The Beginning of Lots of Posts

I started a new little blog post yesterday. Well, . . . one sentence of a new post. I added a period. Pursed my lips and poised my fingers above the keyboard. . . . And then Mette (who had been playing happily outside for a moment) was suddenly at the sliding glass door. She was wailing piteously, and hitting it with her sticky little palms, and smooshing her tear-stained cheeks and forehead against the glass. Summer was only a step behind her (and following a similar course of melodramatic action). (Oh my poor windows: never clean for more than 20 minutes.)

And my typed sentence? It sat there, crossing its little fingers, full of naïve expectation that it might yet become something more (a paragraph? a story?), and blithely unaware that I'd already left it. Just like I'd left the first sentences of ten other newly-begun blog posts before it.

"I'm sitting in the dark outside of Summer's room eating yogurt (which I keep spilling on my pants because, for some reason, I’m using a baby spoon), and acting as sentry to a little girl who won’t stay in her bed."

"After searching for weeks (with varying degrees of intensity) for an errant little Ziploc bag of bolts, we finally assembled a crib for Hans."

"The other day I found an Idaho Spud (the candy bar) under my bed."

"Mike recently purchased a sturdy little basketball hoop and hung it over the coat-closet door in our entryway."

Poor little lonely sentences. Abandoned possibilities. All of them.

And it’s a shame really because it’s kind of entertaining to hear Abe, when he’s bored and for want of anything better to do, standing at an imaginary free-throw line tossing a little blue ball into the hoop Mike bought while he calls out wildly random predictions, makes decisions for members of the family, and offers outrageous claims – with all their truth hinging on whether or not he makes the shot.

“Mom will lose all her limbs.”

“Mom already has lost all her limbs but she's a cyborg.”

“Mom hasn't lost any limbs but she's still a cyborg.”

“Goldie is made up of a colony of small squirrels who control her.”

“Yes, Jesse, in answer to your question. Penny DOES want to paint outside with you right now.”

And Hans and the crib. He had grown to completely fill his little bassinet, so it was high time for a change. But he’d looked so snug and cozy all . . . practically swaddled by his bassinet, and it feels cold and lonesome seeing him in his vast crib . . . a full flight of stairs and loft away from where I sleep. I haven’t moved his bassinet from next to my bed yet. I think I’m partly hoping he’ll decide to return to it.

But! Summer-time has been going smashingly. Kids have been learning to swim, and Daisy and Goldie have been mowing our lawn, and Abe got his first job (serving shakes and ice cream at the ice cream store from my childhood [and probably my parents’ childhood too]). We still feel like it’s just begun – like we still have all the time in the world for every summer-time adventure and project we’d ever imagined. And . . . it HAS just begun really. It has! But somehow . . . we are down to only 2/3rds of it left.

In any case. Here are a few pictures from a Memorial Day weekend get-together at the farm.

And a few pictures of Goldie planting us a little flower garden in our front yard. (We’ve been in a constant battle with the snails ever since in an effort to let her garden grow. They are merciless.)

And some rather magical pictures taken during Goldie’s softball game when the cottonwood trees were in rare form.

When I first pulled up to the park I couldn’t quite make sense of things for a minute. It felt dream-like. I knew logically that it was summer, but it truly looked like winter the ground was so totally covered with white fluff. I was a bit worried about allergies going insane for all of us (Jesse’s eyes and asthma in particular.) But I am a bit nostalgically fond of the cotton. Our neighbor’s had cottonwood trees when I was young, so every June cotton floated about our backyard, and, because we never had AC and often left deck doors open at night, we’d wake to our living room carpeted with the stuff at least once every summer.

And here are a few other pictures of goings on around here.

The end. (And hopefully writing begets writing and I don’t go another month without posting. Of course no matter how much one post might inspire another, one can never eliminate the possibility of rogue interference . . . babies crying at sliding glass doors and the like. So, we shall see.)