The Burrow

There it is.  I watched it and stood up straighter.  I watched it and felt empowered.  I watched it and realized how far we've come and how far we have to go.   Look at her walk across the set.  Look at her blow that horn.  I sat in her kitchen years ago, applauding with others as a few notes and then a few more emerged.  America really is beautiful; just listen to her and try to disagree. All of Tucson was united for those weeks and months and now, if you ask someone if they were in town when Gabby was shot, they'll tell you why they were on their way to that corner but something came up.  It's our town's  where were you when moment.   Martha McSally is running ads caling Mark Kelly a millionaire who scammed the taxpayers.  I call him a man who loves and admires his wife.  She's well worth the adoration and the respect.  She inspires me, each and every day.

FlapJilly is being promoted. She's leaving the world of The Two's  and crossing the parking lot to The Three's .  Her first friend at school moved over a month or so ago, so she'll have a familiar face in unfamiliar surroundings.  The play equipment is bigger and more challenging and the curriculum is less pre  and more school .  She's ready for the challenge, and her parents couldn't be more proud. And then Little Cuter and I exchanged the glance that said it all: OH, Where has my baby gone?   It's a mixture of joy and yearning and overwhelming heart exploding love.... and it left us both just a little bit teary.  She's such a big girl now.

Little Cuter left us a list of things to do. This tiny museum was nearby, and FlapJilly agreed that it would be lots of fun to visit. It consists of relics of Michiana's past, donated by residents and collectors.  (Michiana is the area on the border of Michigan and Indiana, not, as I always thought, a separate town.) Miss Lexie gave us a introduction to the collection, reminding us that we could touch anything we wanted as long as we put it back where we found it.  We held a mastodon bone and a rabbit skin and petrified wood, but the little miss refused to smile or pose with them. This chair was Goldilocks sized, and she was quite comfortable. Unfortunately, the sign she is holding said "Please do not sit on the chairs." There was a 19th century school room and a Japanese Tea House in honor of Mishawka's sister city and there was this beautiful organ, with embroidered foot pedals.   Antique sewing machines and cooking utensils and a genera...

If this is Fall in Indiana, I'm never leaving. FlapJilly and I took a walk through the piled up leaves on her New House Street.  The smell turned me back into a little kid, flinging myself into the gigantic pile Daddooooo created under the pin oak tree.  He collected them in the basket of the sweeper, dumping load after load in an ever growing pile, crowds of neighborhood kids waiting patiently until he swept them all up. SIR is going to have to do some serious raking, if the leaves on these trees in his backyard ever decide to leave their branches. This must be a very warm corner; all the other trees in the area are deep red and yellow.  Only FlapJilly's trees are still mostly green. We didn't need jackets as we wandered through the  Potowatomie Zoo this morning.  I didn't worry about FlapJilly freezing in her I-dripped-lemonade-all-down-myself outfit.  She was dry by the time we got to the playground, after we fed the goats. I warne...

photo courtesy of  JPetersenPhotography There is so much love. So much. 

This is most wonderful garden center I've ever visited There was a choo-choo train, with a very punny narration of the grounds.   There was panning for gold. There were funny little houses. There were ostriches  (who knew their eyes were blue?) and there were fish. There were goats and pheasants and there were lots of ugly pumpkins. which reminded me of pumpkin patch visits in Petaluma. There were topiaries some of which reminded us of home. and alien spaceships and skeletons. There were lots and lots of plants, too, but we were having too much fun to shop. Little Cuter and I will, no doubt go back to shop. But, for today, this was quite enough.

and I'm not there to help. I packed no boxes.  I taped nothing closed.  I held no fragile objects as bubble wrap surrounded them. I did nothing.  Absolutely nothing.  I made sure that the plastic container with the clothes I leave at their house held everything I'd left behind, but I didn't do anything more than push it back into the closet when I was done. Okay, I'll give myself some credit - I took our toiletries out of the bathroom and placed them in the sealed plastic container, leaving one less set of drawers for them to empty.  It doesn't seem like much, does it? SIR is a master packer, and my efforts would, no doubt, have required supervision and a great deal of angst on his part.  He's much neater than I am; last year's Christmas presents sat in their beautiful white Crate and Barrel shipping box so that he could admire the precision with which I had placed the gifts.  He was amazed... wondered that I, the Queen of Disarray, could have ...

Twenty-two years ago,  the blonde bride  refused to get out of the car. It was the first soccer practice of the year, two weeks before school started.  She was new to town and knew no one.  And so, there stood her mother, totally perplexed. If the kid didn't want to play, she didn't want to play.  That was fine.  She didn't have to participate if she didn't want to participate. The team had yet to meet; she hadn't made a commitment. She'd be disappointing no one.   Her mom could drive her home and that would be that. Except, the kid did want to play.  She just didn't want to get out of the car. She was good at the game and she liked running around and there was the uniform and the cheering and it was all to no avail.  On the field side of the car, looking down on the gathering eight year olds, her mom was out of ideas.  She sighed. It was a loud sigh, or maybe I just happened to look up, but we were friends from the moment our ey...

In between the snuggles there was decorating. Babies can't use power tools but Daddies can. I'd never seen anyone use a power tool to open a pumpkin,  but then again I'd never seen anyone use such perfect carving tools either. He did a great job, but FlapJilly had just as much fun with her Crayola water based paints.  I mention that they are water based so that you don't think she is permanently purple. Once she figured out that the colors were for the pumpkin instead of for spreading on the plate,  she took great delight in placing a delicate finger tip or two on her pint size pumpkin. Little Cuter was a helpful assistant, covering the baby's palm with purple paint and placing it on one side.  It was less than successful, and the kid was less than thrilled, but Grandma had a great time laughing at them all.  I was careful to keep the clapping to a minimum, though.  FlapJilly is a great imitator and I didn't want the pai...

It's tough, being a grandparent. You have to go to the park and climb on the slide and slide down the slide. There was lots of wandering around and crawling under  while wondering where her minions might be hiding.  There was looking for Grandpa through the bars, and following the parade behind her. You have to watch her devour a grilled cheese sandwich while flirting with the worker bees,  and then go to music class where she becomes the queen bee. And then, after singing and dancing and making music with every kind of percussion instrument ever invented, you must go to another park, where tan bark makes the littlest human in the party extremely happy. There were dinosaurs to sit upon and cars to drive before it was time to go home. As I warned you yesterday, there's not a lot of pithy thought this week. There's just lots and lots of love.

Answers are so hard to come by.  Questions are easy, because I believe what they taught my children: The only stupid question is the one you do not ask.  Answers, on the other hand, seem to be in short supply recently.  Is the Santa Barbara shooter mentally ill or a bad seed?  Would stronger legislation or better training for first responders or stiffer penalties or a fully armed populace make us safer?  Does a rallying cry take the place of real action? Is that the purpose of a shout-able, repeat-able, quotable slogan?  Is raising consciousness a worthy goal in and of itself?    I've been torturing my brain with these and other thoughts all weekend long.  It started at the quilting bee ; it got worse when I returned home to find TBG glued to the news reports from SoCal.  Rain's comments  to my post on the subject, and our subsequent conversation, just fanned the flames.    I want to know why. I want to...