class to the printer in the library. I had no idea we might be doing anything illicit until I returned and she asked if anyone saw me take the copies from the printer. I said no one seemed to notice. She grinned and said, “Send the rest,” so I did.

After I distributed the homework papers, I circulated through the classroom watching the kids at the various centers. There was a grocery store where children bought empty food boxes with play money. The clerk had to make change. Two boys and a girl were playing a game with multiplication and division problems on flashcards. They were all lightning fast, especially Noah’s friend Sean. They were giving their answers in English and I asked if they were supposed to be doing this in Spanish. They switched over and it didn’t seem to slow them down at all. Noah was over at a table full of test tubes filled with different colored liquids. One child held a sheet of paper that said what each was. She had to make a pair that were similar in some way then the others had to guess both what the liquids were and why there were similar. The kids kept joking and laughing between guesses but every now and then the hilarity would get out of control. While I was over there I had to break up some roughhousing between Noah and Sasha twice (and Señora C did it once while I wasn’t there). As I made my way through the classroom I watched and praised, asked how the games were played, made suggestions about how to use the fraction flashcards, reminded kids to speak in Spanish, and opined that surely Señora C must have a rule against telling classmates to “shut up.”

“We say it all the time,” the girl responded.

“Well, only the girls,” said another.

It was an enlightening morning. I’m sorry Señora C (and all the teachers) have to deal with the balky copier, but overall the kids seemed engaged and happy. I didn’t know they were so likely to lapse into English, but I suppose that’s natural during the more unstructured center time. I told Señora C I’d be back in two weeks. As I left I touched Noah on the shoulder and said, “Me voy” (ìI’m leaving.î)

“Awww,” he said. That alone would have made it worth coming.

This morning we were all out in the back yard. Beth was weeding, I was mowing and the kids were playing with the hose and sprinkler. Or rather, Noah was. June was so busy getting adults to change her into her bathing suit and then back into her clothes that there really wasn’t much time for water play. I think what Noah was doing looked like fun to her, but when she’d actually try it she’d get cold and want back into her dry clothes. So back and forth she went. One of the times I was indulging her, she brought me her suit and a swim diaper. I sat down on the grass next to the mower and helped her undress. For a moment I looked at her little naked body, winter-pale in the strong sunshine, and I thought of that line from “Kaddish”: “children run naked in fields spotted with dandelions.” It’s a beautiful image in an otherwise bleak poem.

Maybe I’m like the volunteer daffodils in the back yard. I just needed to transplant myself to a different place where I could be of more use. Or maybe I’m like a dandelion, a bit of gold that bloomed where it fell and watches the children dashing wildly around it.

Spring Cleaning – Postscript

Posted on May 18, 2008 by Steph

The rivers are full of crocodile nasties
and He who made kittens put snakes in the grass.
He’s a lover of life but a player of pawns —
yes, the King on His sunset lies waiting for dawn
to light up His Jungle
as play is resumed.
The monkeys seem willing to strike up the tune.

From “Bungle in the Jungle” by Jethro Tull
(http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/jethrotull/bungleinthejungle.html) 

We had our jungle cut down today. Five years ago, the second summer we lived here, we decided to stop cutting the grass at the back of our back yard. It’s the most fertile part of the yard; the grass grows there much faster than anywhere else and we got tired of trying to keep up with it. We let the grass grow tall and soon we had a little jungle playground for Noah. That fall, he was two and a half years old and going through his Mr. Tiger phase. He’d been a tiger for Halloween and afterward he wore the costume as everyday attire. He liked to be addressed as Mr. Tiger and he growled a lot. He loved crawling through the tall grass and pretending to be a tiger. Once he’d gotten far enough into the grass I couldn’t see him at all, just the grass swaying as he moved through it.

Every summer we cleared a small patch of earth to plant tomatoes and a path that led to it. Without the paths, it would have been hard to get back there. With each passing year, the jungle got more entrenched. Weed trees shot up to heights of at least ten feet. The grass got tangled and hard to walk through. When June played back there she was always getting her feet stuck and I’d have to come rescue her. Eventually, the only one who spent much time back there was Xander, the more adventurous of our two cats. Then last summer a neighbor complained about the poison ivy that was creeping through our fence out to the sidewalk. And one day early this spring I found a tick on June’s hair after she’d been playing in the jungle. I started to come to the conclusion that Beth was right and we should have it taken out.

Today the Takoma Mowers, a group of enterprising local teenage boys (http://www.bulletinboards.com/v2.cfm?comcode=takoma&loginpswd=yes&stm=yes&bypass=yes&msgid=1419966&fm=1&nw=x) came to pull up the trees and tear down the vines growing over the fence and hack the grass down to a length short enough to mow. They will be back to mow the grass and dig up a garden plot later.

We’re planning a modest garden, but a bigger one than we usually have: tomatoes, sunflowers, lettuce and spinach. Beth suggested we plant some kind of native grass around it, something we wouldn’t have to mow and that might give the back part of the yard that slightly wild look the jungle had the first few summers.

It’s a good idea, but I still feel a little melancholy for the jungle. I don’t know if it’s my hippie streak, but I like things slightly unkempt and I just can’t stand to cut any living thing. I can bring myself to mow the rest of the lawn and weed the tomatoes but I was physically sick when we had to have an ailing tree cut down a year and a half ago. Noah was three years old and sporting curls down to his shoulders before I let Beth take him for a haircut. Even now, I always think his hair is getting cute right before she decides to have it cut. In exchange, I am in charge of June’s hair and I am intending to grow it long, at least until she states a contrary opinion.

Noah says he misses the jungle, too. Maybe on some unconscious level he remembers those long-ago romps in it, back when he was a kitten and there were no snakes in the grass.

Spring Cleaning

Posted on April 20, 2008 by Steph

Oh, right, Arbor Day, I thought when June and I stepped off the bus in front of the library yesterday morning and I saw all the little saplings in buckets of water and a small crowd milling around in front of them. Once a year you can get free trees at Takoma Park’s Arbor Day celebration. They set them up on the lawn of the library and anyone can come and take up to five. Last year, we got a black cherry tree to replace a tree we had to have cut down (its roots had been severed during some road work and it was listing dangerously close to the house). Then we hired someone to mow the lawn, as we do most springs for the first mowing of the year, to get it short enough for our push-mower to handle. I forgot to tell the mower that the bare little stick poking up out of the ground in the side yard wasn’t a weed tree and that was the end of the cherry tree.

I wondered if we should try again. The logistics of carrying June, her folded up stroller, the diaper bag and a small tree on the bus home seemed a bit daunting, but still, free trees are hard to pass up. I led June into the library, undecided. There was a storyteller just about to start up in the children’s room. All this and I’d just come to collect a book I’d placed a hold on. The original plan was to dash in, get the book, walk over to our local coffeehouse and post a sign advertising myself as a writing tutor, maybe linger over a cup of chai for myself and a fruit cup for June, then catch a bus home. I started revising in my head. If we stayed for the storyteller (and it seemed mean not to as June craned her head curiously in that direction) it would be too late to go to Savory. I didn’t want to endanger June’s afternoon nap by keeping her out so late she’d fall asleep in transit. If we didn’t go to Savory, we could walk home with the little tree sticking out of the basket under the stroller. It was still risky, from a nap perspective, but I decided to try it.

Luck was with me and she didn’t fall asleep. After lunch and nap, I took June outside to play while I engaged in some spring-cleaning in the yard. The grass is getting long and lush, especially in the side yard, which has always been the dampest part of the yard. The idea was to pick up all the trash that has been blowing in over our fence all winter, gather the wide assortment of toys scattered hither and yon and stash them on the porch, in the sandbox or under the eaves, and pick up all the sticks that would catch in the mower blades so I could mow the lawn the next day. I consulted with Noah, who was sitting at the computer, before I went out. Would he help me with this job for a little extra cash? How much? Two dollars if he stuck with it until the job was finished. How much if he didn’t? It would depend on how much work he did. He was undecided. Beth reminded him his Club Penguin (http://www.clubpenguin.com/) membership is about to expire and he doesn’t have the six dollars he needs to renew it. Noah spends most of his allowance these days on computer games. He made no move to get up. I took his sister outside and began to pick up trash.

After just a few minutes, Noah came out and wanted to help. I sent him back inside in search of garbage bags, one for trash and one for recyclables. He consulted with Beth, who thought I must want yard waste bags for sticks. It took a long while of sending him back and forth to straighten this out. I suspected he might have gotten distracted on some of the trips because he was gone an awfully long time. Once I had my bags, I kept on with the trash while Noah put a few toys on the porch, occasionally wandering off or forgetting what he was supposed to be doing. I cleared the front and side yards and moved onto the back. Meanwhile, June started to melt down and Beth took her back inside to read books and do puzzles.

Shortly after they went inside, I pushed the deflated bouncy castle under the eaves and exposed the bare dirt underneath. Noah spied a worm wriggling there.

“It’s Lowly Worm,” I joked and Noah laughed. The last time we moved the castle, June saw all the worms underneath and insisted they were Lowly Worm, the character from the Richard Scarry books (http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/519EHMJMTNL.jpg). June loves Lowly Worm. It didn’t seem to bother her that these worms did not have faces and were not wearing any clothes, let alone dashing little Tyrolean hats.

Noah crouched down to watch the worm. Then he picked it up on a stick and moved it to another part of the yard. “This is a smart worm,” he exclaimed as it kept escaping from him. I considered telling him to get back to work, but this was exactly the kind of thing I think he needs to do more. We spend about approximately forty-five minutes outside when he gets off the school bus on all but the coldest and wettest days, but I don’t think he focuses on nature much. He runs around and bounces on his castle or his hopping ball. We draw with sidewalk chalk, blow bubbles, swing in the sky chair, pretend to menaced by giant snakes and think of ways to trap them. Then it’s television, homework and computer games until dinner. I rarely see him really looking at bugs and plants and animals like I used to when I was a kid, which seems odd to me, since he’s so interested in science.

One of the pegs used to secure the edges of the castle was driven deep into the ground and I couldn’t pull it out. I asked Noah, who wanted to play with the hose, to soak the ground around it to see if that would loosen it up. It took a lot of wiggling, but I finally coaxed it out. Noah then lay on his stomach next to the hole in the ground, watching how the mud was slowly filling it up. He asked where the dirt went when you made a hole like that. I explained that the dirt around it gets more compacted. Then we talked about how worms aerate the soil and whether or not their poop serves as fertilizer.

Noah picked up a few sticks, and then he declared picking up sticks was boring. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him that some parts of life are boring, that grownups do boring things all the time. I had a few examples in mind: laundry, washing dishes, etc. But I stopped myself because he knows already; kids do boring things all the time, too. Writing out his list of spelling words four times a week is boring. Feeding the cats every morning is boring. There was no need to lecture him on the virtues of boredom. Instead I asked if he’d like to hose down the dirt and dust off the plastic sleds, then scrub them dry so I could put them in the basement. This was more enthusiastically received.

I kept on with the sticks. There were a lot of them under the silver maple. I fell into a pleasant, mindless sort of rhythm. It was hot, at least eighty degrees. I’m sick, with a nasty cold, and the heat felt like a mild fever, baking the infection out of me. When I was a kid, my mom often told me to go outside and sit in the sun when I was sick so I developed a strong belief that this was a healthy thing to do. As part of the research I do for my sister I’ve been reading a lot about Vitamin D recently, about how many people may be deficient in it because we don’t spend enough time outside and when we are outside, we cover ourselves in sunscreen (http://www.NaturalNews.com/022889.html). It seems like the question is up for debate in scientific circles, but I know it felt healing to me to be moving around slowly in the yard on a hot spring day, getting rid of the clutter.

Beth brought a more cheerful June back outside. When June saw Noah cleaning the sleds with the hose she got very excited and wanted him to spray her with it. Beth took her back inside to change her into her bathing suit. (She tried to get away with just putting her in a swim diaper, but June, never one to do things halfway, insisted on the suit.) The two kids played with the water until June got cold and I needed to take her back inside and get her toweled off and dressed. When I returned, Noah was hosing off the chalk marks we’d made on the fence (a target and a scoreboard for a ball-throwing game we invented for the five to ten minutes of extra math practice Noah is supposed to do every day for Maryland Math Month). I surveyed the lawn one last time and came to the reluctant conclusion that the grass was really too long for me to mow. We’d have to hire it out again. There was more I could do in terms of cleanup, but it was 5:45 and time to start dinner, and the yard really did look a lot better. Noah wanted to know how much money he’d earned. A dollar, I said.

Once in the kitchen, I turned on the radio. It being the first night of Passover, there was a story on NPR about making gefilte fish. I got to thinking about the concentration of spring holidays this week: Passover starting that night, Earth Day on Tuesday, Arbor Day on Friday. All at least in part about rebirth and renewal: finding out you’ve been spared, healing, growing. (Easter would normally be in the mix here but it came early this year.) Prairie Home Companion (http://prairiehome.publicradio.org/) came on the radio at six, as I was boiling linguine and sautéing vegetarian Italian sausage. Garrison Keillor sang:
Oh my sweet, sweet old someone,
comin’ through that door.
It’s Saturday. The band is playin’.
Honey, could we ask for more?

Well, yes. We are so rarely completely satisfied and I am sick and I never get enough sleep, and I can’t figure out how much and what kind of paying work I want to be doing, and so on and so on. But I had a new book to read, a cherry tree sitting in a pitcher of water in the kitchen sink, a pleasant hour with my son and a relatively tidy yard and all it cost me was a dollar.

And that night, for the fifth time in her life and the third time this month, June slept through the night in her own bed. Sometimes you really can’t ask for more.