Signs of Spring

60 degrees today, and bits and pieces of the snow men sculpted five days ago during our winter wallop list toward the muddy lawn like much-licked popsicles:  winter's last gasp, already on  its death-rattle exhale.* 

Me, I'm ready.  

I know I've waxed rhapsodic about the southern spring before, but then again, constancy, thou art a jewel!  I love spring in its leave-taking, when it is perched upon the high-dive that launches it on its spectacular swan-dive into summer; I love it in its full April effulgence,  when the trees are spun-sugar confections and roots extend through moist earth with a minute snare-brush whisper —  we are alive —  but maybe I love it most right now, when everything trembles on the cusp.

Everything?

The transitory moment before the heavens part and rain starts sluicing down, when the clouds are oiled and heaped high and greenish and the wind begins to rise; the blink-and-it's-gone pause between  day and twilight, when the air you walk the dog through is so pink-tinged you long to linger in its embrace; the bit of day before the sun peeks over the housetops, chill and formal, full of birdsong — there is much to be said for the bits of time that lie in the spaces in between. 

Spring is here, but not really, not yet.  The trees are still just angular constructions, festooned with last-year's nests, in disrepair; there's still snow in the birdbath.

But at the same time, a pale rosy haze hovers above the bare branched dogwoods:  next month's buds.  The peonies that never bothered to bloom last year have already let red ropy foliage emerge from the ground.  And once more, as we always do, we begin again; we hope.

Yesterday, two bluebirds lit on the scrub in the park a good portion of the neighborhood avoids.  Today, a hawk, perched on the phone pole.      

*Possibly hurried there by Elder Girleen's single swift well-placed kick on the way to the car before school — oh to be young enough to enjoy the beauty in destruction!

Weather Report: March 2, 2009

Southerner that I am, I don’t have the proper words for snow. Sugar snow, corn snow, powder: here in Atlanta we don’t know nothin’ about those: we just have little snow, otherwise known as dirty snow. People who actually have more than a passing acquaintance with the cold white stuff would scoff; wouldn’t even call what we get around here snow at all. But yesterday’s "storm," which began about 11 in the morning and lasted, off-and-on, until supper time, was such a lovely one —feathery, snow-globe-upended flakes, a cold swirl-and-dance to land on the tip of the tongue, the eyelashes, superlative for packing into snow balls. It left six inches behind in places (not south of I-20, as much as we hoped it might), contained thunder; muffled the city for a bit.

Somewhere there are children who make snowmen that aren’t muddy brown and studded with bits of pine straw collected on the initial roll of ball through snow, but I’m not sure the experience they have is half as magical  as it is for a southern child, who longs for snowfall all year long, experiences it once, if at all, and never ever has to attend school once it commences, since around here flurries constitute a “winter wallop” that leaves the streets empty of people to do what they have to but full of those engaging in what they want instead (get coffee, have a late breakfast).

Yesterday we had our annual snow, and embraced it with glee, because if it’s only going to snow for six hours, it doesn’t matter too terribly much that you lack gloves (me, because I lost one a year ago and figured I could hedge my bets and go without for an entire year), have never owned a suitable scarf (both girleens) or don’t possess a waterproof winter coat (ditto). Not for us the burn-out that comes with having to scrape ice from windshields every morning for months! Not for us, the ritual of getting suited up in padded snowsuits only to have to strip them off for a last-minute bathroom trip before even getting out the door!

Today, of course, all of yesterday’s cold austere beauty has become a few scabrous patches of dirty ice left below the trees, but all the same school’s been cancelled.

 Because it’s not actually snowing anymore and there’s nothing left to play in, the Girleens are mostly just bemused, though game to stay home. But I — although looked at objectively a snow day for me now is by no means a day off — embraced the news with the same joy I did back in those old bad days when snow day meant no classes for me at the University of Georgia and  lollygagging in a bed covered with raggedy quilts in a rundown apartment until mid-afternoon when all that was required of me was leisurely afternoon stroll downtown to see who was out which coffee shops and bars were open.

In the southern locales I've so far lived out my life, snow is not... extraordinary, but at the same time it is so out-of-the-ordinary that it becomes so.   When it snows, the matter-of-fact dailiness of my life is dusted with magic, transformed. I see a little better; I step a little more carefully, my eyes for once on exactly where I'm going.  

I  tend toward the ambitious in terms of resolutions, can come up with a baker's dozen, as I did a month ago, here.  

But it would be enough; to treat each day like a snow day, an unexpected party, and rejoice.

Dreadful Alliteration

Family of four felled by flu.

IN OUR TIMES

This is a long one... by Stephanie Ramage in Atl's The Sunday Paper...

City Hall, are you listening?

Grant Park, Ormewood Park, East Atlanta and Inman Park have a crime problem. And it’s not imaginary.



By Stephanie Ramage

It looks as though the tiny house with tarpaper showing through its walls and a roof grown shaggy with torn tiles has vomited up a flea market.

Furniture, old lamps, liquor bottles, potted plants and remnants of carpet take up nearly every available inch of space in the few feet packed between the street and the place where a black man named Lorenzo Beck blends in with everything else.

His presence is betrayed by the movement of his hand as he tinkers with something on the porch.

The yard, whatever it may look like, is his life’s work.

“I’m a collector,” he says as my intern and I gingerly step around some pots and across a few concrete blocks to introduce ourselves.

I explain that we've dropped in because there has been quite a bit of speculation lately regarding whether there is a crime problem in the city’s southeastern corner, a swath from Grant Park to East Atlanta, and if, perhaps, residents have overreacted to the slaying in January of bartender John Henderson at nearby bar and eatery the Standard.

Atlanta Police Chief Richard Pennington has insisted that residents are overreacting, and Mayor Shirley Franklin claims the city is safer than it has been in decades.

I've come to ask Beck what he thinks.

He says he has lived here in Grant Park for 40 years. He moved into this house with his family when he was a teenager, and crime has always been bad off-and-on. Some times are worse than others.

“But in the last two or three months, it has done got worse. I mean sho nuff worse,” he says, adding that a few weeks ago, only four blocks away, he was mugged and beaten up by three guys. He fiddles with the tire gage clipped to the pocket of his blue work shirt and shakes his head as he remembers it.

At the neatly renovated house next door, Scott MacFarland is just on his way out. He moved to Grant Park seven years ago, and he agrees with Beck that crime in the area goes in cycles.

“It’s usually worse in the summer,” he says. “I always feel like, right around August, ‘What’s going on here?’ Then school starts again and things calm down. You get comfortable, I guess, with the routine of it. And then something will happen like the shooting at the Standard.”

He squints up the street from under his baseball cap.

“That changed things,” he says. “He had given them the money, but they killed him anyway. You want to believe it’s the economy, but that was such a violent act, that’s not just poverty, that’s something else. It’s really disturbing.”

Not long ago, MacFarland’s own home fell prey to an attempted burglary.

“Lorenzo,” he says, motioning to Beck, “scared them off. Everyone I know here has had some kind of run-in with crime.”

According to the Atlanta Police Department’s figures, I remind him, violent crime across the city is down.

“The numbers don’t help you sleep better at night,” he says. “What matters is your own experience of it and knowing friends and neighbors who have experienced it and are talking about moving. The numbers don’t matter. Let’s say you have six people die in one year, and the next year only five die. You can say that’s an improvement, but you’ve still had five people die.”

He’s not frightened, he says, but his wife is afraid. They keep in touch during the day to be safe, but he doesn’t think that qualifies for what APD Chief Pennington has described as an out-of-proportion response to crime.

MacFarland says he believes that the neighborhood outcry is the result of having more empowered people in the area than was the case in the past—people who are less afraid of calling the police and who are more likely to go to the City Council to demand better public safety.

He and Beck pose for a photo and we talk about the APD’s shortage of about 400 officers. On a night when nobody calls in sick or is out for other reasons, there may be 10 or fewer officers patrolling any one of the city’s six zones.

Beck says that he doesn’t feel comfortable with the police.

Not long ago, when the kids at the school across the street were out for recess, their ball went over the fence and rolled down the hill. Beck had no sooner retrieved it and tossed it back over the fence, he says, than an APD cruiser pulled up and two officers began questioning him about the contents of a shopping bag on his premises. It was the bag, says Beck, where he keeps his shaving items.

“I couldn’t get my mind together to talk to them,” he says. “And if you do try to report something, they are so mean and nasty to you it’s like you’ve done something wrong.”

Beck didn’t report the beating he endured a few weeks ago to the police. And he’s not alone.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ 2007 National Crime Victimization Survey, which is based on interviews with victims, more than half of all violent crimes surveyed—including robbery, rape and aggravated assault—are not reported to police. So if there are a lot of police-wary residents like Beck in a given area, crime stats from the APD, the source used by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in its Feb. 8 story, “Though Atlanta Crime is Up, Violence Overstated,” would not give an accurate account of crime.

Also, as researchers have been pointing out for decades, police departments can classify crimes according to their own tastes or needs.

As early as 1974, in an article titled “Getting the Crime Rate Down: Political Pressure and Crime Reporting,” David Seidman at Princeton University and Michael Couzens at the University of California at Berkeley deduced that even small changes in police administrative procedures can produce big changes in crime rates. They also noted that police departments under political pressure to make a city look safer than it actually is have plenty of leeway to do so through classifying crime. The police decide what will be considered a crime and how the crime should be described—as a larceny or a robbery, for example.

“Sometimes,” writes Seidman and Couzens, “this description is reviewed at another point in the police hierarchy,” and changes are made accordingly.

A few doors down from MacFarland, Mike Fitzgerald is renovating his home. He has lived in Grant Park for 12 years and, unlike Beck, he feels more comfortable with the police around.

“They’ve reinstated the mounted patrols, I think,” he says. “And that helps. It makes you feel better to see them.”

He doesn’t think there’s been a rise in violent crime, but he’s heard about more carjackings.

“I think what’s got people on edge is the guns and the groups of perpetrators,” he says. “If you’ve got gangs with guns now, that’s a problem. The guy at the Standard, they didn’t have to kill him to get what they wanted. And they didn’t kill him just because they didn’t want any witnesses because, after all, they left the girl who was working with him alive. So, why did they kill him? You just have to think that the person who did it was some kind of weird animal.”

CRACK HOUSE WHACK-A-MOLE


The next day, I return to Grant Park, this time with Lou Arcangeli, a former deputy chief of police at the APD who teaches criminal justice at Georgia State University.

We schlep up the hill that curves away from Cherokee Avenue, to where a woman in a business-y skirt and blouse, her arms full, is unlocking the door of a house with thoroughly barred windows.

Her name is Malinda Teel, and she has lived here for 30 years. She’s never been a victim of crime, although she’s heard about neighbors whose cars have been broken into. She simply takes precautions.

“We’ve always had a dog, we don’t park on the street,” she says. “We don’t own a big-screen TV, but if we did it wouldn’t be shining out into the street. We’ve got really good locks on the doors. The backyard is fenced in. We go out every night and walk the dog and we do not feel afraid. There might be a spike in crime every now and then when somebody gets out of jail, but I am a little surprised about how vehement the reaction has been to the bartender being killed.”

As Arcangeli and I drive east on Glenwood Avenue to Ormewood Park, the frequency of For Sale signs increases. I turn down a side street where a young man with a shaved head is working on the edge of a driveway. A tattoo of the infinity symbol slithers on his white upper arm as he slowly swings a trimmer.

His name is Stephen Sheldon, and he and his wife have lived here for three years.
“There were three to four identified crack houses in the neighborhood,” he says, “and this kid who did a break-in here came from the one across the street. We got rid of that one.”

Arcangeli asks him how he managed that.

“We called the police. We called and called and called over and over again and we got it shut down,” he says. “Then, of course, the crack house just moved around the corner, but at least it’s not across the street anymore.”

Sheldon suspects that one reason for the persistent crack houses and the random crime around them is a lack of awareness. He notices things on the street, but not everyone does. “I hate to be an a**hole about it,” he says, “but some of the older people, really the middle-aged people, are just not paying attention.”

CRIME BY THE NUMBERS


A little further on, East Atlanta huddles around its small business district.

Like Grant Park and Ormewood Park, it is a chock-a-block area of economic diversity. Carefully restored bungalows share hedges with tenements that are little more than shacks. From 2007 to 2008, the area saw a 14 percent increase in violent crime, despite a decrease in much of the rest of the city.

I turn down McWilliams Street, and Arcangeli stays in the car to make a phone call as I knock on doors along a stretch of rundown houses.

As I step into one driveway, a group of guys on the porch shout a stream of profanity and threaten to kick my ass or shoot me if I come one step closer. I say I’m a reporter, but either they don’t hear me or they don’t care. It becomes apparent that they think I am a government worker of some sort because they yell “Get out the goddamn yard unless you goin’ bring me my f**kin’ $1,000 tax refund the gover’ment ’spose to be givin’ ever’body! Where’s my goddamn check, bitch? I want my f**kin’ money!”

I return to the car.

We drive a couple of blocks west, where a woman who looks to be in her 40s is out for a brisk walk. I wave and ask her if she feels safe here. She says yes. Then another woman, with a baby in a sling and a dog on a leash, approaches us and tells her, “We’re forming a neighborhood watch and I thought you might want to be a part of it.”

The woman, who introduces herself as Elaine Wright, replies that she does. The two women admit they only know each other by sight, though Wright’s lived here for six years. They exchange phone numbers and Wright explains to me that last fall, she and her neighbors managed to get a crack house shut down. She points to the house where it used to be.

“We called the cops over and over again,” she says. “My husband took pictures of all the traffic in and out and we finally got it shut down.”

Now the inhabitants of the crack house have moved to another house in the neighborhood, right up the street. It’s the same scenario presented by Ormewood Park’s Sheldon—a game of criminal justice Whack-a-Mole.

Arcangeli and I drive by the new location of the crack house. An elderly woman totters up the steps.

Arcangeli details a phenomenon familiar to criminologists called “cloaking.” In it, unemployed younger family members move in with a grandmother or grandfather who’s glad to have the company, but the young people then use the older relative’s home as a crack house. The legitimate flip side of this phenomenon, where young unemployed relatives move in with grandparents, can be a positive development, because it does provide greater safety for the elderly and gives the kids more stability. The only way to tell the difference is by watching the activity.

Traveling north on Moreland Avenue from East Atlanta, one soon enters the Little 5 Points/Inman Park area.

When the AJC published “Though Atlanta Crime is Up, Violence Overstated,” Inman Park resident John Hines focused on the tables of crime stats at the bottom of the article. In an e-mail written in reference to the article, he states that the APD stats as analyzed by the AJC seem to indicate “that violent crime is sharply up in Inman Park from an already bad year in 2007 although it is down for Atlanta citywide…”

In Inman Park, the “numbers show a 19 percent increase in violent crime...from 2007 to 2008, and a 30 percent increase from 2006 to 2008 … violent crime increased very sharply in the fourth quarter of 2008, from an average of 2.5 per month in the four preceding quarters to an average of 10 per month in Q4…” (East Lake/Kirkwood, from 2007 to 2008, experienced the biggest jump in violent crime of any neighborhood: 53 percent.)

The numbers are less important, though, than how Mayor Franklin and Chief Pennington respond to them.

According toTom R. Tyler, author of “Policing in Black and White: Ethnic Group Differences in Trust and Confidence in the Police,” an article published in Police Quarterly in 2005, the APD has an opportunity to help the community, whether it solves violent crimes like the slaying at the Standard or not.

“People get very upset when they feel that their concerns are not heard or are not being addressed, and that’s true whether they are white or African-American,” says Tyler, a professor of psychology at New York University. “One thing the police can do is make a big effort to share information with people. They might not be able to solve the case, but they can restore trust.”

And having confidence in the police department is important in determining more than merely the perception of crime, says Stephen Raudenbush, a sociologist at the University of Chicago who has researched neighborhoods and violent crime.

“Past evidence suggests that when neighbors distrust the police, crime will tend to thrive." SP

The Second of Three Valentines

This morning, I threaded my way through traffic to the dentists' office, completely on my own, no offspring with me; sat myself down in the hygienist's chair only to discover that it had been over a year and a half since I last showed up there. Apparently taking your children to the dentist religiously, slavishly, punctually to the dentist every 5.9 months does not, through some interesting osmosis, translate into clean teeth for Mom.

Just in case you thought otherwise.

Hygienist Sarah remedied that state of affairs and was even quite nice about it, conceding that I was in pretty good shape, all things considered (or rather, my teeth were).

That taken care of, I heighed myself back into traffic, tuning into AM 1690 ("The Voice of the Arts") for the drive home.

AM 1690 used to be AirAmerica, and then it wasn't, and then I stopped listening to it while I was driving, and then recently I found it again in a Come-to-Jesus moment occasioned by the fact that as I was fiddling with the car radio, they played "I'm Working for the Man,"

(Oh, well, I'm picking em up and I'm laying em down
I believe he's gonna work me into the ground
I pull to the left, I heave to the right
I oughta kill him but it wouldn't be right
Roy Orbison, 1970)

and since then, whenever I end up at the 1690 end of the dial, the dj's playing a song by the Rondells or a rousing rendition of "Roumania, Roumania or something else that makes a perfect soundtrack for the movie-of-life.

Today being Friday, the song was "Roumania, Roumania, (they play it every Friday at a certain time) and the fact that the album it's from is called From Avenue A to the Great White Way: Yiddish and American Popular Songs 1914-1950 tells you everything you need to know: klezmer music makes the six-lane stretch of Interstate 75/85 through downtown Atlanta downright cinemagraphic.

Previous posts long ago made it clear just how often I depend on the car radio for moments that transcend the mundane.

This morning, the sky was all wisps of blue and cotton batting. Laid out underneath it was the ornate strutwork of the city; the skyscrapers built the past few years already become such a stairstepping bar graph — charting what exactly?

Oh Atlanta, real honest-to-god cities laugh at your pretensions, wouldn't even bother to call you a city at all. But I love the way your commuter trains trundle and clank, over asphalt that comes together and parts and merges, a clotted molten river, particularly during morning and afternoon drive-time.

Here in this sprawling southern city, life is mostly flicker and ebb we prefer to remain sealed off from in our cars: slag-heap and shanty, weeds and tattered plastic bags, even the elegant Tilt-A-Whirl of the buildings downtown and their chill, translucent spires, the looping trajectory of headlights sinuous around them like some welder’s arc-light.

Years ago, before children, I worked for a while in a law office downtown and took MARTA to get there. Every morning, the doors of the train parted and I stepped forward, hobbled by high heels and skirt. On the train, I swayed, half-asleep, always facing forward, moving toward employment I had to have but didn’t much like.

But once, an elderly man slipped back through the train’s automatic doors to rescue the glove dropped by a crying child onto the platform. Once, the car I stepped into was so still and hushed that it felt almost holy, seemed as full of silence as the pause and pulse of breath, drawn in, before a choir starts singing.

Oh, how did it happen, that I could feel so much for a particular city? That it could become home?

Working Jigsaws

A week ago I set on the left-hand corner of my desk a saucer — in the optimistic speckled pattern of Franciscan’s Starburst — filled with chips and slips and shards of china mottled still with red clay dirt, to remind me. Of what? Of something that china elicited from me; something that the sight of it laid out in my palm left on the tip of my tongue to want to say.

I am on the cusp of forty-four, my body has without me really noticing how or when become the sort of soft motherly body I despised my own mother for when I was fifteen, and lithe and taut and tan (it being 1979 after all), and she was the age I am now. Why not do sit-ups, I wondered, with the completely unconscious cruelty of youth. Why not buy some decent clothes? Why not take care of herself?

And now I know exactly why one wouldn’t. Because other people are being taken care off first, and once that’s been accomplished you might have other things on your mind besides your clothes. Because it’s more pleasant to purchase things for your lithe, taut beautiful offspring — how on earth did such heartbreaking loveliness emerge from the welter of your DNA? —than take inventory of your own battle-scarred body in some three-way mirror at Target, where the clothes are cheap but neither fit nor flatter in the less palatable part of the maxim you get what you pay for.

I am by no means the fashion-plate I once could have been, but in service of the merest ghost-wisp of memory that such a thing was once was possible, I walk. Sometimes alone, sometimes with a child in a stroller, sometimes with another mother. In summer I walk at six in the morning and in winter I walk at four in the afternoon when the temperature is highest and as I do I wonder how I ever forced myself to do so at the peak of the opposite season.

I used to walk wherever the mood took me, but now I have a particular route. I’ve measured it on Google Ped, I know it is a little over three miles. It takes me past dogs gotten loose and dragging chains I take back to their owners and seafoam spangles of safety-glass from the latest smash-and-grab of cars left recklessly with cell phones or their chargers in plain view. This time of year, it takes me past the holiday inflatables in every other yard, deflated: snow globes and santas on motorcycles and nativity scenes all melted into puddles on the brown-grassed yards like the remnants of The Wizard of Oz’s wicked witch.

This neighborhood, it gentrifies in fits and starts, and five long years ago, developers started buying up the kudzu-draped vacant lots between the 1920s bungalows and post-war Levittown-like starter homes (the last two seasons of overreaching prosperity this neighborhood knew) and constructing over-muscled craftsman homes, bulked up into two stories and three-car garages and all the other things we now believe we need that the bungalows they’re theoretically based upon never possessed. And some of them — I love an old house with cracked plaster as much as the next person, mind you — are lovely, what with porches you could raise a family on and solid doors with leaded fanlights.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who likes them; rumor has it that these houses are the ones the kick-in-the-door bandits make a beeline for because they’re not stupid either and new house equals ipod and flat-screen, and even with an alarm if you know what you’re doing you can be back out the bashed-in front door in 45 seconds flat.

But all that is neither here nor there.

There is a particular spec home on my route that paints the story you can follow in the newspapers these days but made more manageable, like a miniature painted onto ivory with a sable brush.

Before there was a house there, there was a vacant lot full of tossed tires. Located around the corner from the elementary school built in 2000 on — people say — a landfill.

I walked through summer and winter, through one child’s graduation out of the stroller (a season in which I gained some weight) and through the disappearance from my life of one simpatico walking partner and indow the welcome appearance of another, and during all that the house was not there and then suddenly … it was.

Crew after crew of Spanish-speaking labors swarmed over scaffolding and the red clay earth was broken open to pour the foundation. The view from the back yard was of a warehouse-turned-daycare-turned-abandoned-building and Section Eight housing but so what: the workers lugged in granite countertops and painted the exterior a particularly fetching shade of Bunglehouse Blue (you would know it when you saw it, it being as pervasive in exteriors these days as Martha Stewart Jade-ite green is for the inside walls of houses).

And then work stopped. Completely. The landscaping had not been started, or the sod that covers a multitude of sins unrolled; the house rose like the prow of a wrecked ship from sculptured piles of red dirt and a smattering of weeds that rattled against the bricks as the months went by.

Eventually, somebody figured out how to jimmy open the bottom story’s windows. One evening I saw a boy around eleven or twelve clamber out the upstairs window and scamper along the roof line (a call to 911 and a visit with the beat-cop ensued).

The windows were starred with broken glass, the weeds grew taller, and one morning when I pushed the stroller past, my eyes caught on a bit of china glinting in the dirt meant to some day become front yard. It was that same Martha Stewart Green, that arsenic-like color that a previous generation frantically painted over whenever they encountered it on a wall, that we now, as a generation, adore.

And there were more, and more, and more, once my eye adjusted to seeing them. A bit bearing still the tag-end of the manufacturer: …ango China….castle, PA. Another sporting a maker’s mark of crown. Crackled glaze and slabs of marble. An art nouveau pattern curving around the lip of a bit of bowl like an elegant glimpse of the neck of a woman in a black velvet evening gown. Heavy diner china with three lines of color banding the rim, suitable for Edward Hopper paintings. The cobalt blue milk of magnesia bottles.

I had found either treasure or the dump!

Lucky for me the neighborhood I live in gentrifies only in fits and starts and the sight of a woman poking around the front yard (and then side yard, and then back yard) of a half-constructed house apparently gives no one any pause.

I can be as crazy as I choose and in a neighborhood where the guy who has no teeth (who greets every single homeowner into the area for the past ten years with an unintelligible, slightly threatening request for ten bucks) spends hours strolling through the neighborhood using a beat-up walker without anyone noticing it as something out of the ordinary — nobody will chastise me for trespassing.

What on god's green earth will I do with all these bits of broken china?

But I love them all for what they might be pieces of: our past. The chinoiserie’d goldfish swimming across its broken universe of plate. The floral, fireworks-like explosion of painted blossom. Right now, I have in front of me a slice of plate that has, ensnared upon it it a tiny-bas-relief image of a swan. Black pin-point of eye, brown beak, tucked wings and all emerging from reeds painted the blackish green of Charleston-style shutters. 

The plate itself, if whole, would be quite ugly.

But how miraculous the piece is! As is the thought that out of anything I might have stumbled upon — this being garbage after all — I stumbled upon this! 

The swan is no bigger than my thumbnail, it glides serenely into the future, it endures.

Slow Food, Slow Families, Slow Blogs ...

Just in case you thought I wasn't saying much these days because I was busy brining all-natural, free-range turkeys or lazing around eating bonbons or something, I am proud to direct your attention to:  

Blogging at a Snail's Pace

I knew there was a reason I hadn't been here for a while!  

Thank God we have various "slow" movements to give us permission to be .... normal. 

(Stay tuned for, the Slow Publication Movement, in which the fact that twelve years have elapsed since publication of a person's first book means not that they got married, had kids and withered on the career vine, but that they've been busy... savoring ... life.)  

Oh, yes... have a Happy (and Slow) Thanksgiving.  

Weather Report: November 9, 2008

I admit it, I had grand plans.  In the final weeks before the election, when I'd developed a twitch in one eye due to obsessive  Huffington Post reading (and from the anxiety those daily emails from the Obama campaign were causing), I was going to get out with a camera and document what I think we all already knew, even then, no matter what the outcome was going to be, was history in the making... 

• ...the car pool line at Elder Girleen's elementary school, the row of mini vans and station wagons and compacts, most with Obama stickers pasted to their bumpers....
  
• 
  
• ...a jack o lantern carved with the already-so-recognizable Obama campaign logo, placed on a front porch next to a house with a McCain/Palin yard sign ...
  
• 
  
• ...the GO VOTE exhortation chalked in pastel on the sidewalk  half a block away ...
  
• 
  
• ... the early morning line our neighborhood's polling place had never witnessed before...
  
• 
  

So much has been written.   Judith Warner's New York Times column from last week, here, says much,  and so very eloquently.  

On Wednesday, November 5, I walked out my front door and was astounded to see that while I had my mind on other things, the leaves on the trees had miraculously, gloriously, shed the dull-green cast late summer gave them and turned gold.  I know we need rain like nobody's business, but the blue sky that's arched behind those trees this week, so cloudless, so saturated with color — it made me ache.  I don't think I've ever seen anything so hopeful.  

Yesterday, I drove interstate 20 in the early morning ... turned off it onto Highway 138 and began the drive to Athens, past Quick Trips that a month ago had no gas in their pumps, past blocky contemporary cemeteries where graves were brave with bouquets of plastic flowers.  Past a Baptist church where cut-apart and welded-back-together metal drum smokers had already been fired up and barbeque was in a couple of hours going to be sold.  Past a salvage yard that stretched out over acres, where the cars had been positioned nose to tail, starred of windshield, sporting crumpled bumpers. 

The first time I was able to vote, Ronald Reagan was elected president.  

The trees are at this moment such a brave lick of flame and color, and what if it really were morning in America, right now?

  

 

Consider the Fig

It's not news to anyone:  spring's long long gone, not even a whisper of memory anymore.  The rabbit's-foot curves that were the leaves of the fig tree at the side of the house in April are now completely unclenched; as early as June they'd become hands with broad, spatulate fingers.  

I stand on tiptoe, push the leaves back with both hands, searching for fruit, greedy.

A cicada insists:  hot, hot, hot.   A mockingbird patrols the sag of the phone line.  Who would think it's September?  Not I,  trills the bird mockingly, over my head.  The figs I find weep milk and crystalline sugar.  They're purplish, ripe, completely unlovely.  Borne of plants put into the ground a generation ago, when this neighborhood was bars-on-the-windows and frugality handed down.  

Now we live in such plenty:  nobody eats them.  

Me, though, I might be a scavenger born and bred, the offspring of hippies who scoured their neighbors' Madison, Wisconsin lawns for dandelion greens, a copy of Stalking the Wild Asparagus open to the leafy greens chapter.  I've been known to ... well, let's put it this way: one summer, when Elder Girleen was still young enough to sit in a stroller, I filched handfuls from the back yard of a vacant house and carried them home in an emptied sippy cup.  And the boughs draped over our backyard privacy fence from the neighbor's yard:  if I can reach the drooping figs, I can consider them fair game.  

They're wonderful with goat cheese and arugula.  One summer I made them into ice cream.  I don't know when I started to like them.  When I was little, I equated them with the gardens of elderly women:  on a par with swept dirt yards , cracked tire planters, whitewashed trunks of pecan trees.  Inside the sorts of houses that fig trees belonged to, there were sure to be dirty kitchen drawers lined with yellow, curling shelf-paper.  Sure to be window sills displaying mason jars with screw-top lids full of miscellaneous screws, and balls made from old rubber bands saved for decades.  

In Texas, my grandmother had a fig tree in her yard.  We visited every summer; every morning I watched her breakfast on figs ripe from her tree, sliced and swimming in bowls of half-and-half.  I turned up my nose.  

But I would sit cross-legged in the dappled, rustling shade underneath the tree, reading  books I found in the old glass-front bookcases; musty-smelling books I never would have dreamed of reading at home, where I had access to friends, television, the library:  Anne of Green Gables, Return of the Native.   Whose names were inscribed on the end-papers of those books?  Ancestors, I supposed.  I didn't know them. 

Now, here I am, forty-three:  when I reach for the figs on the trees outside my dining room window, maybe all that history is still within my grasp.  I part the leaves, I reach for summer with both hands.  The Girleens like them with Greek yogurt and honey.  

We get two or three at a time.  They're certainly not anything you could live on, but when I check for ripe ones while the Girleens are at school I feel like ... like what?  A good provider?  Inside the house are lists to be made, emails to answer. I am procrastinating.  I am outside in the yard, picking figs.  

Lists.  I make them, I change them.  In two weeks, I leave for  a two-week residency here.  I did this sort of thing before,  but all that was in another life, one before children.  Now I have two kids, and I find that I'm preparing for being away from them (and it's not even two weeks, it's ten days) the way a mother bear eats berries in preparation for winter.  My lists — what time people have to be at school, how many snacks have to be packed to go with them, when they have to be picked up, when and where piano lessons are, the telephone numbers of neighborhood mothers whose help has been pro-offered and gratefully accepted — have become so elaborate:  I may have to give the Husband and the Grandmother, who is coming to stay, a Powerpoint presentation before I get in the car loaded up with files and research books and computer and printer and drive off to the mountains!  

For ten days, I will be responsible for no one but myself, and this feels both seductive and frightening.

I imagine that driving-away, and it feels like it's for so long, and to such a far-away place.  I remind myself it's not rocket-science, this mothering I spend so much of the day-to-day engaged in.    Everybody will be fine!  Children learn good things from seeing their mothers engaged in work. They learn good things from going to school with hair uncombed every once in a while (this being one of my predictions)! So what if they eat too much pizza for dinner!  

I will learn good things.  I will have the chance to replenish, to write, to rub shoulders, to talk shop.  

But if people can get along without you, then they can get along without you.  And that is complicated stuff.  

So what do I do to combat my anxieties?

I pick figs, as if that would be enough to keep anyone from being hungry.  The house is better stocked with food than it usually is, no matter that I've done it so far in advance my stockpile while be long-gone by the time I drive off.  I do load after load of laundry, as if that will keep people from running out of clean clothes two weeks from now.  

    

Here One Day, Gone the Next

Elsewhere in the world, it may  still be the dog days of summer, but not 'round here.  

Nope, your calendar's not wrong:  it's still just early days of August, when lawns unravel into little more than crabgrass and heat leaves everything limp.  The leaves of the kudzu and the poison ivy are glossy and lustrous twining up the trunks of the trees.  The crepe myrtles have littered the ground with brassy fuschia blossoms, stridently attempting to add some color to things.  Last week, when we walked from the car to the pool,  wilted fluff from mimosas spangled the pavement.  

But even as August does what August does best, we have The First Day of School, and today the Girleens, newly-backpacked and outfitted, are off at their respective schools (first grade and preschool) experiencing life without maternal intervention.  

The house is very quiet. 

 The temperatures may be inching up into the nineties, but all you have to do is walk a first grader into their school building, opening those heavy metal doors into the smell of fresh paint and freshly-waxed linoleum floor that says first-day-of-school like nothing else can, to feel fall's onset.  It's there, like an underglaze under the panorama of summer.  

There's crisper weather ahead.  You can taste it on the tip of your tongue. 

One Week, and Counting...

School starts here in the ATL in a week, so we're celebrating these last days before the school-year routine whips us into shape by doing things we usually don't ...

... like sleeping late...

... staying in pajamas until 11 a.m....

and

... going to the swimming pool every single day...

Because being Martha Stewart is definitely one of those things I'm not a regular basis, I feel required to commemorate  the Fresh Fig Tart with Rosemary Cornmeal Tart and Lemon Mascarpone Cheese  we made this weekend.

With figs from the tree we planted two springs ago.  

You gotta celebrate the end of summer with a flourish.

Hot Town

I know, I know:  if I were a better person,  driving would probably come up less often in my writing, the way of the world currently being $4.19 gas and an environmental crisis and all.  

The reality is, we actually don't do that much driving.   We live south of Interstate 20, and out of loyalty to the 'hood, stubbornness and just plain perversity, I try to stay on the wrong side of those tracks as often as I can.   

When I set up the Girleens' swimming lessons for the summer, though, I was asleep at the switch, and now I'm spending a couple  a days a week for the month of July shuttling them back and forth to the swimming pool.

But I suspect that even if this were not the case, the act of driving would take up more space in my writing than it probably should, simply because driving becomes a meditative act when one spends much of their waking time with small children:  yes, the small children are also right there with you, strapped into their seats like tiny paratroopers, but they're just as lulled as the next person by tires on asphalt, the blur of view beyond the window, and the dreamy life-is-a-beautiful-art-movie  sensation caused by being in a car with the radio on.  

In the car, I seem to have time to think.  Apparently Elder Girleen does to, for the car is where, the other afternoon, she asked me the following:

Mommy, why is Prince Eric always unconscious in the Little Mermaid?

In the car, we pass the HAND CAR WASH, a cinderblock building  painted a shout of orange so brilliant, so orange, it practically breaks eardrums,   where an itinerant BBQ cook has set up a rickety, surely-not-condoned-by-the-health-department smoker; we wait out the light, we turn, the dangerous, alluring scent of well-cooked ribs pervades the car.  

I'm hungry, the girleens chorus.   

In the car, we listen to Let It Be as we inch through rush hour traffic, because music hath charms that soothes the savage beast, also six-year-olds and three-year-olds who've been swimming for hours on July afternoons who have just been chauffeured past the mouth-watering aroma of BBQ ribs a mother would never dream of letting them eat.  

Oh, the summer I was sixteen, when the ashy, head-spinning taste of my first filched cigarettes filled my mouth and time was immaterial, the summer I was sixteen, when we debated life's big questions, one of which was this:

Beatles?  

or

Stones?

I was a girl for Mick, through and through.  The Beatles?  Too hippy-dippy; they didn't have that necessary edge.  Sentimental, I thought, sappy ... and then I lit another cigarette and set the record player needle into the groove of my current fave Patti Smith album, Easter. 

And now here I am, forty-three, and the Rolling Stones mean naught to the girleens, though Wild Horses is a song that's gotten their approval. The Beatles are the band we listen to.  

And all those songs I thought so sentimental 25 years ago?  What a beautiful soundtrack they make as you travel through your life with kids in tow,  your youth waving goodbye in the rear-view mirror.  

Too Weird to Resist Writing About

Over the years, standing in line has apparently held me in good stead, professionally.  I once paid for Bruce Springsteen tickets by writing an article for the Athens, GA weekly paper about waiting line for Bruce Springsteen tickets (article headline:  Born to Stand in Line).   The essay I published a few years back in Brain, Child about waiting in line before preview night at one of intown Atlanta's most (in)famous consignment sales might be one of the more widely-read pieces of writing I've done.  

Given all that, how could I resist saying something about the sight I walked past this morning?  A row of family-type cars parked nose-to-tail along the curb in front of the neighborhood elementary school, hatchbacks tilted up to meet the dawn, minivan doors slid back to reveal welters of sleeping bags and water bottles and  fast food wrappers?  And on the sidewalk, a gathering of unshowered, tousle-headed parents (mostly dads) that eloquently expressed the middle-aged need for coffee?   

 Oh, the blessed ignorance of the childless! Once upon a time, back when I was in that state, the fact that the Georgia lottery funded preschool meant less than nothing to me.  My head was full of weighty matters (which convenience store sold the cheapest cigarettes; what restaurant served brunch at 4 p.m. in the afternoon).  I didn't even know the difference between daycare and preschool.  I didn't even know what preschool was, for God's sake.  I myself had gone to a single year of nursery school before kindergarten back in those dark late-sixties days when parents still occasionally spanked their kids and said "NO, STOP IT!" rather than "That's not okay." 

But I would say that the three topics most engrossing for groups of intown Atlanta parents who don't know each other all that well might be, as follows:

1. Intown real estate:  how much it costs, who's selling it, who's buying it, and whether the restaurant in the ground floor of the latest loft, "green-living" or "live/work" development is child friendly.
2. Sleep:  the parents' lack of it, their children's ability to go without it.
3. Preschools —where to send kids, why to send kids, and, most importantly, how one might to get into a state-funded preschool program the year before kindergarten.    

Why might this be important?  Well...because, thanks to the lottery, it's free? Well... because, if you've got an older child already attending elementary school, it would add years to your life if you only had to orchestrate one drop-off and pick-up a day?  Because, to paraphrase the sentiment from Field of Dreams,  the state of Georgia built it, so you might as well come?

I haven't ever had a dog in the state-funded preschool hunt (elder girleen didn't go, and younger girleen isn't at the age for it), but you can't live in intown Atlanta and not be aware of it.  When Elder Girleen was a baby, I remember a new friend mentioning that she'd gotten up at 4 in the morning to stand in line to sign her older son up for pre-k (as that year before kindergarten gets called) at the school a block away.  That was six years ago:  this year the line began to form at that particular elementary school four days in advance of pre-k registration.  And that's not even a record.  Last year the line started two days even earlier than that.  That's six nights, folks, of sleeping in your car.  Rumor is that this year a group of parents at that school has rented an RV for the duration.

All that happens north of Interstate 20.  South of that divide, in the part of Atlanta some people still consider the wrong side of the tracks, there was no pre-k line until last year.  Last year, it formed the night before.  This year, two nights before. At the rate we're going, nobody's gonna be able to call this the wrong side of the tracks much longer.  

As I type this, parents stand in front of the elementary school in our neighborhood, marking time.  22 hours to go.  Good Lord — I only waited for Springsteen tickets overnight!  The Dylan line in Austin  in 1990 was aided by a six-pack and flirtation.  At least somebody brought a guitar!

Rumor is that next year Atlanta Public Schools may finally distribute spaces in the state-funded pre-k program through a lottery.  Will that be fairer?  More sane?  Yes.  Nobody will miss the line.  But a part of intown Atlanta parenthood that has become more folkloric than any other will be gone.   I doff my hat to local color.     

 

Drinking from the Motherhood Cup

Way back in those early days when I only had one child and that child was a babe-in-arms and my house seldom rang with conversations along the lines of

Elder Girleen: P, you're bothering me! You're in TIME OUT

Younger Girleen: Arghhhh! You Poopy Head! Moommmeee, A says I'm in TIME OUT.

I'd observe families that contained elementary school-aged children with the internal equivalent of slackjawed wonder. Not because I was wondering how on earth they managed but more because they might as well have been aliens from another planet. There I was, fretting about sleep and how many dirty diapers my kid had, attending playgroups where folks debated types of diapers and the dangerous outgassing caused by miniblinds hung in a nursery — and in the very same universe these folks were attending soccer games every single Saturday morning of their lives, being Girl Scout leaders, explaining to kindergarteners what drugs were (think about how hard that actually is), carpooling, baking things for bake sales.

They were brash, they were loud, and occasionally they had our sedate little family of three over for dinner, when they carried on heated discussions about politics at the same time as a three-year-old created an extremely hands-on art installation out of his mashed potatoes and a seven-year-old had the sort of very verbal crisis that is caused by being six or seven and having a brain that is way too big and moves way too fast for the emotional wellbeing of anyone within a ten mile radius.

This morning I was up at the crack of dawn putting a pot roast in the crockpot (the way I cook with a crockpot doesn't really lessen my labor, it just moves it to another time, say, 6:25 in the morning); as I write this people are dropping off eggs for the neighborhood egg hunt tomorrow, which I somehow became the organizer for ("And I ask — how did I get here? This is not my beautiful house; this is not my beautiful wife...") and I've just realized that the neighborhood egg hunt, which used to consist of about seven kids, may be extremely successful this year, so much so that the older kids of which there used to be NONE in our neighborhood may run roughshod over the tiny toddling one-year-olds whose parents are imagining this egg hunt as a lovely spring photo opp. I've also realized that one of those bulls in the china shop will probably be my own offspring.

One of the most overused platitudes around would have to be that annoying old chestnut before you judge a (wo)man, walk a mile in their moccasins but sayings become old chestnuts because they're especially apt, right?

I can't think of a single place where more shoe-trading goes on than Parenthood World. If I said this strange and wonderful place I find myself in now had heightened my ability to empathize I would sound like a saint or something, and that I most definitely am not. But because of it, the thread of my life has been more tightly woven into the fabric I only know to call community.

It's a beautiful tapestry, isn't it?

Luck, Variety Bad

Seen while walking with Younger Girleen this morning: house, For Sale sign in front yard; car parked at the curb being hitched to tow truck by Repo Man; homeowner standing on front porch watching with paperwork clutched in one hand.

Snippets

1. Been out of town and, since I bought books while gone, the nightstand pile threatens to overwhelm me (as does the laundry, the still-packed suitcase on the living room floor, the preschool emails that came in while I was gone, and the general trivality of life).

2. Obama is ahead by 50% in our precinct as of this incredibly early moment.

3. My story, The Artists Colony, is up and running, at fivechapters.com . I love the way Five Chapters serializes stories. Wouldn't it be great if such ideas revolutionized the always-moribund short story market? If people started reading stories at work the way they check blogs?

4. From the NYTimes review of a new book out (Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob, by Lee Siegal):

Siegal argues that the Internet invites people to 'carefully craft their privacy into a marketable, public style.'

Ah, yes, that Pristine Surface . Given my recent online pub, and the fact that a few people from that site may wander to this site, I should be using this space to wax eloquent about something.

Instead, you get this.

Static and Grit

A pale January sky today, stitched up with vapor trails, but it's not just that that tells me we're settled into winter and, because the season's so short in this neck of the woods, at the same time teetering on the cusp of spring.

Lady Liberty is back.

And I was so pleased to see her on the corner yesterday in front of Liberty Tax Service— or rather him, since yesterday's Lady Liberty was a guy with dreads clad in his paid-by-the-hour work attire of the tax season of patina'd copper green gown and foam rubber liberty crown — that I realized that with time, ANYTHING is possible. I have begun having great feelings of affection for Atlanta.

Extraordinary! All it took was TEN years. Before that, the places I chose to live were always college towns: let's call them Disneyland for Hipsters I and Disneyland for Hipsters II. Better bookstores, better public services, better dressed baristas in the coffee shops. How on earth could Atlanta hold a candle to that?

My relationship with Atlanta was pretty similar to that of two people in an arranged marriage: it made sense as far as the business of my life went (ie, it possessed the job for the Husband that allowed us to escape my childhood bedroom, where we'd been living for the past six months) but love it I did not.

For years, my motto as far as living here went was close your eyes and think of England.*

But more and more frequently, I open my eyes and look around at the Atlanta I live in, down at its heels, corrupt and urban, full of grit and static, and realize that, though my feelings for it don't match the passion of first love and I would never dream of defending it over someplace really nice, like say, Austin, I'm glad I live here.

If I lived elsewhere, I would measure the arrival of spring by the emergence of the daffodils' blunt green bayonet blades. Here I have the arrival of Lady Liberty, who will stand on that corner from now until April 15.

The first year we lived here, an inflatable Lady Liberty head was tethered to the top of Liberty Tax Service, a sight as post-apocalyptic as the listing statue on the beach in Planet of the Apes. Now we've just got Lady Liberty, who works from 8 in the morning until 8 at night, who stands on the same corner where a few years back two very large prostitutes stood soliciting business while we ate dinner in the brand-new pizza place across the street and watched them through the plate glass window. Lady Liberty, who is sometimes old, sometimes young, sometimes male, sometimes female, sometimes black and sometimes white, but is always one of the most oppressed people on the planet, at least as far as their employment goes. Trucks honk their horns at them. The corner is not a particular scenic place to spend an entire day.

I loved those Disneylands for Hipsters where I came of age, oh, how passionately. But this morning after dropping off Younger Girleen at school, I stood in line at my fav coffee shop (the one that offers me my large special friend) and thought how glossy those places were (and still are). Here, on the other hand, I've got an unfashionable bald guy in front of me with scuffed shoes, one of the barista's tattoos are old-prison-tattoo green, and the other barista is a little oily and probably didn't shower before he came in to work.

Depeche Mode's Master and Servant was playing on the sound system. Let's play ... master and servant whoever the lead singer of Depeche Mode was warbled.

Let's NOT, the barista opined as I walked out the door.

Oh, Atlanta, you may be a lame, out-of-date city, but you're my lame, out-of-date city.


*I'm thrilled by this opportunity to spin the arranged marriage metaphor past its breaking point.

Party Oatmeal

A very graffiti'ed tunnel under the CMX freight railyard has linked my here and there since we moved to the 'hood. (Yeah, we're literally on the wrong side of the tracks). I drive it practically daily: to Younger Girleen's preschool, to the grocery store, to just about anywhere I have to go outside our neighborhood, and a few weeks ago, a particular piece of graffiti appeared to replace my previous fave on the concrete outside the tunnel, Please Save Us From Ourselves.

Party Animal is what the paint-dripping scrawl really says — but when I drive Younger Girleen to school and see it, I read Party Oatmeal instead.

Party Oatmeal seems like it might be a fairly good way to describe, not the middle-aged equivalent of being a Party Animal, but some measure of geologic time. We've got B.C., A.D., the Cretaceous Era... and we've also got Party Oatmeal, which, boiled down to its essence, is that period of time when most of the humans you spend time with are under the age of six. Sometimes fun, sometimes a quagmire. Deeply domestic. What could it be, other than Party Oatmeal?

Down at the Drive-In

Last night was Movie Night for Elder Girleen's school at the drive-in, so we made a nest of pillows and hello kitty sleeping bags in the back of the station wagon and headed out to see Bee Movie.

Well, ladies of the evening may use the play structure at our neighborhood park as a great place to ply their trade; the biggest hill around here might actually be the old landfill; but a straight shot down the thoroughfare leads you past Nail World, Dollar Land, Super Valu and the Foxxxy Lady straight to... the drive-in, and I wouldn't live anywhere else in the city (except maybe a huge Victorian manse complete with cupola on the other side of I-20).

As luck would have it, we ended up positioning the station wagon RIGHT NEXT to Elder Girleen's two favorite kindergarten guys. She almost exploded. Groups of kids ran recklessly from car to car, possessed by the anarchy that takes over when the adults of your world are otherwise occupied (in our case by figuring out how to extinguish the light in the back of the station wagon for primo movie watching).

The cold front blew in, we settled in: and I give the experience an A +. About the movie, though...

Ratatouille was at least about a rat expressing his creativity through cooking. Bee Movie, on the other hand, is about a LAWSUIT. The hive is sorta like the city in Metropolis but not in an ironic or interesting way, the whole honey making project isn't very ... scientific and the best thing I can say about it is that it made me realize how LUCKY we are that it's not the 90s anymore, when we all thought Jerry was the funniest thing since sliced bread.

Halloween Grist

Back in that misspent youth I'm so fond of mentioning, I usually spent Halloween night babysitting friends. No, no typo there, I wasn't babysitting for them, I was babysitting them, their chosen Halloween recreation leaning toward situations requiring nursemaids. (And I thought I had no experience mothering until I had children!) This didn't really endear Halloween to me, though over the years I forced a number of roommates to sit through movies I decided were suitable for the season (Note: The Old Dark House, made in 1932, is not scary and will drive even the most tolerant of roommates out of the room).

Given such an ambivalent history with Halloween, I'm astounded I've managed to squeeze as much blood from that particular turnip as I have in terms of blog entries. But Halloween looms so large in the lives of my children — how could it be otherwise? Most years, Halloween begins for us about a week in advance: there are school Halloween parties, neighborhood Halloween parties.... Basically, by Halloween itself, The Husband and I are wiped out, and bicker over who will do what on Halloween night — is it better be the one at home passing out candy to teenagers whose "costumes" consist of peach-fuzz mustaches and cigarettes (and sometimes infants with their own trick-or-treating bags), or traipse through the neighborhood with two exhausted, overly-sugared fairies?

Due to a great stoke of luck, we'll miss most of the auxilary Halloween celebrations this year. Elder Girleen is crushed — only the fact that she's missing them to be a FLOWER GIRL gives her any consolation. I'm thrilled though — at least I don't have to scramble for a costume the afternoon of the preschool Halloween party. Usually I put on a cowboy hat and my boots and leave it at that, but after five years of attending, I've noticed that most of the moms at this particular event show up as ... witches.

This morning, when I took Younger Girleen to school, the front yards we passed were not just dotted with inflatable ghouls and pumpkins, sadly deflated (last year's fad), but gravestones have popped up like toadstools.

These might be the end times, indeed. Our houses are built upon graves, and motherhood resembles a coven.