Month: May 2020

I owe about 90% of my front garden to my friend, Natasha, across the street. She has given me all sorts of plants over the years as she has tended to her own beautiful garden. She has told me the names of these plants so many times that I’m too embarrassed to ask again. Being home all the time now and paying closer attention to my garden, I have a strong urge to know all their names, and I’m beginning to notice the same plants around my neighborhood. Well, I now have the app PlantSnap. I simply take a picture of the plant, and within seconds, I have the common and scientific names. Now I can say things like, “That mayapple you gave me nearly a decade ago is really thriving!” or “I’ve been noticing so many people have spiderwort in the neighborhood -such an off putting name for such a lovely plant.”

The four of us took a walk up the hill with Sasha last night to deliver birthday treats to a good friend: Edwin’s homemade challah bread, my new favorite chocolate chip cookies made with oat flour and coconut oil, and a few false forget-me-knots, or Siberian bugloss (identity confirmed on PlantSnap) that have spread all over my garden that the birthday girl had admired last time she visited.

Usually, Sasha is the hold-up, insisting on sniffing every bush, street light, and fire hydrant. Not so this time. I stopped numerous times every block to snap a picture and check the identity of everything that caught my eye. I started quizzing everyone, too, and would declare with glee, “Nope! It’s a flame azalea!” and “Ha ha! It’s a SOUTHERN magnolia, not just a magnolia.” Why was my family putting distance between them and me? By the last few blocks, it was just Sasha and me, and we kept the perfect pace for one another.

When I was a student at White Oaks Elementary, our entire fourth grade went on an overnight field trip to Prince William Forest Park in Triangle, Virgina. In preparation, we spent an afternoon selecting the courses and activities we would participate in. Pond Life was very popular and a required course. We toted our mason jars down to the pond, dunked them in the water, and used magnifying glasses to peer at the murky water. I also took Coat Hanger Kingdom, in which we placed a coat hanger on our chosen spot of earth and examined everything within the triangle. If you were lucky, you’d find a spider or rolly-polly, in addition to grass and dirt. We also had a choice of soccer or kick ball before dinner, and then everyone would take part in square dancing in the evening.

We were given a detailed list of required and optional items, all of which needed to fit in a large trash bag labeled with our name, which would be tossed into the back of the school bus on the morning of the trip. I remember the optional items I brought: a camera with two 24-exposure rolls of film and a compass. We were directed to write our names on coffee can lids with permanent black marker, which we would hang on a string around our necks for the duration of the trip.

It’s interesting what has stuck in my mind about the trip: how hot and sunny the kickball game was, even though it was nearly evening; the daddy longlegs I adopted and kept in a jar until he escaped while I was at Pond Life and Coat Hanger Kingdom; the awkward square dancing, where I was partnered with Brian H. with sweaty palms; and the sound of the screen door perpetually banging shut on our cabin.

Years later, I would plan a similar trip for our fifth graders during my second year of teaching in Falls Church. The two trips had differences, for sure (besides being 20 years apart): this one was to Hemlock Overlook and focused on team building activities – no Pond Life or CHK; instead of square dancing, we had a bonfire and smores. Some things were the same, though: I had the kids pack their belongings in a big trash bag (so easy to smoosh into the back of a bus), the cabins rang out with the same banging of screen doors, and the smell of insect repellant hovered in the air as sweaty children ran through the forest.

These kittens. Man, I love these kittens. They have won us all over with their little mews, tiny paws, insatiable curiosity, and lack of scruples. Even Sasha dog is desperate to play with them, but she’s a little much for them; however, they are very intrigued by her tail. I’m not sure they realize it’s connected to her. They’ll start batting at it, and when she turns around, taking it as an invitation to play, they bail on her. There is definitely no shortage of love going on here, though at times a little one-sided.

My childhood ran on wheels. My first set of wheels was a red tricycle with red and white tassels on the handlebars. The street out front was a dead-end, with three rows of townhouses facing it in the shape of a C. A long median with grass and juniper bushes at the ends ran down the center of the street (“the island”), thereby making the street one big lap.

Once I ditched the tricycle for the Big Wheel, I took the party off the sidewalk and onto the street. With a Big Wheel, you must master the skid. You work up to top speed and then slam on the brakes for the perfect sideways skid. I think that’s my earliest memory of what it was like to feel cool: the Big Wheel skid.

I’m not sure why I would have ever given up the Big Wheel, but I suspect it had something to do with a certain blue Schwinn with a white banana seat. Once my older sister graduated to a 5-speed (5 speeds!), it was time for me to learn to ride the Schwinn. The method in my family was for my dad to hang onto the back of the bike seat and keep us steady as we pedaled around the island a gazillion times. I remember rounding the end of the island and seeing my dad standing off to the side. I was on my own. I could ride a bike!

Other wheels figured prominently in my childhood, especially roller skates. When they repaved the street on our block, the kids all hit the asphalt the minute we got the green light. It was like butter; I skated for hours, not a bump under my blue wheels. We raced, glided, and rolled around the island until the streetlights came on, the crickets began chirping, and our parents called us in. The wheels came to a stop and rested up for another day around the island.

There’s a change in the air. After nine weeks of social distancing, the boundaries we’ve drawn so clearly around ourselves are starting to blur as we consider how to creep forward.

Friends invited us over for lunch last Sunday. We sat at a responsible distance from one another on their deck, while the kids sat in the backyard, also maintaining proper distance. It felt so good to share a meal again and catch up without the aid of a screen, but it’s also a bit draining having to take precautions that would have seemed completely paranoid only a few months ago.

Last night I had two friends over to my deck, where we shared some of Chris’s latest homebrewed IPA. It turned into a four-hour hang-out. At some point, it started raining, so we decided to relocate to the sheltered front porch. I invited them to walk through and even use the bathroom, but I was keenly aware of my effort to stifle a sense of alarm. I didn’t realize the effect it had on me until this morning when I recounted my dreams to Chris. I dreamt that I kept forgetting about keeping my distance from people, and I would find myself without a mask in crowded offices and in the middle of city blocks thick with people.

Today was the first time we got together with my parents, apart from a short sidewalk visit in April. They shared dinner with us on our deck on this sunny, breezy evening. They are nearing 80 and have been keeping almost entirely to their home, so my concern was keeping them safe from us, not the other way around. They were pretty relaxed, though, and we managed to keep a safe distance between us until they were ready to leave. Edwin gave my mom, his Nana, a big hug, and he and I both immediately sucked in a sharp breath. My mom, however, just shrugged and said with a smile, “He’s my sweet boy.”

It’s surprising to me that after nearly five decades of living without social distancing or wearing a mask or thinking twice about the safety of having family and friends in my home, I have become accustomed to the norms we have established since March 14th. I imagine it will be a while before we can get back to that place we were before, and I also wonder what will be forever altered. I do know, however, that I cannot stay cooped up and distanced forever. I will move forward with care.

First, a little family context: a household line in my own home, which I carried from the home of my childhood is “Something is not right.” This comes from the Madeline books with the plucky Parisian orphan. Miss Clavel had a talent for sensing trouble and would declare, “Something is not right!” which we adopted, employing a French accent as best we could (“somezeeng eez not right!”).

The TV in my childhood home, the only TV for many years, was in the basement, so, naturally, my sisters and I logged many hours down there. On my way down, I liked to jump many stairs in a single bound. I’d jump down the last few, then walk past the last jumping point by a few stairs, jump again, then add another and jump again, and so on. This one time, I landed at the bottom and recoiled in pain from what felt like a bee sting.

I called out in pain, and my dad came to check on me. Can you bend your ankle? Okay, wiggle your toes. Now, stand up and put some weight on your foot. I could put weight on most of my foot, but something felt off. We could make out a tiny red dot on my heel, but no bee or any other bug was in sight. My mother and I looked at each other: “Somezeeng eez not right.”

After much hemming and hawing, my dad decided to take me to the hospital. I recounted my stair adventure to the good doctor, and he gently pushed on my heel. He decided to take an X-ray, and do you know what? There was a sewing needle IN MY FOOT. My foot just happened to land in such a way that the needle hiding in the carpet entered my foot eye-first, missed the nerves, and disappeared from view.

I was to go home, drink and eat nothing, and report back for minor surgery in the morning. I couldn’t wait to tell my mom and sisters that I had a needle IN MY FOOT. How cool was that?

I can still taste the sickly sweet ether they used to put me under. What seemed like a minute or two after the doctor’s and nurse’s voices became muffled and disappeared, I woke up without a needle in my foot, but desperately thirsty. The friendly nurse offered me soda on ice, and I chugged the whole thing and promptly threw up on her.

I wished I had gotten to save the X-ray of the needle cozily tucked into my heel as a testament to my hunch that turned out to be correct: somezeeng was not right.

Our townhouse in Burke had a floorplan with a sub-basement. You descended a flight of steps to the basement, turned a corner, and walked down three more steps to the sub-basement. Since 1995 or so, this room has been a quaint little library with a wooden floor, a bar, and a small furniture set.

The sub-basement of my childhood was quite a different room. A set of metal shelves ran along one wall, holding various tools and boxes of nails. Saw horses stood off to one side, and our bikes were usually parked in the center. The floor was cement, and cobwebs hung from every corner. A giant green plastic pool, “Mr. Turtle,” was propped against the far wall when it wasn’t holding court in the center of the common area behind our row of townhouses in the summertime.

This room, though creepy, dark, and dusty, was the site of the best adventures in the house. It had unmatched hiding spots. We would play hide-and-seek inside when we needed a break from the heat of summer, and if you could slip away to the sub-basement without being noticed, your chance of victory was virtually guaranteed. The piano bench at the top of the basement stairs was home base, so if you could lure unsuspecting kids to the pitch-black basement, you could wait for them to take a wrong turn and then bolt up the stairs, burst through the door into the blinding sun, and tag the piano bench. Safe and sound.

The sub-basement was also the site of water adventures. Whenever we got a hard rain, the sub-basement would flood, sometimes as much as eight inches. It was almost like a snow day. We would run down to the basement to check the water level, and if we were lucky enough to get more than a few inches, we’d run back up to put on our rain boots, and then scurry back downstairs to wade through the water. My parents had quite a different perspective: my dad would grumble and move things to dry ground, and my mom would fuss about how dirty the water must be. It would be years until they hired someone to correct the problem, so we had many good times in the watery sub-basement.

I am a baby Bruin at heart, even though I was officially one for only a single year. I went to Burke Elementary for first grade, the center of our then-small town. I only spent one year there because the boundaries kept shifting as they built a new elementary school. We were the baby Bruins because we were all destined for Lake Braddock Secondary in seventh grade, where we would be full Bruins for the following six years. We had field days and weekend fairs complete with a dunking booth, cotton candy, and a book fair. Our hallways were lined with black and white linoleum patterned with sunlight streaming through the windows, down which teachers’ heels smartly clicked. Our classrooms were safe havens with solid wooden doors and cloakrooms that smelled like lunch boxes and raincoats.

Mrs. Singleton was our principal, a perpetually smiling silver-headed lady who drove a pea-green VW bus. She would cruise around town, picking up potential truants and those who missed the bus.

I was devastated when they moved us to a trailer at a different school for second grade, a holding pen for when our new school was ready. My sister, being a sixth grader, got to stay at Burke School to finish out her elementary years. At the beginning of third grade, they moved us to a trailer yet again on the grounds of our new school. As soon as our wing was done, we moved into our new classroom. This place had freshly painted walls, semi-open classrooms (no doors), brand new carpet, a pit for storytime in the middle of the “pod,” which was a hub for all the classrooms in that area, and a wet area for art classes. I guess it was state-of-the-art for those days, but I never really got over having to leave Burke School and its wooden doors, cloakrooms, and echoing linoleum.

Being the middle sister, I was always the one to share a room. Lara was four years older, and when I was three and a half, Alana was born. We lived in a three-bedroom townhouse, so when baby #3 came along, Lara and I moved in together. My parents got us twin beds, each adorned with matching bedspreads my mom had sewn. Little red and pink flowers ran across them, and an off-white ruffle adorned the edges. It just now occurred to me that she must have sewn these while pregnant and chasing after a three-year-old and tending to a seven-year-old.

We had three new pieces of white furniture: a dresser (Lara claimed the three drawers on the left, so I got the three drawers on the right); a white vanity with a mirror that opened up out of the center; and a tall corner piece with a wide drawer, a small bookshelf, and… wait for it…a secret compartment on each side. I don’t know how we came to call them secret compartments because there was nothing secret about them. They were simply matching sliding panels on either side of the center bookshelf, right there in plain sight. I guess we called them that because we forbade each other to look inside one other’s. What in the world did I keep in there? Pixie sticks? Rocks from the creek? Birds nests?

Lara and I shared that room until the summer before she entered eighth grade, when my parents granted her her own room. She got her very own grown-up furniture; instead of a white vanity and secret compartments, she now had an elegant set of oak. I moved into the bed farther from the door, where I could better stake out a lair, moved my clothes from the right drawers to the left, and made way for Alana.

Throughout my childhood. the Easter Bunny managed to step in paint, not once, not twice, but every single year until I was in middle school (or thereabouts – I can’t remember when he finally thought to look out for that perpetually spilled can of paint). Perhaps the biggest excitement Easter morning was not the baskets filled with chocolate bunnies and jelly beans, but the footprints the bunny would leave out back.

We’d run to the back door, which looked out onto a small wooden back porch and a few stone pavers that led to the back gate, and sure enough: he did it again! That bunny stepped in white paint and tracked it right across the pavers and the back porch, up to the sliding glass door. Miraculously, the paint always came off right before he stepped into our house. He managed to leave our baskets full and dyed eggs hidden around the living and dining rooms without getting even a toe print on the floor.