The Daily Brief

A thunderstorm blew over my house on Sunday, around mid-day. This happens every two or three weeks, at least once a month during a normal spring and summer. Our thunderstorms in South Texas are as outsized as everything else is supposed to be in the west. Sometimes they appear as great creamy mounds of cloud, piling up and up and up in the clear blue sky, the bottom layer as flat and grey as a an iron, pressing down on the land. Out in the high desert, you can see them coming, a long way away, with a grey veil of rain hanging below, and even if the storm is moving away, sometimes you can catch the scent of it on the desert air, a teasing whisper of moisture.

Around here, a thunderstorm sweeping in from the mountains, or up from the Gulf will cover the entire sky; sometimes there is a odd, sepia or greenish cast to the air, until the last of the sunlight winks out. The clouds darken to leaden grey, and press closer, as if twilight is falling in the middle of the day. Lights that are activated by a sensor—streetlights and advertising signs and such— wink on. Sometimes the storm is announced by gusts of wind, but more usually by a distant grumble of thunder.
Storms that come in at night introduce themselves with lightening; one spectacular storm a couple of summers ago lit up the sky constantly for nearly half an hour; nonstop flickering light, etching the trees and the big stone cross at St. Helena’s on the other side of the green belt at the back of my yard in harsh, blue white light. Impossible to count the seconds between the flash and the noise, while gusts of wind lash the tree branches.

The rain announces itself as a faint rustle in the grass and in the tree leaves, pattering in random wet splotches on the stone path. The first few fat drops resound like small pebbles on the fiberglass porch roof, and then the full force sweeps in, and the light pattering becomes a full-throated roar. The porch roof is fringed with silvery streamlets of water, and St. Helena’s and the great stone cross in the field beyond my garden are dim shapes in the veil of rain. The rainwater is cold, or maybe it only seems so, but it feels like the storm has brought a breath of coolness with it. Sometimes the rain brings hail, almost always icy little pellets the size of bee-bees bouncing off hard surfaces. Very occasionally, the hail is larger— marble and golf-ball and baseball sized, and accordingly more dangerous. My neighbor Judy was trying to get some of her potted plants under cover during the hail storm two months ago, and collected a number of bruises on her shoulders and back before she thought better of that plan.

The rain sheets off my neighbor’s roof, overflowing the gutter and splashing into the flowerbed that I have mulched with gravel. My own downspouts are spilling water into the area between our houses, the garden path is awash with it. The street in front of my house runs nearly ankle deep in water after a downpour like this; somehow the this city has never quite got the hang of constructing roads with adequate coving; roads and drains mean pretty much the same thing. To our enormous civic embarrassment it is entirely possible to be swept away and drown within city limits, as the result of driving down certain streets in a heavy rain.

Ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, the downpour is relentless, but then it seems like it is not so dark, the twilight is lifting, and the roar on the patio roof dies away. A few birds chirp uncertainly from where they have taken shelter. A crack of blue sky widens between two clouds, a fan of sunbeams spreads open like the halo of a saint in an El Greco painting, and the storm is gone as swiftly as it arrived. And with luck, there’ll be another one in a couple of weeks, so I’ll not need to water my garden with the hose, and the little white wildflowers that people call rain-lilies will miraculously sprout in a day or so, nickel-sized white hexagons on a green stem, swaying among the uncut grass in the fields and roadsides.

There are three ways of dealing with the challenge of having champagne tastes and a beer budget; aesthetic, artisanal and economic. One can either

Learn to like beer

Learn to make champagne

Drink mineral water on six nights of the week, and champagne on the seventh.

Now that my daughter has friends who are coping with small children, she has become quite amazingly appreciative of me as a mom. ( Mothers’ Day flowers and a card, and something nice for the garden!) The terrible twos were not all that bad, and she even gracefully managed the terrible teenage stage without any scars on either one of us; although, as she pointed out when we were talking about this— we HAD to get along, because it was just the two of us. No impossible friends, no rebellion, no experimentation with unusual substances, or various infractions of the law… no stormy tantrums, no slammed doors. Quite frankly, I was envied by a number of other parents, and even a prospective parent who was in two minds about what it would be like to raise a child, and wished that it were possible to just clone my daughter.

But I have never been quite sure if I just lucked out, and got a child with a temperament and interests which were compatible with mine, or if it was those few and sensible rules, drawn from my parents’ house rules or from my own experience with smaller children. Someone once made the point that in the old days of large and close families, older children often had to mind the younger sibs or cousins, with the pleasing result that when they came to have their own children, there were no surprises. I had already taken care of my youngest brother, had the neighborhood monopoly on baby-sitting as the only responsible teenage girl for blocks around, worked at summer camps, with Sunday School classes, and as a Scout troop assistant leader. So, very few surprises, and a lot of confidence going in. And I was terrifically pleased by the invention of disposable diapers, by the way. Gift of the gods, people, gift of the gods.

I knew enough not to expect a lot out of a toddler, at least. You might be able to teach a three year old to use the toilet, play Chopin on the piano, and remember her/his manners… but not to count on that, terribly… and not to beat yourself up if you couldn’t. Until the age of about three and a half to four, when they grasp the concept of threats and bribery, what you have is a completely self-centered, impulse-driven little animal. Love them and kept them from running out in traffic, or sticking their fingers into the electrical sockets, and try not to expect too much. Good behavior is pretty much a random, hit or miss proposition. At least, until they are at the stage where you can say “Darling, if you don’t stop that, mother will spank!” or “Darling, if you are an absolute angel, mother will give you some ice cream!”— and they comprehend, and amend their own behavior willingly, you are just not going to get consistently good behavior.

And never make a threat or a promise you have no intention of delivering on. If you aren’t going to follow through, don’t even open your mouth.

You have to be willing to be authoritative, to be a parent, not a pal. If you don’t have their respect when they are small, what chance do you have of it when they are taller than you?

Spanking (never in anger, bare hand on bare butt, for clear infractions of established rules) was hardly ever required after a certain age. I could always come up with a far more suitable, non-physical punishment— forfeiture of allowance, privileges, expiation of guilt, something creative like that.

I worked very hard at never being surprised into anger at anything startling she told me. If you are angry, you will frighten them, and then you will never hear anything again that a child thinks might make you angry. Practice a noncommittal expression, and the useful phrase “Well, that is interesting, sweetie.” Then take a deep breath and rationally deconstruct what they just told you.

I kissed off having any sort of non-child oriented social life for about fifteen years. Your family life, your job, your social life. You can only have two out of three.

And finally, never forget that your child is a seperate and unique human being… not some sort of extension of yourself. They are, and ultimatly, their own person, and as such they may do things that you yourself might never do.

Myself, I would never have enlisted in the Marines, but it’s what my daughter wanted to do.

Although my back yard is tiny, a veritable scrap, a pocket-handkerchief of a back yard, it somehow feels much larger, because it backs on a green-belt. There used to be some scrubby trees growing against the other side of the fence, but the city cleared it all away as a fire hazard some years ago. This somewhat inconvenienced the nesting cardinal pair that came back, year after year, and forced them to locate their subsequent nests first in one of my rose bushes which had briefly attempted to become a tree, and then in the tangle of jasmine vines, and finally up in the photina somewhere. Although the nesting area varied, their feeding habits have not: I hear their distinctive squeaking song all throughout the spring, in the morning and early evening, when the feathered traffic around the hanging bird-feeders is greatest. There really isn’t much out of the ordinary, bird-wise; the usual brown sparrows and wrens, great flashy blue-jays— the glam rock-stars of the backyard-bird world— a mocking bird now and again, and a flock of very fat grey doves.

If I wanted to, and it was legal in a suburb, I could hunt the native doves from the back porch; it would only be easier if they actually walked up to the door and committed seppuku on the mat. As it is, not even Bubba and Parfait, the neighbors’ cats that prefer my garden to their own, are not much interested in hunting the birds. Oh, they make a desultory effort now and again; Parfait crouches in the tall fringe of grass and watches the rabble of doves scouting for the spilled seed on the ground under the feeder, but he has yet to even make a good-faith effort at actually stalking them. Bubba, with primitive feline instincts rising irresistibly to the fore, sometimes makes a short dash into their midst, but he has yet to actually catch any of them. I don’t think he really tries very hard; after all, my yard is their gentlemen’s club, a place of leisure and repose. I think they look on the birds as entertainment; Cat Television, the Bird Channel. Neither one of them is dedicated to hunting, or particularly good at it, not like Nimue, the bad outdoor-cat who frequently stalked, slaughtered and ate the tender parts of the doves, leaving the garden strewn with feathers and half-eaten avian corpses. Nimue did know her limits, though— she did not tangle with Wellie the opossum.

Wellie (short for Wellington; among other things the owner and proprietor of a really impressive nose) the opossum waddled up to the back porch one afternoon, drank deeply from the cat’s water dish, and then took his fill from Nimue’s food dish, all while she observed lazily from a sun-warm place on the rock pathway. Then, he calmly waddled across the porch, underneath the chair that I was sitting in, and into the small corner cupboard— an arm’s reach from where I sat— where he curled up among the garden sprayers, containers of plant food and the long loppers and went to sleep. I was never able to decide if he was either completely fearless or as dumb as a box of rock, or come to any good reason— other than a fearsome collection of needle-sharp teeth and claws— why Nimue was quite tolerant about Wellie calmly appropriating her food dish and personal porch. I suspect cats think of opossums as merely another sort of ugly and mutant cat.

Nimue and Wellie have since moved on, but wild life in the garden is burgeoning: the toads come and go, and the lime-sherbet-green lizards inflating their pink throats on the wisteria branches are always there. A couple of evenings ago, I heard something crunching away at the kibble in the cats’ dish, a tiny kitten-sized thing that skittered away and hid among the potted plants when I opened the door. Not the neighbors’ escaped pet ferret again, not like last year, but a miniature Wellie, an opossum-kit with a white face and black ears. Yesterday it was there again, joined by a second, and a third, who crept cautiously down the lattice, or from between the pots. They crunched nervously, sometimes balancing on the edge of the dish. Two of them fled when a hungry dove landed, and stalked up and down with an indignant flaring of tail-feathers and wings, but the third kit kept possession of the dish. The disgruntled dove hopped away off the porch and the two shyer kits crept out from between the pots again, and ate and ate until they were quite full. I assume they are living on the flat porch roof, under the shelter of the main roof overhang, and come and go by the lattice and the wisteria vines. Bubba and Parfait seem to have as little interest in hunting them as Nimue did with Wellie, even though they are very much smaller; presumably the cat-opossum truce still holds. The man at the pet store says he had a semi-tamed one for a while, and they will eagerly eat slugs and snails, which is a good reason to tolerate them, even aside from the fact that they are rather amusing to watch.

I do wish I had a turtle in the garden, though. I have rescued two from various busy streets, but both times I was too far away from the house to take the time to bring either one of them home. I left them both in green pastures, out of the traffic. But a turtle would be cool… the next one I find in the road is coming straight home (even if it makes me late to work) and joining my wild kingdom.

Out of a number of things you do not want to be waked out of sound sleep by—say, projectile vomiting in the adjacent bathroom, an intruder breaking in downstairs— tops in my personal experience was the sound of several things, all at once: a violently slamming door, a child screaming, and a great deal of feline hissing and snarling. But this all did happen one late summer night in Athens, in the apartment where my daughter and I were living in Ano Glyphada, a couple of blocks up the hill from the taxi-stand at the bakery by the five-point intersection. The neighborhood is very much changed now, since the Olympics, but it was then an assortment of two or three story apartment blocks, with gardens, mixed in with small houses and empty lots. Our balcony, which ran along two sides of the building had a view of Aegina and the Saronic Gulf, and if you got on tiptoes at the end of it over the front door, where a huge bougainvillea vine went all the way up to the top of the building, you could just barely see ships anchored in the port of Piraeus.

(Our place in Athens, c. 1984— the second floor. First floor, to Europeans)

We rented the second floor apartment from Kyrie Panayioti, who lived on the ground floor with his wife, Kyria Venetia and their two sons. Kyria Venetia’s sister, Kyria Yiota and her husband and their two children lived on the third floor. Each apartment took up the whole of the floor, and had windows all the way around, so as to get the full benefit of the breeze from the ocean. The ground floor garden, lovingly tended by Kyria Venetia, was shaded with small lemon and olive trees. Even I, with only my narrow walkway of a balcony, had pots of herbs and a small pine tree in a pot. The balconies were shaded by fine striped canvas awnings, installed at great expense by Kyrie Panayioti, and the interior rooms by a peculiar sort of slatted wooden shutter that could be raised or lowered by a fabric strap, or positioned at a half-way point with the slats separated to allow in a certain amount of air and light.

It was not just Blondie and I, on the second floor; she was just coming up to the age of three and a half, the right age to want pets. We had adopted a pair of kittens we had found, abandoned on a building site in the spring. Patchie was a tortoise-shell colored female, who looked like her coat had been stitched together from odd colored brown and caramel and black scraps left over from other cats; her presumed litter-mate Bagheera was solid black all over. They had grown into a fine looking, lively pair of young cats, who adored my daughter and slept on her bed for choice. They had the run of the apartment and balcony, and never seemed to want to go farther, although Patchie had fallen off the balcony railing one day, rolled down the first-floor awning and bounced off the end into Kyria Venetia’s patch of squash vines, from whence she sat and wailed for rescue.

At night, I lowered the shutters to the bottom of the window, but left them in the half-way position, all but the shutters in the kitchen, which I left open at the bottom for about ten inches, so Patchie and Bagheera could go in and out. I felt very secure with this arrangement, since we were on the second floor with no way for a human intruder to scale up twenty feet of sheer wall, but on that one night, we did have an interloper. The first I knew of it was the almost simultaneous scream from my daughter and the door to her bedroom slamming shut. I bolted out of bed in the pitch dark; fell over my slippers and out of my bedroom doorway into the hall. No matter— your child screaming for Mommy, you will crawl over broken glass to get to them. I wrenched open her bedroom door, and something furry brushed my ankles, as it exited in haste. Snapped on the light switch, I see my daughter sitting upright in a tangle of bedcovers, Patchie and Bagheera snarling and spitting as they dive for the door, small, fur-covered thunderbolts streaking past.

“It was another cat, Mommy,” said my daughter, as the sounds of bad cat-language diminish along the balcony outside. The bougainvillea rustled violently, one last frustrated snarl as our two feline guardians saw the intruder off, out the way he came. “It woke up Patchie and Bagheera, and they knocked the door shut. They were fighting and it woke me up.”
“Lovely, “I said, “Other people have watchdogs… we have watch-cats. Go back to sleep, sweetie.”
“Good, “Said my daughter,” They’ll keep everything bad away, won’t they.”
“We can only hope,” I said.

(And they did: Bagheera died at a relatively young age, after surgery for cystitis, but Patchie lived a long and adventurous life in three countries, and is buried in my garden in Texas, surviving just long enough to see Blondie come home from basic training. We were remembering this incident the other day, and Blondie wanted me to write something funny and cheerful about it.)

Late March, April and May are, with all votes counted, the hands-down winner for loveliest time of year in South Texas and the Hill Country: the temperatures are mild and temperate and the rains are frequent enough to turn everything green… or all of that which is not in multi-colored and glorious bloom. The redbud trees are covered with blossoms that are actually not really red, but more of a very dark fuchsia-pink, and there is an ornamental pear or almond tree in the front yard of a house at the top of the street which has been veiled in pure white blooms for the last two weeks. The weeping willows were the first to put on new, delicate green leaves, followed by the ubiquitous Arizona “trash” trees.

In my garden, the new leaves on the mulberry tree have grown to the size of a small child’s hand in the last three or four days, while the wisteria has put forth mightily during the same time. I neglected pruning the wisteria this fall, so it there are not as many bunches of pale violet blooms this year as last, but the Spanish jasmine vine on the back porch is covered with little star-white clusters. In the morning and the late afternoon the scent of the jasmine hangs thick and sweet, mingled with that of the almond verbena’s almost invisible bracts. The bees bustle around waxy clusters of blossom on the dwarf Meyer lemon and lime trees, while Bubba-from-down-the-road lounges on the sun-warmed stones of the path after having eaten his fill. The most recent cat, who for my purposes is nick-named Parfait, is more interested in the flutter of birds around the feeders hanging from a branch of the mulberry tree, and crouches alertly in the untrimmed winter-ryegrass. Parfait, alas, has no hope of ever catching a bird, since he cannot keep his tail from twitching…. And they are well out of his reach anyway.

(Wisteria in bloom, in my garden)

There is a mad rustle of wings, and much excited twittering in the vicinity of three hanging feeders, around sunrise and sunset, but the birdsong is accompanied these days by the constant tap of hammers driving nails into wood, coming from the roof of a house just down the street. I think of the sudden hailstorm three weeks ago as the “Spring Creek Roofing & General Contracting Full Employment Act of 2005”, for every house in the development needs a new roof; if not now, within six months or a year when the damaged asphalt tiles being to leak water into the house. Lawn signs for seven or eight local companies are sprouting in lawns, three or four in a row sometimes.

Three or four houses already have their new roofs complete, the same number are in progress. It is a hazard in the morning sometimes, dodging a small dump truck, or a pickup truck towing a trailer full of new roofing felt and shingles, or carrying away the ruined waste of the old. The nearest roof-in-progress is five doors away from mine, next to the home of the roofing contractor himself; his own roof is as damaged as anyone else’s, but he figures have his crew do his neighbors’ first. I am waiting for his estimate on mine, and will probably accept it. He has been a fairly good neighbor— although Judy, who is a soft touch for animals— thinks he leaves his dog alone too long during the day. Of the houses along my block, two-thirds of them are the homes of single women, or single parents, but Texas is one of the places where chivalry is not yet on life-support. For a woman to develop sudden car trouble, or house trouble, or even be wrestling with an outsized burden in a public place is to suddenly have any number of rescuers, striding forth with a confident manly swagger, and a John Wayne-ish growl of “Hey, little lady, let me take care of that for you!” The roofing-contractor neighbor is just that sort— he’ll do us right, I am sure. And in the meantime, the garden is in bloom.

I have spotted the first blue-bonnet in bloom in my neighborhood, a single lonely specimen in a patch of assorted wildflowers where the little streamlet meanders from top to bottom of the development. There is a largish patch of them coming up amidst the grass in an empty tract of land along Stahl road, unmistakable harbingers of spring. Very soon there will be acres of them in bloom up in the Hill Country, followed by herds of photographers, and a couple of double-page features of them in the local newspaper. It’s a Texas thing, going ga-ga over the bluebonnets and other wildflowers every year, but it’s a much healthier obsession in the long run than high school football. I may even encourage bluebonnets in that part of my garden given over to native plants and flowers, assuming there the two Arizona trash-trees allow enough sunshine underneath.

I’ve been much too busy the last two weekends cleaning up after the hail-storm two weeks ago; so has everyone else. The curb is piled high with bundles and bags for trash pickup: the hail came down the size of marbles and golf balls, knocking down sticks and leaves by the pile. Some of the trees are now looking very lop-sided, with all the leaves stripped off their outer branches. The concrete sidewalks and driveways are freckled with pale little blotches, where the hail-stones struck, and all the local auto-repair places have suddenly sprouted extra signs touting hail-damage repair. Signs from different roofing contractors are also sprouting in the yards through-out the neighborhood. A friend from church said she had counted no less than seven different companies and contactors’ pickup-trucks with ladders hanging out of the truck-bed cruising the side streets as thick as fleas. It seems to have been a very tightly-focused storm; outside the immediate impact area, it was just another ordinary thunderstorm. My neighbors who were caught at home by it all said it was quite terrifying. The noise of it was incredible, and it went on for ten or fifteen minutes.

I did not think there had been much more than superficial damage to the garden; I thought my roof had escaped serious damage. Many of the other houses in the neighborhood looked like they had great dark smears or shadows on the weather side of their asphalt-shingled roofs. There were also a number of broken windows, and vent-covers, and supposedly someone’s patio roof gave way. I didn’t have any broken windows, and I couldn’t see any new damage to the screens that couldn’t be accounted for by the cats, and astonishingly enough, the fiber-glass over the back porch was un-perforated. But this weekend, and last weekend I talked to all my neighbors, and the up-shot is that we are all going to get new roofs. The insurance adjuster just told me that she is doing up the damage estimate for my house, and yes, I need one also… so, that is what I am working on this week! One of the neighbors, whose house is next to Judy’s is a roofing contractors, and it looks like he is doing bids for all of us, up and down the street. It would be great if he could just stage all the materials at once, and just go from house to house, all at once, and give us a bulk discount. My insurance adjuster says it might be a very good idea to hire him anyway; after all, if he does a bad job, I know where he lives….

We stayed in a castle, a real castle, Schloss Rheinfels on the Rhine, across from St. Goarshausen. The hotel part was newer than the medieval ruin that topped the crag overlooking the river, the railway, severely vertical acres of grape-vines which gripped the rocks with vinous fervor, and several other ruined castles up and down the river as far as could be seen. It was a great roomy barn of a place, with thick stone walls; you could have dropped rolls out of the dining room windows straight down on the freight-cars passing down below, at the very foot of the cliff. The ruins of Schloss Rheinfels were adjacent, and much overgrown. Many of the towers and doorways were filled with dirt, leaving just enough space for a child, not that Blondie was very interested in the dark and cobwebbed tunnels within.

We explored it all one late afternoon, and then had to take the VEV to the nearest Volvo mechanic in Bingen-am-Rhine for some mechanical work (bad gas in Italy, apparently) and the train to Rhein-Main AB to get an emergency loan to pay for it. It was getting to seriously autumnal, nearly a month after we had driven away from Athens and the only place my daughter remembered living in. We were on our way to Spain, taking a leisurely auto-ramble through Italy, Germany and France. There was only one thing my daughter didn’t miss about Greece, and that was the habit of any and all— especially the elderly— patting her on her blond head, and admiring her northern coloring.

“Like I was a little dog,” she muttered rebelliously. I was worried that she might just take a bite out of the next well-meaning hand, and looking forward to Germany because there she would fit right in, and no one would notice her particularly. Some hope— she looked like everyone’s grandchild, and was just as admired, although there was not as much head-patting… for which we both were grateful. Small children do, after all, have sharp teeth, and at four and a half, Blondie was very forward and brash.
The VEV was purring smoothly again, on the road along the river, north to Koblenz, all castles and vineyards, and little towns with a riverside promenade and a church with onion-domed towers, and if that didn’t kick over the quaint-and-rustic meter, the roadway along the Mosel pegged that sucker all the way over into the red.

The road along the Mosel was a two-lane country road of the sort that I had become very used to, narrower but nearly empty of traffic, and the river meandered and looped among rolling green hills, trimmed with russet and gold autumn-harvest colors. The August holidays were well over, and all the tourists had mostly gone home. Early in the afternoon, we came around pronounced bend in the road, and there was a beautiful, half-timber and thatched little town, straight ahead.

(Cochem Am Mosel, 1985)

It clustered around a conical green hill topped with a toy castle, a tall central tower trimmed with mosaic tiles. A perfect, Grimm’s fairy-tale castle, with battlements and tiny pepper-pot turrets, peaked roofs and a portcullis gate, guarded like an enchanted place by a surrounding palisade of taller hills. I pulled over, and looked at my map, the Hallwag atlas opened on the passenger seat.
“We’ll stay here, tonight,” I said. “That has got to be the prettiest place I have ever seen.”
“Can we go look at that castle?” my daughter asked, “It’s not a ruin, like the last one.”
“Of course,” I said, and turned off the road along the river. I had no idea of where to stay inexpensively in a place like this, but trusted to luck: there was always something, a gasthaus, or even a private home with a “zimmer-frei” sign swinging from the gate. The main road threaded through town, around the back of the castle hill, past a little ski-lift moving continuously up to the top of the tallest crag overlooking the little town. There, on the right, the modest “zimmer-frei” sign in front of one of the houses in a modest block of townhouses.

We took the last parking place in front, and snagged the last room too, for the home-owner came out and took down the sign as soon as I paid the required 40 DM. The windows of our room looked onto the back of the house, where the dangling seats of the little ski-lift moved up, up, and down down, twenty or feet above the steep slope.
“Ohh, Mommy, can we?” My daughter leaned out of the window, tiptoe with eagerness, and I sighed, and hauled her inside so I could close the window. I had a very bruising experience with one of those little lifts, as a teenager, going up to a youth hostel in Koblenz, which was housed in a castle on top of the customary crag. I was not terribly athletic and heights— or the imminent prospect of falling from them— bothered me terribly. I took my camera and handbag— we would walk over to the castle, and have some dinner in town, but first… the ski lift.

It was one of those constantly-moving ones, requiring deft-timing in swinging yourself into the moving seat, and in the case of my daughter, a boost from the attendant. Going up wasn’t so bad, facing the steep hillside and going up, and up, staggered rows of grape vines sweeping past your dangling toes. The ground appeared to be little more than a short drop below. At the top, Blondie jumped down from the seat herself, and neatly moved away from the path of the moving line of suspended seats. I took her hand, and we walked around to the look-out, below which was the whole town, neatly spread out like a toy village, centered around the crossroads and the castle.

And then, going down again. Just like going up, but in reverse. Horribly in reverse, because going down meant facing out, and a long, fast and horrible controlled fall, and my daughter screaming. Screaming, in excitement,
“Oh, Mommy! It’s like Wonder-Woman, it’s like flying!”
She was exhilarated. I on the other hand, was torn between screaming, throwing up or fainting, and not wanting to do any of the above in front of her. So, since I had my camera in my lap, I uncovered the camera lens and took a picture. Two things came to mind in the first twenty feet of the ski-lift drop; that as a child, my daughter was totally, completely and utterly fearless, and in the coming years, I faced any number of occasions watching her do things, where I would be torn between screaming, throwing up or fainting… but it would be best just to sit calmly, with white knuckles and a faint smile. And take a picture.

(Looking down, from the top of the lift, Cochem Am Mosel, 1985)

They say St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland, but do you know what he said, as he was about to do it?
He adjusted the rear-view mirror, looked over his shoulder and said,

“Arright, yiz in th’ back, are yiz aright, and ready to go, then?”

But I don’t wear green, myself on St. Patricks’ Day, as Grandpa Jim was an Orangeman, through and through.

(Grandpa Jim and Uncle Jimmy, early 1920ies)

From the archives, “My Grandpa Was an Alien”

There probably is some kind of karma involved, because several hours after I posted the pic of my back porch and wrote about the neighborhood cats that see my garden as a sort of clubhouse (and, no… I will not be adding the new one to the pride, he will be tamed and neutered and fostered out to another human of his very own! Really! Stop looking at me like that!) my neighbor Judy called me at work:
“I just wanted to let you know that it just finished hailing out here, “She said “Hail the size of marbles, some the size of golf balls. Just so you won’t be surprised when you get home tonight.”
I was pretty surprised, because it had just rained a little where I was; but it has happened before around here: one part of the city can be having all sorts of horrible weather and five or six miles away, it’s mild and calm, and people there are watching the weather reports and going
“Huh???”

So, it was very interesting to get home last night, and see a lot of the new leaves off the Arizona trash tree plastered all over the driveway. The storm roared in from the south, more or less, as Judy told me, so the south-side of my house— normally the most sheltered— had a five or six inch deep drift of hailstones piled up in the flower bed and the walkway. All the firespike and mona lavender are stripped of leaves, the photina growing by the front door has shed a layer of leaves all over everything underneath, and the grass and stone path in back are covered with shredded laurel leaves, like green confetti.

The hailstones were the size of large and small marbles; as of this morning, twenty hours afterwards, they are still not melted. The branches of the rosemary shrubs along the front walk, which took the brunt of it, are covered with patches where the bark was entirely scraped away. A painted ceramic pot has had the paint chipped off, all the way around the edge. Everything else— oddly enough much of it in pots where I would have expected it to be much more exposed to the hail is not very much damaged at all. Most of the stuff had only begun to put out small leaves, and is not very much affected.

I have never seen hail that big; one of my neighbors had their skylight shattered, someone else has had a patio roof collapse, and another was caught on the road and has a cracked windshield. Even the old-timers say they hardly ever saw so much large hail at one time. The worst I ever saw before this was in Spain one summer, when it came down about the size of BB shot, but so much of it, that it looked like snow, and washed into the storm drains where it promptly froze and blocked them up. The resulting mess flooded half the low-lying buildings on base.

And to top it all, after the storm blew over, it was mild, and warm and got up to eighty degrees yesterday afternoon. The popular saying is that if you don’t like the weather in Texas… wait five minutes, it will change.

My back yard is entirely fenced, and sheltered from the late afternoon sun by an enormous mulberry tree, and is usually at its best during two times of the year— that is, spring and fall. Summers are hot and harsh, winters are cold and dreary, and our gardening season is split into two short seasons by them. The first best time is beginning now, when the jasmine and the potted Meyer lemon trees are out in clusters of starry white flowers, and everything else is leafing out, recovering from the whatever winter freeze we might have had. It has been a particularly wet and soggy winter, rather than cold, so this year everything in my yard will be most especially green and lush, and may yet carry through summer that way

We only had a couple of days of freezing temps, but it hit the plants I put in last fall the hardest; a grouping of native Texas plants to attract birds and butterflies, around a green glass Japanese fishing buoy in a metal stand, where the bird feeders hang from a branch of the mulberry. The fire bush and lantana, the Esperanza and liatris are all putting out new leaves. I love to sit out on the back porch in the mornings and evenings, when the big rose bush and the Esperanza are alive with birds, and there is a constant flutter of wings around the feeders.

Sammie, the white cat from across the road— who was nearly blind— used to like sitting behind the potted plants, and pretending that he was stalking the birds going after the spilled seed on the ground. Alas, he was too blind to actually catch a bird, not unless it was a bird with a death-wish marching right up to his whiskers. Sammie, who uncharacteristically (according to his owner) developed a deep affection for Blondie when she was home over Christmas, grumpily tolerated sharing my garden with Bubba, the black cat from down the road who has been coming around for years. I think Sammie and Bubba looked on my garden as a sort of gentleman’s club; not in the nasty, titty-bar sort of way, but the comfy chair and old-port English manner of gentleman’s club. Alas, Sammie was side-swiped by a car one day when on his way over; he was not seriously hurt, just shaken up, and stays in his own yard these days, which is for the best.

Bubba, the wise and wily old survivor, who does not have to cross the road— he frequently arrives by strolling along the top of the fence that runs along the back of all our houses— does not have the place to himself though. For the last two weeks, another young cat has been trailing along in his lordly wake, at 6 AM and 6 PM sharp. Just as young Percival the sort-of-feral began hanging around for the food, and was eventually coaxed into tolerating caresses, and then the soft life of an indoor cat of the First Degree, I am contemplating doing the same with this one…. But oh no, not for myself! I have four cats already; another one will be crossing the boundary into “crazy neighborhood cat lady”, as well as being frowned upon by the code compliance section of the City of San Antonio.

This new cat— who may yet actually belong to a neighbor, just like Sammie and Bubba— has been coming around for two weeks now, and already accepts being petted, and tolerates me sitting on the glider and listening to the radio while he crunches through a bowl of finest Science Diet Light. It is another young male, all white underneath with a brindle brown and grey patch on his back, and on the top of his head. He seems touchingly eager to reject the call of the wild, and curl up on soft furniture and embrace the life of an indoors cat…I must be strong and resist! But as soon as he is tame enough to handle without shedding a couple of pints of my blood— and I know for sure that he doesn’t belong to someone (Judy, my neighbor who knows all this sort of thing, says no, he is a stray) he is off to the spay and neuter clinic, and on to the waiting list for the Animal Defense League shelter, awaiting a soft chair and a garden of his own.

Where I spent Sunday afternoon, after the first trip of the year to the Antique Rose Emporium….

here… and here

Of course, these pictures are from last spring, when the wisteria was in bloom… but it will be looking like this in about three weeks.

I just think of it as my private patch of paradise….

The Caracalla-Therme in Baden-Baden was very new, all sleek glass and polished surfaces, and would have stuck out like a very sore thumb if it hadn’t been so tactfully placed among so very many large trees. Practically everything else of note in the spa-town was built in Beaux-Arts or rustically Germanic plaster and half-timbering, sparkling clean, adorned with gardens and lawns. Every vista delighted the eye; there was nothing to strike a jarring note. I wondered briefly where they stashed unattractive elements like supermarkets, auto wrecking yards and poor people.

“You must zign zis release, madam, “said the attendant at the front desk. “Your dottir, she must be-have in ze baths. Ve haff many invalids taking ze waters, you must see zat she iz not to be runnink and jumpink.” I cheerfully signed the form, and accepted a locker key on a length of elastic, while Blondie looked around with deep interest. I resolved to keep hold of her hand as much as possible, especially in the neighborhood of anyone who looked especially frail. Frankly most everyone else looked robustly healthy.

We changed in one of the women’s changing rooms and locked up our clothes and my purse, and padded barefoot down the corridor towards the pools, the largest of which was housed in a great three-story tall glass tower, a round stone basin full to shoulder-deep with steamingly warm water. A bench ran around the inside lip of the biggest pool— not all the way, as Blondie discovered when she frolicked off the end of it and went down with a yelp and a gurgle into water well over her nearly-five year old head. I fished her out, and we settled on a length of bench which offered a view of the gardens outside, and two smaller pools. Bliss it must be to sit immersed in warm water, up to your neck and regard that view in winter, all covered in snow. It is also hard to be standoffish, when lounging in your bathing suit in a pool of hot water.

“You are American or English?” queried one of the other bathers. Ah, the eternal, pause-making question; it was probably pretty safe to answer it here, when asked by a bare-chested man in swim-trunks. “And where are you from, in America?”
Ah, the other pause-making question: where from? Originally? Lately? Lets’ not even get into the fact that my daughter had been born in Japan, and in another month we would be “from” someplace else entirely. Just travelers, passing through. And what did I think of Germany?
“Do you speak German?” another bather asked all friendly interest.
“Some. I had three years in high school and a year in college, but I’ve never been sent anyplace I could use it.”
“We should help you practice, then, and speak only German,” suggested the first man— oh, well, he had a point. Back in the States, the only practice I had outside of class was with some of the older people at Church, émigrés all, some of whom insisted on singing all the old hymns in German, irregardless of the rest of the congregation. I made careful and laborious conversation for a while, while Blondie got steadily more bored, and fidgety, and then I excused ourselves, saying we were going to check out the really hot pool.

We had passed the steps going into the small ante-room with the very hot pool on our way in. There was a constant circulation of people around the pools, wet feet slapping on the floor, and as we were going down the steps to the hot pool, Blondie suddenly reached up and took the hand of a woman who was also going down the stairs, who looked down at her with startled amazement.
“’Allo, kleine!”
(Blondie: “I really don’t know why I did that… I just had the feeling that she really needed something, something that we could do.”)

The woman was older than I, maybe mid-forties, and painfully slender. She also had a daughter with her, a teenage girl— like Blondie and I, killing time on an afternoon by soaking in the hot water. She was Lise, her daughter Anna: they were in Baden-Baden because Anna was to start at a local high-end secretarial school, which demanded that graduates be fluent in German, French and English, and Lise had driven her down to Baden-Baden in her husband’s BMW sedan.
“It is a luxurious car, “Lise admitted, “But my husband— he had to travel so much, to meet people for business…he needed to be comfortable, traveling so much… we should be speaking English now, so Anna can practice… your husband, is he in ze Air Force, alzo?”
Across the hot pool, Anna and Blondie were discovering a mutual enthusiasm for “Asterix and Obelix”. Anna was the right age to be adored by a small child, and to find the unquestioning adoration of a small child to be completely endearing.
“Asterix.. , Obelix… Dogmatix… Vitalstatistix…Getafix…Fullyautomatix…Cackaofinix… Unhygenix…Geriatrix…”
“Not any more, “I said, “We split up before she was born.”
“I am sorry, “And her eyes rather filled. “So hard for you. My husband died six months ago… he used to come to here on business…”
“I am sorry,” I said. Six months and a widow… five years and a bit, and something else. As hard to endure? Never mind. Grief is the price we pay for having love.

“We are going to the Brenner’s’ Park Hotel for tea, after here, “I said. It was pronounced around there as one long word: “Brennersparkhotel”, rather like Fort Worth in Texas is pronounced by the old hands as all one word: “Fortworth”.
“Truly? How wonderful… I have never been, of course I have heard of it. My husband went there many times, to meet with clients, you understand.”
”Then, why don’t come with us?” I suggested. Lise sparkled with interest, and agreed that yes, it would be a perfect culmination to the afternoon. We would go get dressed and meet in the foyer, and walk over to Brenner’s’ together, and have a lovely leisurely teatime.

(Blondie: I didn’t think anything about her wearing a black dress. In Greece, it was just what older ladies did, wear black all the time.)

The black made her look haggard, I thought. I wondered if it were still the tradition to go to half-mourning after a year, to white and grey and lavender. At any rate, she was a bit more in tune with the ambiance than I was, in denim skirt, and blouse and a preppy LL Bean sweater, but the staff at Brenner’s’ was too well-schooled to appear to take any notice of what guests and customers chose to present themselves in. We were shown to the grand lobby where tea was being served, adjacent to the formal dining room. That end of the lobby was furnished with a grand collection of chairs, sofas, and low tables, set about with urns of plants and flowers; a place to sit and have tea, or wait for someone, or just sit about with a newspaper and people-watch.

“Oh, look, how grand!” whispered Lise, as a very elegant lady in a long formal swept by on the arm of a gentleman in black tie evening dress. “It’s just like “Hotel”… a television show, have you ever seen it?”
“No, “I said. We had watched very little TV in Greece. We were brought a tray with the tea things, and little plates of cake and sandwiches, and service for four in delicate china, and we sipped and nibbled and vastly enjoyed the elegant procession of other guests going in to early dinner in the main dining room, all formally dressed with serious jewelry. One of the black-tie clad gentlemen was circulating throughout the lobby, bowing elegantly over a hand here, nodding grandly to another gentleman there. Lise’s cup of enjoyment quite overflowed when he came up to us and introduced himself as the manager of Brenner’s’; was everything completely to our satisfaction?
“It’s perfect, “replied Lise, and when he had continued on his grand and hospitable rounds, she set down her teacup with a little clink into the saucer and said, “I am so glad we have come with you, so glad we met you at the baths. This was the very first time since my husband died…. That I have gone and done something fun!”

I mumbled something modest and conventional about enjoying it all also, but never said what I was really thinking about grief and loss, as I looked at Anna and Blondie giggling over their mutual fondness for comic books. Blondie’s father still walked in the sunshine of this world, alive and well, but the love to which we should have been entitled, inexplicably, mysteriously withdrawn, if indeed if I had ever had it to begin with. Anna’s father may have been six months gone… but at least he had left, still loving her mother.
And grief is the price we pay for having loved, no matter how long or short the duration of that love.

To my darling daughter, Cpl. Blondie— it’s been 26 years of the most amazing, eventful, bumpy but satisfying journey! (and neither of us has ever been arrested, either!)

The very first picture I took myself of my daughter!
Happy Birthday, Sweetie!!

Mom’s favorite Christmas cookie recipe came originally from one of those post-war commercial give-away cookbooks which have provided James Lileks with so much materiel for “The Gallery of Regrettable Food” when they attempted to shroud whatever foodstuff they manufactured in as many culinary guises as possible. This particular collection was from Pillsbury, however, and was first worn to tatters (besides being liberally splashed with vanilla, smears of butter and sprinkled with flour, sugar and other substances), then lost for a time— it turned out that my sister had it— and finally lost permanently in the fire last year. But before that happened, Mom had submitted the recipe for the Valley Center Art Association Cookbook; the original book is gone, but the recipe lives on.

Sift together: 2 ½ c. flour
1 tsp soda
1 tsp cream of tartar
¼ tsp salt

Cream together with electric mixer:
1 c butter
1 ½ c. powdered sugar

Add: 1 unbeaten egg
1 Tbsp vanilla

When well-blended, add the dry ingredients. This makes the basic cookie dough, which must be chilled before forming, and baked on an ungreased cookie sheet or parchment paper at 400 deg. The greatest thing about these cookies is the number of variations that can be done with the basic recipe; they can be simply rolled out and cut with shaped cutters… or you can do any of the following:

Snowballs: Stir in 1 ½ c. finely chopped walnuts, chill and then shape into small walnut-sized balls. Bake at 400 deg. For 8-10 minutes, and roll warm cookies in powdered sugar.

Cinnamon Balls: Shape plain chilled dough into walnut-sized balls, and roll in ¼ c. sugar mixed with 2 tsp, cinnamon. Bake at 400 deg. For 5-8 minutes

Chocolate Rolled Cookies: add 2 ounces of unsweetened melted chocolate to basic dough. Chill, roll out and cut into shapes. Spread half of the cookies with a frosting of your choice (Mom always favored peppermint-flavored icing) , and top with remaining cookies to make a sandwich cookie.

Fruit/Nut Balls: Add 1 Tbsp. grated orange peel, 2 Tbsp orange juice, ½ c. mixed candied fruit, and 1 c. chopped nuts. Chill, shape into walnut-sized balls and bake at 400 deg. 5-8 minutes.

Jelly or Chocolate Balls: Form chilled dough into walnut sized balls, and using the end of a wooden spoon push a hole into the top of each one. Fill the indentation with jelly (apricot, currant or raspberry) or melted semi-sweet chocolate. Bake 4-5 minutes.

It really takes a gift to find yourself on a soggy-wet mountainside in on a Sunday afternoon in December, with a fine drizzle coagulating out of the fog in the higher altitudes, slipping and sliding on a muddy deer track with a tree saw in one hand, and leading a sniffling and wet (inside and out) toddler with the other.
Yep, it’s a gift all right, born of spontaneous optimism and an assumption based on the map on the back page of the Sacra-Tomato bloody-f#$*%^g Bee newspaper, and a promise to Mom. Said map made the %$#*ing Christmas tree farm look like it was a couple of blocks, a mere hop-skip-and-jump from the back gate of Mather AFB’s housing area, an easy jaunt on a pleasant Sunday afternoon, a lovely and traditional Christmas pastime, choosing your own tree from the place they were growing in!

I was taking leave the next day, and driving home to Hilltop House from Sacramento, and my job in the Public Affairs office. It would only be the second Christmas I had spent at home with Mom and Dad since going on active duty (and it would be the last one for ten years). And Mom had made a confession;
“I haven’t gotten the tree yet. The ones at the lot look horrible, all but dead.”
“I’ll buy one here and bring it down, “I said, spontaneously. “There was a bit in the paper this morning about a local Christmas tree farm. I can tie it to the roof rack.” My car of the moment was a VW station wagon with an immaculate interior and a very useful roof rack. If it didn’t fit into the back, like the unfinished chest or drawers I had bought for my daughters’ room, it went up on top, lashed about with bungee cords and rope. I had brought home a lot of stuff that way.
“Perfect, “said Mom. “Stick the trunk end in a bucket of water overnight, so it won’t dry out on the way down.”

We set out bravely enough, early in the afternoon, my daughter strapped into her car seat, and the map from the newspaper open on the passenger seat, where I could refer to it, easily. Past the housing area BX shopette and gas station, out the gate, a couple of turns, and there we were, tooling along a pleasant country road in the mild winter sunshine. On the map it looked as if I would stay on this road for a couple of miles, until it intersected with another road, one with a couple of wiggles in it… into hills, perhaps? It looked as if the tree farm were out in the country and fairly easy to find, not hidden in a jumble of other businesses, intersections and traffic. Soon, empty fields and meadows opened up around us… stood to reason a Christmas Tree farm would be out in the country. Maybe the next mile or two would bring me to the turn-off, the road with a couple of wiggles in it…

Fifteen minutes… twenty minutes… half an hour, still no intersection. Forty-five minutes, and it was very clear that the map was deceptive about the distances. I had gassed up in anticipation of the long drive the next day, so that was not a problem, but if I had not already told Mom I would come home bearing a fresh-cut Christmas tree, I would have turned around and gone back. An hour went by, and the road began to climb. Good heavens, we were nearly to the gentle dun-colored foothills, where the clouds had begun to pile up against distant jagged blue mountains of the Sierra Nevada. At last— an intersection ahead! I slowed down to verify against the map. Yes, the right one. Pretty soon, it began to climb, looping farther and higher into the hills, up into the cloud layer. I ran the wipers to clear away condensation, hoping that the distance along this new road was not as deceptively mapped. I had definitely not counted on two hours there and back. This had better be worth it.

There was a sign, at least… a sign, a gap in the undergrowth, a dirt road leading up into the trees, but the condensation had become a drizzle by the time I pulled into a parking lot, which was merely a couple of cars haphazardly stopped in a roughly mown field around a plain red-painted shed with a deep overhanging roof. The door was open, there were people there, but not as many as there were cars.
“Here, “said a teenaged girl at the cashbox. She handed me a tree saw, and a mimeographed sheet with sketches of the various types of trees with attention to their needles, and a list of prices— so many dollars per foot of tree. “Just cut down the one you want, bring it back here and we’ll figure the price.”
I took the saw, and stuffed the sheet in my shoulder bag, and looked around.
“Where are the trees?”
She pointed out the door, where the dirt road continued up to the top of the hill.
“Up there. They’re all over. Just find one you like.”

My daughter began to lag, halfway up the hill. I looped the tree saw over my arm, and picked her up. The ground was very wet, either sloppy mud, or slippery grass. We had at least come away from the house with coats, but my light-weight tennis shoes were soon saturated. Coming down the slope on the far side, I skidded and sat down rather heavily. Great, now I was wet and muddy to the waist, as well as my daughter. The trees were scattered, not in neat, easily accessed rows, among taller trees and long thickets of grass. It began to rain. I had to put my daughter down and let her walk, but she was not happy about that, and began to sob, quietly.

We would have to find a tree, soon… and close enough that I could drag it… and the saw… and my poor daughter back to the shed. The most convenient trees were either too large, or the more expensive varieties.
There… there was a tree, with the long graceful bunches of needles. It sat on a slope, but it was just a little taller than me. I sat my daughter down, and put my purse in her lap—
“Here, watch this, for Mummy,” and picked a place on the tree’s trunk, about four inches above the clay and clinging soil, put the saw to it and went to work. Mercifully, it only took a few vigorously-expended minutes. I slung my purse and the saw over my arms, picked up the tree and my daughter, and began the long, unhappy, sodden forced-march up over the top of the hill and down towards the sales hut. Some Christmas excursion— wet, pissed-off, on a soggy mountainside with a lopsided Christmas tree, a wet and wailing toddler, and a hour-plus drive, and a longer one in the morning… oh, Christmas tree!

I did soak the trunk of it in a bucket of water, before lashing it to the luggage rack for the drive south the next morning, though that may not have made much difference.
“It’s so fresh!” Mom said, rapturously. “It smells marvelous! Never mind about the flat place, we’ll put that against the wall, and no one will ever know… really, I wonder how long it’s been since the ones in the lot have been cut! I really wonder about that, now.”
“You probably don’t really want to know, “I said. “Merry Christmas… and you owe me $10.”
“Is that all?” Mom said.
“Oh, yeah, “I replied. “That’s all. Merry Christmas.”

As predicted last month, Mom and Dad’s new house will not be finished in time for Christmas. Although they may have all the roof complete and tiled, in between the holidays, all the inside work— the interior partitions, with the drywall to be installed and mudded, and all the tilework, not to mention the kitchen and bathroom cabinets and painting the whole place— will take another three or four months.

Mom has already picked out the paint chips for the inside; a very deep creamy-yellow. I saw it in a page in a catalogue and thought how perfect it will be in the house, once finished. In the late afternoon, when the sunshine comes through the solarium, the inside of the house will glow like a Japanese paper lantern. They already have collected a large storage unit of furniture and linens and things, to fill up the new spaces, replacing as much of the china and knickknacks from odd places like the AmVets thrift store…
“Very nice things there, “Mom said, “If you know what to look for.”
I think that the things from thrift stores and swap meets, and second-hand shops replace more nearly those things left to the fire a year ago October, all those things a little worn with use, dear with familiarity, not particularly valuable in themselves, but comfortably shabby.

I have already sent Mom her Christmas present, which was much appreciated: a large cardboard hatbox, filled with framed photographs. Some time ago, I had re-photographed many of the family photographs, or taken copies of them. (And oh, how I wish now I had taken many more!) Over the last month I bought a mixed lot of frames (at the thrift-store) and proper mats, and scanned and adjusted my collection of photographs— a good many of the originals turn out now to have been left in the house. The frames and mats are all color-coordinated so they can be hung in a group. For now, they are in the storage unit, but Mom appreciated them enormously.

Blondie and I will celebrate Christmas here in Texas; she is able to come home on leave, and we plan to re-do her bedroom with new paint and curtains, and stencil the floor as I have done in the rest of the house. Something about all that house-building and painting, and refurnishing… it’s catching, I think!

Fall, the most gloriously transient, fleeting time of the year is most especially welcomed in South Texas. The brutal summer heat looses its’ death-grip, afternoon sunshine falls like a golden benison, and the nights are cool and breezy. All over the city, is the echo of windows being opened, and the sounds of children’s voices coming from the scratch game of toss or basketball at the end of the cul-de-sac is not masked by the roar of the air conditioning compressor fan.

Here, the leaves shred out gradually from the trees, not in a spectacular rush of color, not like the mountain aspens and sycamores in Ogden, when Blondie and I lived in Utah— a great golden blaze against the grey wall of the Wasatch Front— which lasted only a week or so, and fleetingly carpeted the ground with gold, like a vision of Tir nan Og or the mallorn wood of Lothlorien. Our winter here does not usually include snow either; not for us the vivid spectacle of a certain small maple tree, which grew next to the old base library at Misawa Air Base, and whose leaves in fall turned the color of blood and hang on to the branches for a good while, well after the first winter snows blanketed the ground in pure white. Dark red, long-fingered maple leaves blazed against the white sugar snow, one season into the next without a pause.

This last Sunday was a perfect day, perfect shirtsleeve fall weather; warm in the sunshine, a hit of chill in the shade, perfectly balanced between the two seasons like the sulpher-yellow butterfly balanced on stalk of fuzzy purple Mexican sage blossoms. I walked around my neighborhood at midday… so many people out mowing lawns, the chorus of suburbia must be the sound of a power mower, the scrape of a rake gathering leaves, the snick of clippers. A man out in the street expertly hurls a football to two boys who catch it, fumbling and toss it back to him; on another two boys and two girls are tossing a baseball across the street, from one sidewalk to the other.

At that house, a man is bringing plastic tub of Christmas ornaments out of the garage, and strings of icicle lights are uncoiled on the lawn. Farther down the block, another man pegs a series of giant candy canes along the edge of the lawn and walkway, linking them together with a string of lights. A stack of decorated wreaths here, another skein of lights being attached to the roof-edge by a woman on a ladder. An older teenage boy brings out a wire-form deer out of the garage— there may be a whole flock of them pastured on this lawn by next morning. One of my other neighbors has a flock of penguins in felt caps, made from tall bleach bottles, who settle on his lawn around an igloo decorated with tinsel every year.

The rituals of suburbia, the rites of the season, on that one perfect day between fall and winter; I ought to be at home, baking a loaf of whole-wheat bread, writing my Christmas letters, packing up the gifts to be mailed to my sisters’ children, to William, and to my parents…. But I linger outside, relishing this one perfect day, reluctant to go inside, not while the sky is a pure, clear blue arch over head, and the air is mild, and butterflies dance around the spires of sage.

When in the name of all that’s unholy, did Halloween turn into an extravaganza of coffins and mock gravestones set up in suburban lawns, and formations of witches plastered onto tree trunks and garage doors, great glowing hanging jack o lanterns, and ghosts and witches and skeletons and huge ass spiders (shudder!) and monstrous webs, and life-sized skeletons? When did decorating the house for the benefit of small children in dime-store costumes or something cobbled together from a stack of torn sheets and some Rit dye, panhandling door to door for packets of candy corn and little pastel rolls of sweettarts become almost as much a collective pain as Christmas? It probably happened about the same time that the pattern catalogue for costumes (costumes for all ages, yet!!!) at the yardage store became as thick as the Simplicity seasonal catalogue and stayed on the pattern table year around. I just know that Martha Stewart had something to do with it, the overachieving beotch, and it must have happened while I was out of the country during the 1980ies.

It used to be an innocent, home-made, modest little affair. Mom bought us each a pumpkin, and in the early days Dad helped us carve them with a kitchen knife and scrape out the mooshy tangle of seeds and stringy orange fibers. By the time JP and I were in junior high, we conducted the ritual pumpkin butchery ourselves, and assisted Pippy with marking out a scary face in straight-angled cuts. Fit the pumpkins with candle-ends, saved for this purpose in the drawer with the silverware, set them out on the front porch, and there we were, all set. Of all the neighbors around Hilltop house, only Wayne got ambitious, rigging a ghost of cheesecloth to fly silently down a wire running from the trees by their gate to just above the front door.

We made our own costumes, mostly, although Alan’s mother had made some elaborate ones for his older sisters, which I borrowed a couple of times. Mom’s contribution to our costumes mostly was to turn over the whole thing over to us, along with any sheets which had ripped down the center. With a couple of sheets and whatever we could scrounge around the house in the way of props, we’d have something that would hold up for a couple of hours of tricker-treating, and for the Halloween carnival at school. .
“Mom, can I dye in the bathtub?” I asked.
”Sure, but don’t expect to be buried in it.” She shot back. I was an artist with packets of Rit dye from the grocery store. I couldn’t do it in the washing machine after the first time we tried that— the dye stayed in the pipes for a couple of loads.

I outfitted Pippy that year as Mary Poppins, in a long dress and straw hat, carrying an old tapestry handbag of Moms’ and an umbrella. The handbag did double duty as a bag for treats. The year that I had read the entire Lord of the Rings to Sander, he wanted to dress as a hobbit— again with a tunic and cloak of dyed sheets, and a sword and shield that Dad roughed out of wood, and that I painted with semi-Celtic motifs. Another year, the sheets were worked into a long grey dress, and a white pinafore and headscarf with a red cross in grosgrain ribbon on the front—
“A Grey Lady!” said Great-Aunt Nan in delight, when she saw Pippy dressed up like a WWI nurse, holding Sander’s hand. Sander was a flying ace, in his ordinary school clothes and windbreaker jacket zipped up the front, with a long white silk scarf borrowed from Mom, and a canvas flier’s helmet and pair of goggles from the surplus store. The helmet fit him perfectly, leaving us to wonder when in history, exactly, were they recruiting dwarf aircrew.

Close to sundown, we would light the candles in the pumpkins— it was really, truly only tricker-treating, after it was at least decently dark, with smothered giggles coming from the front porch, and children in twos and threes working up their nerve to ring a strange doorbell. Usually, there was a parent or older sib outside the circle of porch-light, cuing the chorus of “Tricker-treat!” and reminders to say “thank-you” before they romped away, clutching their brown-paper grocery bags of treats.

Home-made, kid-made costumes, simple pumpkins, and brown-paper bags— all very simple in comparison, as shapeless and disorganized as a scratch softball game on an empty lot on a summer morning when school is out. Now that Halloween is all elaborate, and organized, like Little League, with uniforms and coaches and formal rules, it may be more spectacular, but I have a sneaking suspicion it may have been more pure fun for the kids then.