The less savory side of home

Yesterday, we had a family reunion of sorts at a local water park. Cousins, aunts, uncles, friends who basically are family...Three of our group had diligently made about 350 water balloons, we had huge watermelons on ice, beer and kooshies, large thermoses of ice water, and many bottles of sunscreen to help combat the blazing 100 degree heat and sunshine still beating down at 4:00pm. Many families had a similar idea, and when we arrived, a dozen little kids in bathing suits were scurrying happily about in the fountains and under the buckets that dump gushers of water at random on hopefuls waiting below. The water guns were manned, and those not lucky enough to commandeer one tried to stay just beyond the range of reach. Mom managed to claim the last empty gazebo but just after she did so, another foursome moved in. Mom kindly said, "we have fourteen people coming so really need this space," to which she received little more than an angry look and animalistic grunt. I tried to ease the situation by suggesting we split the table (tiny though it was) and received a similarly rude response. Ok. We set down our coolers and our bucket of water balloons; immediately, one of the little girls (not part of our group) started taking and breaking them. Mom, again kindly, said, "sweetie, we spent a long time making those and all our cousins are coming to play." The response from this girl's mom: "I am just trying to hold my temper."

Really? There just isn't any excuse for that kind of entitled BS. It's ugly and gross, and in those moments, it is easy to see how divisions among people can start, can take shape; how negative impressions and mutual suspicion can harden or become more entrenched. We quietly moved our party to the grassy space under a shady willow, and I then watched as that same little girl (no more than 5), got down on her hands and feet and started bouncing her butt up and down in the air in a sadly sexual way. Hip rolls, hip thrusts, sassy talk followed; she was definitely used to having an appreciative audience for this show, and I found it so utterly depressing.

Our society is so hyper-sexualized today; I often feel lucky to have sons as I think in some way I'll have a reprieve from the emphasis on bodies that is all around. I look at what young girls wear these days, and I am often appalled. Last week, in my DC neighborhood, I saw a young teen walking with her mom. The girl's shorts were basically just a pair of underpants; you.could.see.everything. Maybe I'm just getting old (I know I wanted to wear short shorts when I was young), maybe I'm just super maternal now that I have children, but I know that I would not let my daughter out of the house wearing shorts with a hem above her crotch. And I certainly would not teach, encourage or let my daughter act like that little girl in the park in Lake Charles was.

~~~~ Regarding a completely different form of unsavoriness: we saw a cockroach this morning that made me scream bloody murder. Jack ended up on the dining room table in tears (he is so my child; sorry, Jack), Oliver was calling for Poppy, and I threw my cup across the room at the roach as if it would capture and do away with him magically. See, at first I thought -because I haven't seen a Louisiana cockroach in a really long time- that this elephantine bug was some kind of beetle. He was so sturdy, and his reddish-brown shell threw me off. He was just tromping across the kitchen floor like a misguided sergeant, so I planned to catch and relocate him to the great outdoors.

As I approached him with my cup, however, the truth of the situation hit me like a ton of bricks: this was no beetle; this was a LOUISIANA COCKROACH. Y'all, these suckers are serious. They are huge. They are ugly. They can fly. When you smush them, pus and guts ooze out forever. LA cockroaches are nothing to trifle with. They won't hurt you, physically. But they continue to startle and scare the shit out of me (and apparently my city'fied children too) with the same force as when I was little. That's when I threw my cup, sent Ol to find Poppy, hid in a corner of the kitchen and hoped for the best. The roach made tracks and hid under the bar.

It was a stand-off.

Dad came down, laughing his head off at our pitiful inability to deal with this roach's presence. At one point I spied the roach peeking out from under the northwest leg of the bar; I yelled for Dad who came barreling towards it armed with nothing more than a kleenex. A lame, thin tissue. I'll be damned if I ever approach a roach with a kleenex.

I ran outside and hid on the porch. Jack cowered upstairs. Oliver ran around with a chopstick wand. Dad smushed the roach with the single tissue and showed us the guts for proof of its demise. I about hurled but was relieved; Oliver cheered and ran to find Jack. "Jack, Jack, Poppy smushed the cockroach with his HANDS." Poppy is now a legend. I'm looking around with eagle eyes, just in case.

Home

I was born in Augusta, GA, just a couple months before my dad completed med school. He and my mom (she had a hell of a tough time moving from New Orleans to "Disgusta"), lived in the servants quarters of a beautiful, old mansion; the kind your mind conjures if you hear someone utter "old-school, monied Georgia home." They loved living in that home, loved and came to know the family who built the beauty, and in fact started musing about their very own dreamhouse while there as the family's younger son was an accomplished architect. I've always enjoyed thinking about their hopes and dreams as a newlywed couple. They had no money but they still, together, envisioned the sort of place they hoped they might someday be able to build. When I wasn't even six months old, we moved to Mobile, a city just as southern as was Augusta. Dad was to start his residency there, and Mom and Dad found a tiny house in Springhill, a lovely neighborhood near the university. My sister, Elia, was born in Mobile, and though my memories are vague - the sort I don't totally trust because they could just as easily be others' stories told to me repeatedly over the years as they could my very own recollections- I have some sense of life there. I had a good friend named Kimby, Mom and I did lots of puzzles, Hurricane Frederic wasted Mobile, I have a faint scar on my right ankle that I swear came from a jagged piece of aluminum on a fence in our yard, I went to a Montessori school and my teacher was Ms. Fink.

A few years later, it was on to -and for my mom, back to- Lake Charles, a medium-sized town in Southwest Louisiana where she'd been born and raised. Mom never planned to return to Lake Charles, but Dad was busy with a full practice, and she had the two of us little ones; the thought of having her parents nearby was compelling to say the least. I can certainly understand.

And so Lake Charles became our home and is to this day, the place Mom, Elia and I call our hometown: grade school, high school, first jobs, first boyfriends; we were all married here; this is where we return when we're "going home."

During their first years back here, Mom and Dad brought their dreamhouse ideas to fruition in blueprint form. Al, the architect from Augusta, drew up the plans, and slowly, as they could afford to, they made their way to the reality. First they bought a plot of land on Contraband Bayou. Do y'all know what a bayou is? For those who don't, it's a small waterway that often branches off from a larger body, like a lake or river. It's more substantial than a creek or stream but definitely not on par with a real river. I like the way Wikipedia describes bayou, so if you're so inclined, you can read more via this link. Bayous run throughout the Gulf Coast region and in my opinion, they plus marshes are what makes Louisiana coast-land so hauntingly beautiful and unique.

If you head East on I-10 from Lake Charles to New Orleans, you'll drive over the Atchafalaya Swamp Freeway which is, perhaps, my favorite thing in Louisiana. Basically, the freeway is a many-mile (15? 20?) bridge that seems to hover just above the swamp. Cypress stumps and knees spot the water like it's got a serious case of measles, egrets swoop down for a quick meal of fish, sometimes tiny boats of fisherman have set up camp, rods at the ready. And still you drive, mile after mile. If you're lucky, you'll do this in the evening with a full moon hanging heavy in the sky, as if it's stuffed with catfish and bread pudding, happy and full.

For years, we tended our plot on the bayou, and one day Mom and Dad were able to put in a boat slip and wharf. We lived just one street over and would come visit our bare land with the beautiful, sturdy wharf keeping bayou wakes at bay. My parents nailed each board to the foundation themselves.

When we came to ski, Mom would beam with pride over the speedboat she'd always wanted, and we, our familial team, would pack it up: skis, vests, water, sunscreen, gas money, sunglasses, an oar just in case. She and Dad would take us to the Lake or to English Bayou, a glassy-smooth waterway that was often the cat's meow for good skiing.

Mom would slalom with the purest joy, then Dad would don his single ski and jump the wake back and forth like a fish. One day he came so close to the wooden barriers surrounding a support column of a bridge that we all gasped in terror. Mom had made these hilarious, laminated signs that she stored under the boat seat cushions: one said, "Alligator in your wake;" another something like "Check your nose- boogar." I can't remember but even though we always knew they'd emerge, we still laughed. And laughed hard.

Elia was so tiny when she was young that we had to tie her skis together because they weighed as much as she did and her little legs couldn't hold them in parallel until she was up. She was a champ though and soon slaloming with the best of them. I was always the nerdy holdout, scared of speed, nervous about whatever. I never could slalom but I had a good time on two skis; I still do.

When I was a junior in high school, Mom and Dad's dream came true. The foundation of the house was laid, and for the next year, we watched it rise, just as it had two-dimensionally on Al's beautiful plans. It was finished just weeks before my senior prom, and Mom and Dad made dinner on the back porches for 16 or so of us here that night. All the women were clad in floor-length white satin gowns, the guys in tuxes. And I sat on that very porch tonight, 19 years later, sipping a glass of wine and looking out over Contraband Bayou for the umpteenth time.

I wish I'd appreciated it all differently, more, when I was younger. That's the crappiest part of youth: what you do and should appreciate are too often worlds apart. Yet something stuck, and much of growing up here is what I draw on now, when I look to my core and seek to find and honor my truest self. I am so happy that my boys are in some ways, growing up here too. That they have both DC and South Louisiana to reference as they mature and shape themselves. They're sound asleep right now, and I'm heading in that direction too. Good night all.

JacKwonDo, jam, hermit crab drama continues

Ol climbed into bed with me at 4am; 45 minutes later, I realized just how god-forsakenly early it was and returned him to his room. It was at that point that I heard the narrator's voice emanating from Jack's room, deep in the bowels of the Harry Potter #4 book-on-tape. I tiptoed to Jack's door -eager to catch him in the act; last week he lost these CDs for this very reason and had just regained their presence in his room last night- and flung it open. There he sat, simultaneously entranced and gaga with fatigue. Displeased, I grabbed the CDs, ordered him back to bed, and then returned to my own. Something of this nature always happens when Tom is gone. Maybe they don't pull this shit on him. Hmm... in any case, I've felt a bit peaked all day. Yet there was packing to be done, jam to be made, Tae Kwon Do to attend and so forth and so on. Oliver drew pics of girls while I made apricot-peach-almond jam this morning.

As if all lady knowledge coalesced in his mind at precisely the point at which he came across a large sheet of paper, he sketched a new tableau of Princess Leia (smudges on the sides of her head to represent her "cinnamon bun" hair), Padmé (a pinhead-sized dot atop her head signifies a pony tail), and Wonder Woman (always with a tiara on her forehead and golden lasso at her hip). I liked the fence of strong women that resulted! He said I couldn't tell anyone about it. Oops.

My inner voice then suggested that I really might want to get a start on packing because we leave at such a horrid time tomorrow morning, so I headed to J's room to gather his things. What did I spy in the hermit crab tank? A single leg/claw, a bit of aftermath from last week's cannibal murder. Apparently in the days just after the crime, despite the fact that T bought several new shells for Max to consider, he (Max) slunk around his home in the buff. At one point T became a combo of irritated and concerned with the crab's naked body and shoved him into a shell. Max wore it briefly before going nudist again. Then what does he do? He climbed right back in the damn, too-small shell he's had since last December. It seems he ate Yoda for no good reason as Y's shell just sits there, an empty and forlorn reminder of a kinship that is no longer.

Max is on his own now, folks. We are not buying him a new friend, and when he goes, that's it for our life with hermit crabs. Good lord.

My mother-in-law came over to help while I packed, god love her, so I got that taken care of, ran a few errands and dropped dinner off at the Grands (Nanny's chicken salad; caprese salad; chocolate chip cookies; bread and jam for tomorrow). They are moving into an assisted living facility in two weeks, and I will really miss seeing them. Fortunately, their new home is no farther from mine than their current one, so I can still take the boys to visit which will be lovely. Oliver makes them each a card every day that I cook for them, and I know they adore him as he does them. It's been such a lovely, special "job."

By 5p I was dragging arse, but Jack has blue belt testing coming up at Tae Kwon Do so we really needed to get a class in before leaving. MIL stayed with Oliver (what would I do without my MIL?!), and Jack and I boogied to his class. I love the studio- the instructors are so great with kids, so dedicated to teaching them this craft, and J has come to love it. He needs some coordination so this is good for him. And, while the teachers are always kind, they do ignore random verbiage which is a fabulous lesson for J. For example, in the middle of class today, I heard Jack ask, "does anyone know when my birthday was? I'll tell you! Ok? It was July 4." WHA? Why would that have possibly seemed like an opportune time to share that fact? It wasn't, and no one responded. Thank you Tae Kuk.

When these little guys, cute little pencils all of them, don their sparring gear, I can never help but laugh. There is so, so much gear, like a dozen pieces, and though it's lightweight, it looks heavy. They all end up looking like bobbleheads in boot camp. Jack had his purple belt stuck in his jock cup at one point. Hilarious.

Home, shower, bed, more jam. I've just made a wonderful new one: black velvet apricot + pluots + Cognac (friend and fellow canner, Bevi, had the idea of adding Cognac!) + a bit of black pepper. Deeelishuss.

I'm off to make some dinner and then hit the sack in anticipation of my 3:45am wake-up call. To Louisiana we go, and next Tuesday, I return without my little ones! They are staying with my parents for their annual Big Boy Week which is always awesome for everyone involved. I'll be back with you tomorrow.