LIFE-GIVING STARCH-PODS

Or, "Blood-neighbors"

“What’s your plan?” my neighbor and friend asked me last week. All utterly due gravity aside for a moment, because that’s how my brain works— it is the student at the back of the class with gum in her hair— I almost snarfed my tea.

PLAN? You seem to be operating on the assumption that I have something other than formless despair in general, that I perhaps even know where my car will end up on any given occasion when I get into it, I felt I might say. Thankfully I did not. The friend in question donates organs to strangers. Not kidding. Maybe it was just the one, but I wouldn’t count her out from further turkey-carvings just because she happens to really kind of needs both lungs, for example. She has my undying respect and bafflement, gobble gobble, etc.

But this friend, despite her abilities to plan her own organ harvest and to excel-spreadsheet an entire family’s activities for a week, indeed for the semester, whereas I struggle to get through oatmeal versus eggs for my children’s breakfast (when neither will be eaten, keep in mind)— this friend is also, somehow, very fluid, and fun, and receptive, and earnestly welcoming of whatever comes her way outside of the skeletal system of the spreadsheet. So, in short, I thought I’d better come up with something good, so as not to appear as much of a shower-drain hairball as I felt.

Unfortunately, in times like these, I generally revert to the truth, if for no other reason than it is all I can think of.

“Um,” I began, as some tea dribbled onto my shirt, “Keep making things.” I thought a minute. “Keep trying to be kind.” It hurt my head, how dumb this list felt next to the roil of our shocked and worried psyches. “Keep trying to raise good people.” I sighed, apparently tapped dry. I shrugged. To my surprise, she nodded respectfully and with appreciation. “That’s not a bad plan,” she said.

I looked out her kitchen window onto the garden she and her family keep, where just a few weeks ago my family “helped” dig potatoes and were given a bucket of the firm little life-giving starch-pods to take home.

I thought about our daughters, who were either making rat-nests of the craft supplies upstairs or building a fort. Our sons: hers kindly tolerating mine, five years younger— even sometimes losing himself in the mild enjoyment of helping the smaller, less dexterous child build a magnet-tile marble run, which is an activity the smaller child’s mother would rather put pencil shavings in her eyeballs than aid and abet.

I thought about our husbands, who are kind and inventive and gentle and HAVE ENERGY with the children. How, when they see the collective, neighborhood heap-of-wife congealing by the counter, in need of adult female conversation, one of these men simply takes over and guides the tide of complaint and “play” (also known as pre-fighting) into the other room with clear and certain but cheerfully delivered conditions about when the robot will play chase with his laser-eyes (after those among the smaller have eaten the necessary calories to keep their brains from shorting out).

I thought about how, before she had her children, this friend had designed her house— her actual house, which, by the way, is about as energy efficient as it gets before you start digging sod-homes on the prairie—specifically so that neighborhood kids one day would want to congregate and play there. How, a decade or so on down the road from this hope, the plan is working. (It doesn’t hurt that she’s a fully licensed Tantrum-Prevention-and-Abatement-Snacks provider.)

I thought about how there are berry canes in both our yards, and the smaller people who live in these places know how to gauge when those berries are ready, and pick and eat them. How the wonder of that little truth is everything, in a way: yard to cane to eye to mind to hand to belly to blood.

I thought about how we sometimes manage to build bonfires and actually enjoy our yard for a few minutes or hours at a time now, and the children are currently allowed to play with the ends of burning sticks, because they know their bodies, and the elements of fire and wood, well enough to be trusted with their own trajectories when they’re not of a mind to kill each other. So, about half the time. It, too, is a goodness that wasn’t there before. (“What are the kids doing?” my husband asked, when I came in from my turn at keeping them occupied until dinner. “Playing with fire,” I said, tired as shit, and he nodded, and we went on with vectoring the house-mess into workable piles.)

I thought of how my son, who previously wouldn’t engage in any alphabet-talk unless it was to find out where you were going to insert the word “poop” into the song, is now saying things like “Hey Dad, did you know? GYM starts with a juh-juh-juh-JAY.” How this little insight, its minor incorrectness completely irrelevant to its value, makes a puddle of me. The kind of puddle who is at last getting to behold qualities and skills in her children that indicate they do have a village, after all. Miracle of miracles: their wellbeing and growth is no longer entirely, suffocatingly up to their nuclear family.

I thought about my daughter getting her first piece of non-family postal mail. A postcard from her kindergarten teacher arrived, a note that thanked her for being a role model in class and working so hard in her small groups last week. When I finished reading it to her, her brow furrowed, and the first thing she said was, “where’s brother’s letter?” (His came the next day / had been separated in the mailing process.)

I thought about how, when I am reduced to a kind of meat-gruel, by the point of the children’s bedtime routine at 7pm, my husband chattily fills the next half-hour with the tales of doom and disaster that the children LOVE— bits of history that I didn’t know he even knew, right down to what the infamous Edmund Fitzgerald was hauling across Lake Superior when the Witch of November struck and sunk her, quite mysteriously (it was iron ore). How my kids, after one of these night-sessions, sometimes ambush me the following day with requests like “Mama, tell the one about King George,” and I know suddenly that not only am I going to have to pluck up the threads of my tattered, fading knowledge of the Revolutionary War, but I’m also going to have to somehow make it good.

I thought about how my children’s recent obsession is candle-making. How they cannot get enough of warming shards of spent beeswax candles over a tea-light and pouring it into tiny moulds we rescued from the sandbox. How the wax is now everywhere; how they haven’t slowed their passion and we’re on day four now. How one of them insisted that we hang an old lantern they pilfered from the basement in the playroom, and light three of their tiny, wonky candles nightly, in new recognition of the early dark. As if some sense of the world, of how it changes, is already inside them, as is the bud of their light-bringing response.

And I can’t help but think, in spite of everything, that all this is real. It’s still real, maybe more real than it’s ever been. And it will remain real, as long as I give it some of my attention, so that it can do that crazy trick of life, of aliveness: the trick of moving from the yard to the eye to the hand to the belly to the blood, warm as my nearly-snarfed tea.

On the way to the neighbors’, October