Lunch: leftover strawberry/peach pie (this was yesterday. Today no lunch because my stomach was rebelling against something, possibly that pie...)
Mulling: It's hard for an introvert to shop at Trader Joes sometimes. I will deliberately avoid certain lines because I know I'll have to discuss how my day's going and what I'm doing this weekend and what I'm making for dinner.
Packing: Things for the girl! Zoë flies to Bangalore out of Logan on Monday. She'll be in Cambridge for the weekend, where we will meet her for the day on Sunday, armed with bags of saris and salwar kameez and electrolyte tablets and hand sanitizer and (most importantly) her passport. Have you ever sorted saris and tried to figure out which little blouses go with which gorgeous silky sari fabric, and folded them into a tidy, colorful pile? I recommend it.
Did I mention that Gus has taken to occasionally howling like a wolf when he hears a siren? The siren has to be really close, like speeding by our pulled-over car or right past our open dining room window. It's adorable, and I always tell him, "Good dog, Gus!" Every once in a while I will hear a more distant siren, and I will howl like a wolf to try and get him going. It never works, but it does make him whip his head around and look at me the way I'd look at him if he suddenly said, "Say, I'd love to have one of those ice cubes, while you have the freezer door open!" Like, "She speaks my language. Why does she usually pretend not to??" When Adam was here last month, he did it once too, and again, Gus examined his face intently: This human too?
THANKS FOR THE ICE CUBE HUMAN.
It has been not-even-that-hot-but-hot-for-Maine lately, like 85ish, the last several days, and man, I have been sweating like a...whatever. Big salty drops of sweat just cascading down my face. I feel like some delicate alpine flower or something--so hot. (Is this hormonal? Or something? Some hideous mid-40s thing?) I mean, I've been unable to accomplish much of anything, just moving in slow motion as I rinse out a cup and a bowl and then think, "There. My work is done for the day," before collapsing in front of a fan with a glass of iced coffee. The other day I made an upsetting confession to Mark: "You know how everyone says they hate air conditioning? Because it's so artificial and blah blah blah? I LOVE AIR CONDITIONING SO MUCH. The colder the better." Okay, today's much cooler, and I've been able to paint a fourth layer of tung oil stuff on the counter and wash several loads of laundry and walk Gus and eat breakfast with Isaac and do the dishes and contemplate some billable work and write some emails.
My blurry neighborhood.
I felt so lonely walking last night and looking at the blue moon and missing Mark (who's in Kansas for a few days for our nephew James's wedding) and my bruddies and some other special people. It made me think about how brave Zoë is to go on her own to these places she goes, and to be committed to what she's doing there even if she has to be without people who know her and hug her and love her so much. I'm so much more of a wimp in just about every single way than that girl is.
I live in a house with two fluffy animals, and as I have no little kids and am obligated from a wish to live a long life (and procrastination) to jump up every 45 minutes or so from actual billable work and do some other activity (which might also include making myself an iced coffee, washing breakfast dishes, cleaning something, pulling weeds, and of course futzing around on Facebook or whatever), I actually brush them both daily. Many times daily, and Mark does, too. Gus especially is just molting this summer, and Theo's coat is doing something weird where it suddenly feels matted but then you realize you can grab the chunk of "matted" hair and just pull it out all in a satisfying clump. Oh, the sweaters and sweaters I could've knitted from these two, if only I knitted and would ever do such a thing.
So when it's really hot it's nice because cat and dog hair just kind of floats around in the air and sticks to your sweaty face and body.
I have vacuumed up bags and bags of my boys so far this summer. I am so glad that Zoë, girl of All the Allergies, isn't here right at this very moment to be breathing in hair and dander.*
Gus: molting, and also defending his territory, which extends as far as his eye can see. His other Pyrenees thing is an underlying firmness in sticking to his own decisions about what to do, regardless of what some person might be instructing him to do (or not do). He's just so cheerful about it, it's honestly hard to get mad. The other day, Mark called him to come out of the water at 8:55, five minutes before the beach becomes Humans Only. Gus decided, "Nope." Instead, he waded, up to his armpits in the ocean, back and forth, pretending not to hear his name, gazing sideways at Mark from time to time, for an additional ten minutes. Hey, it was hot out!
Other funny Gus thing: if I say to him, "Where's the Master?" he goes looking for or running to Mark, all excited. If I say, "Is that your Master?" Gus gazes lovingly at Mark. Mark kind of hates the "Master" thing, but I'm just continuing a family tradition starting with this cartoon. I speculate that Gus thinks of me as "that nice lady who lives with Master and me."
I hereby give you permission to cheer yourself up, on occasion, with whatever form of ice cream makes you happy, by the way.
Banana splits, tra la la.
Or...
Soft serve as big as your face? Sure!
*She is in Switzerland this weekend, presenting at a conference, matter of fact. Back to Mysore on Sunday!
Apparently I've forgotten how to blog. I've also forgotten whether I object to using "blog" as a verb.
Here's a pretty picture:
The sky looks like this today where I live: the clouds look all puffy and cartoonish like that! I ate breakfast with my dad at the Palace Diner in Biddeford, drank a malt iced coffee with my sweetheart, texted with my girl in India, spent some quality time with my three boys (two of them non-human). I wrote some words on paper with a pen. I got no paid work done, as a little reward to myself for a week of getting lots of paid work done. Good job, self.
Isaac has been busy making sure he's got all his Ts crossed and Is dotted, so to speak (in other words, ensuring that when family members descend in a festive throng for the occasion of his high school graduation, that he is in fact a high school graduate). He even went to the prom, not at his school but at his special friend's. He's also been busy being a waiter at an Indian restaurant, where he works with a lovely family who cook him a special meal every night after his shift. Last weekend, Mark and I went to see the sublime movie The Lunchbox, and there was so much delicious looking Indian food in it that we ended up eating a second dinner at The Palace. After Isaac finished working, he sat with us to eat his own dinner, and one of his coworkers said, "This is so nice, you can chitchat with your mother and father!" He comes home smelling lovely, with leftovers for lunch at school the next day and little spots of turmeric on his button-down shirt. Last night he learned how to make Malai Kofta.
He's off to college in the fall, a bit of a surprise to us since he'd thought probably a gap year or two would figure into his plans. But Sarah Lawrence it is--he'll be a half hour away from Zoë. We are anticipating visits to see them both, while they're in the same part of the world, next year. And what the completely empty nest will be like, or mean for us...we just have no idea. But I'm so thrilled for my boy, he got accepted everywhere he applied but one, and got generous financial aid from Sarah Lawrence. He and I drove down there for an accepted students' day, and it was pretty exciting. I can see Isaac really loving it there.
We borrowed a dog for three weeks, after signing up to be a foster family with Big Fluffy Dog Rescue. Rhonda is a sweet, slow-as-molasses, soft-as-a-kitten Great Pyrenees, and we enjoyed her company while she was here. Gus, in particular, was thrilled to have a canine pal around. We'll do it again, though it was hard to say goodbye to her.
And the girl, the girl! She is in New York visiting some friends for a few days, but we pretty much get to have her for three whole weeks before her next departure. She'll be studying Urdu in Lucknow this summer and also visiting some friends in various parts of India, before coming back to finish school at Barnard in the fall. It's like magic to have her around, and extra special for her to be here when we're celebrating the end of Isaac's high school career and, soon, his eighteenth birthday.
Wow, this month is really careening forward, isn't it? Tomorrow's the thirtieth, and thirty days has...November. And then, friends, it's December, and there's baking to be done. We spent Thanksgiving playing games and reading and watching Dallas Buyers Club at the Nick and eating Indian food with David M at Hi Bombay because Tandoor was closed, if you can believe such a thing. Today we talked to Zoë on the phone--she flies to Budapest in just a few days, is packing up her life in Madurai and saying goodbye to her host family and friends.
Now I am listening to my Cab Calloway holiday Pandora station while Mark braves Home Depot in search of holiday lights. I spent all day painting! Yes, still the bathroom! We are seriously nearing the home stretch, especially if you don't count the floor. We haven't quite decided what to do with the floor yet. Ahh, but it's going to be such a pretty little bathroom!
It's Zoë's twenty-first birthday. There are so many strange things about this, foremost among them the fact that she's twenty-one years old. Then, there's also the fact that she's in Madurai, India--although we are relatively experienced at this particular weirdness, since she spent her sixteenth birthday (and that Christmas too) in Germany. We didn't even mail her a card this time, because around the time such a card should have been mailed, it looked like she might leave Madurai early. But we did get to talk to her on the phone today at great length! She had a good birthday, surrounded by friends and a sweet host mom (who told her at one point "God sent me a Hindi-speaking girl!"--it's a treat for both of them that her host mom is from North India and speaks Hindi). Two cakes, lots of gifts, dinner out with pals. It sounded like a sweet, celebratory day for our girl. She has only two weeks left in Madurai, and then her adventuring will take her to Budapest for seven weeks before she lands on this continent again.
She was just a tiny little peanut, see?
And now? She's a grown up, world traveling, polylingual, brilliant, gorgeous young woman.
A soft, rainy Monday, and such a fun morning at the dog beach. Gus ran around in circles with a huge goofy smile on his face, swam and wrestled. Somebody unearthed a huge marrow bone, and the whole posse of dogs played keepaway with it.
I'm missing my sweet girl on this day before her birthday.
But look at her consorting with another elephant! My favorite of her quotes about this: "Sometimes you're just walking by somebody's house and there happens to be an elephant in the front yard!" My favorite of Isaac's quotes about this: "ZOE AND HER ELEPHRIEND!!!!!"
Eighteen degrees can look like this, friends. Another chilly day, another cup of tea! I found a pretty pretty little feather on the ground this morning, after weeks of searching for the two feathers from my dream a while back. The feathers in my dream were more exciting, but this is a sweet speckled brown and tan and white one that I like very much.
I had a dream that this beautiful girl was coming home in January, only it wasn't a dream!
Back to work, where I am blurbing, in this order, these words: Shiite, cartoonist, commie, zoologist. Yay!
It's that time of year--dark, dark, dark at 4:30pm. Crunchy leaves, pellet stove, gloves, my famous hot bag of corn.
We had what is likely to be Isaac's last ever conference at The Learning Shack this week. This is our final autumn of high school as a family. Weird, this time passing thing. We also learned this week that Zoë is definitely coming back to these United States next semester! She'll spend her winter break (which starts December second) gallivanting around Europe, and then she'll head back to New York in January to dive back into the challenging classes she loves. I'm happy when she's happy, no matter where in the world she might be, but all three of us are pretty much jumping up and down with excitement about her coming back!
On a final note, please watch this lovely, lovely video directed by our friend Charlotte Royer (Zoë and Isaac's former babysitter of awesomeness and current filmmaker). Featuring many loved ones, including my boy and also my Maine. The best thing about this is that Zoë just coincidentally happened to watch it with some friends in Madurai--first, she said, "Hey, she was my babysitter!" And then, "Wait a minute, that's my brother!"
September, slow down! It's speeding past, full of new schoolish things and medical-related things and heaps of library books, plus my victory in getting Mark hooked on Friday Night Lights (everyone thinks he or she is immune, due to his or her disinterest in the subjects of football and Texas, until it's too late to turn back and they're staying up til midnight watching just one more episode), and not to mention our weekly dark double-feature nights of watching the very last few episodes of Breaking Bad along with the first two seasons of the excellent British series Black Mirror with Jason and David. The dark night of the TV soul is lightened by the fact that we also eat pie--so far, blueberry, apple, pecan, and tonight...pumpkin.
Isaac cracked his head open one night and had to get it stapled up. And yet, he claimed it only "hurts little bit."
Note blood stains on pillow. We spent three hours in this room.
Completely unrelated: he also got his wisdom teeth out. When this photo was taken, he was feeling groovy.
We took this picture because we thought the name "Illuminati" was funny. It was only later that it dawned on me that "maxillofacial" surgery includes Botox injections, and I became very creeped out by the whole place.
50+ hours of intractible hiccups, to be specific. Mark checked out fine in the end, as you can see by his diagnosis. And no, he's not hiccuping any more.
Completely unrelated cat torture. No, actually no cats were harmed in the taking of this photograph. Theo loves any attention Isaac gives him, and Isaac is gentle with his cat puppet. That cat is ENORMOUS, right?
So there you have it, most of our medical adventures this month. Meanwhile, in Madurai India, Zoë rode her bike into a manhole, but she escaped with only bruises. And I undertook a very dull elimination diet to try and figure out what my stomach doesn't enjoy digesting. I've given up in confusion after a week of no caffeine (not to mention no dairy, soy, wheat, or pretty much anything else), but we'll continue to work on it, my stomach and I. In the meantime, I will eat a slice of pumpkin pie tonight.
It got hot and sparkly, just in time for Independence Day. We celebrated with Sam and Max and David M, grilling things on the grill and eating them sprinkled with chaat masala, and drinking beverages poured over ice cubes, of which I always neglect to make enough, and also kept giving to the dog and the cat to crunch and lick, respectively, the result being: not enough ice cubes.
The three of us skipped the fireworks, though we could hear plenty. Gus was blase, while Theo slunk up and down the stairs with his ears back, seeking safety from the horrible noises. He was pretty much inconsolable.
Speaking of which, how unusual is it for a grown person to wish she were a house pet so she'd have an excuse to lie on the floor all day long, especially on hot days?
Mark and I explored a little bit last weekend, in Port Clyde and Mt Blue State Park (Saturday and Sunday, respectively). Gus is a willing, cheerful companion in the car and on trails, in parks, on docks. Still, it made me miss little Mister Minnow with a pang. I still think about him all the time.
The nest is empty this week--Isaac has bused south to New York for more film set interning. The nest feels big lately, the yard sprawling and wild, everything damp and sticky, or alternately foggy and damp, even inside the house.
I talked to the girl on the phone this morning, seven thousand miles away, nine and half hours in the future, and her voice was laughing and bright as she walked home from the tailor with her block printed Rajasthani suit. My favorite was when she said, "Wait--this isn't my street. This street is full of pigs!"
June is slipping by, full of being a family of four, of sunny days and rainy ones and dogs at the beach and meals at the table and donuts and long walks and Mad Men and iced coffee and board games. Zoë was here for three and a half glorious weeks, and as I write this she is flying over Europe, eastward, destination Delhi and ultimately Jaipur. She does a beautiful job, that girl, of balancing the thrill of the adventure with the sadness of saying goodbye, the scariness of heading into a year on her own in India. She is good at expressing all those conflicting feelings in a straightforward way, while I maintain calm outwardly, punctuated with bursts of frustration or weepiness that take me by surprise.
Mark's mom came to visit, to give that girl one more hug. And also, to take a ride in this vintage Cadillac with Christian and Isaac.
There were a few really hot days, as if nature were preparing our girl a bit for living in the desert this summer. We went to the beach, like normal summertime people!
The sky put on all kinds of shows for us.
These clouds might be my favorite.
It's the same sky, but it's different every single day. And it's the same sky, really, under which Zoë is living for the next year, even though we will be adjusting to the bizarre ten-and-a-half hour time difference yet again, as she adjusts to the forty-degree temperature difference (the least of the differences, of course). She loves it there, it's her place, and it makes her so happy to be delving deeper into Hindi, into India, and then starting this fall, to be diving into Tamil (language number six: English, French, German, Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, and I am allowed to list those in a bragging way because I am her proud proud mother). Her happiness makes the distance not so far, makes the adventure feel a bit like we get to participate, of course in a vicarious and virtual way. Although Mark is hatching a plan to meet up with her in December. More on that soon.
Because of the rain and the gray and the chill, and the animals' sensitive tummies and their furry butts. And because Mark is back on the job hunt, and because a cup of tea got spilled upon a Necessary Laptop.
But really, things are still more like this:
Because, I love almost everyone, almost everything in my life. An old friend came to visit from the past, my girl came home, we've spent some time all-four-of-us, which I love. There has been great food and good movies and a sweet Iron & Wine concert (complete with pre-concert Sam Beam sighting/interaction), friends, family, books, funny telervision,* Hindi music, dogs and their people, magical fog, longer and longer days.
Not only that, but I got Firefox to put the damn photos on my blog.
Beautiful stormy beach in the morning. We went back in the evening and celebrated our anniversary (22 years!) by walking in a torrential rainstorm on this same beach, Gus galloping happily through the sand and bumping goofily into the other dogs, all three of us soaking wet. The Gus had a bone and Mark and I had Indian food beside the toasty pellet stove.
Mark and I are here in Portland, Maine, picnicking by the Atlantic ocean and watching storms tumble in across the sky. reading books, watching movies, letting the grass in our yard grow tall while the black eyed susans and pink anemones take over.
Max is here too, enjoying fresh air and fruit and good coffee for just another few hours before he drives his old car back to upstate new york and starts RA training at school. He loved China. it was wonderful, it was difficult. Maine feels good but strange: "So many white people!" He misses the young woman below, who he hasn't seen in three months:
The bravest girl, she is in Jaipur getting packed right about now, leaving on a bus for Delhi and then getting on a plane to New York by way of Paris. She would be devastated to leave India if she didn't fully intend to go back immediately after her sophomore year of college. Her plans as of now include heading back next May, and staying for an entire year.
This guy will be babysat by my Mom and Dad in Cambridge while Mark and I fetch our girl at JFK on Monday (Ican'twaitIcan'twaitIcan'twait).
These guys, below, are apart for a week while the blond one is visiting his cousins in San Francisco. The tabby-colored one gets the worst deal of anyone, hanging out in the house without canine companionship. He will have a couple of nice humans to meow at, though, friendly cat wrangler volunteers.
Okay, friends, that's my update on everyone's whereabouts. August is funny, sticky, and overgrown and lazy. I don't mind summer hanging around a while longer at all, but October--the best month--is ahead!
Oh, summer, funny fleeting/lingering season! Season of cotton shirts and cats and flower dogs. Iced coffee, long drives, pebbly beaches and Mexican food in the woods. We've got our hands around this summer, and even though its end feels imminent, really there is an entire month of it left before Isaac starts school. And two weeks--two--until our Indian girl comes home!
