Beach Party

This has been a trying week. The ground is finally dry enough to get the tractors out on the fields and Earl and Erik have been plowing and discing and planting and spreading manure. I see them and talk to them when they're in for lunch, but they're occupying their own planet these days--the Planet Fieldwork. Somehow, I forget, every year, what this is like. First cut of haying I remember, but the scurry to fix the equipment, get seeds in the ground and get the manure all spread before haying always surprises me. I think it's like the biological inability to remember childbirth accurately, mine anyway. I've been so happy to get through the experience well and successfully that I forget that parts of it inescapably suck. I guess fieldwork isn't really all that bad, but when Earl announces, after dinner, that he thinks he'll go back out to the field to finish plowing and he'll be back not long after nine, I'm solo on bedtime and missing my few innings of watching the ball game with my husband.

The reason Earl had to go back to plow is that I came and got him before he was finished. I had been hanging out at the house, cleaning the kitchen and talking to Pam, when I realized I hadn't seen Harley or his friend Jasper for a few minutes. Jasper had fallen asleep on the blue chair around the corner, but Harley was nowhere. It had been ten minutes since he'd asked if he could go get the potato chips that he and Jasper had been eating on the porch steps. I'd said yes, and that he could go get them and bring them inside. Cliffy was just walking up the driveway from school and I didn't think anything of Harley going outside on his own. He's three-and-a-half and the door was open and he's got his things he does in the yard--digging holes, playing pirate, sitting on the toy cars and airplane and going on adventures to faraway lands. Besides, although he's rascally and likes to interrupt his brother's play and sabotage cleaning projects, he's generally a good kid and his insatiable need for loving attention generally keeps him close by and on this side of the law.

But then I couldn't find him. I called for him and then I yelled for him and looked all around the house and yard. Then I got worried and I glanced at the stream and pond behind the house and checked under the porch. Pam and Cliffy and Pam's daughter, Jade, looked in the house and helped me call. Then I started to freak out, and really looked in the pond and stream and then the big pond up the road and then Pam went down the road on the Ranger and I went to get Earl, who was plowing with Jackson on some rented land a few miles away. I was hoping, stupidly, that maybe Earl took Harley with him and maybe I didn't hear him tell me or that maybe he had asked Jasper to relay the information. The absolute height of my fear was when Earl opened the tractor door and it was just him and Jackson and a look of curiosity on both of their faces and I thought to myself, "They've been having a really good time and I'm about to ruin that. Forever." Earl was profoundly calm in the crisis, cataloging the outlying places we might look and in what order and I can't remember what I did except drive the car and play worst-case-scenarios. And then we met Pam on the back road. And she was smiling.

Jade had found Harley on the old dumpy couch in the corner room downstairs. He had pushed one of the cushions forward, made a little nook, pulled a blanket over himself, and fallen asleep. I had been folding laundry earlier in the day and there were some unfolded clothes on the couch; Harley, under his crumply blanket was invisible. In the classic manner of a three-year-old in a house full of boy noise, he can sleep through anything. I had looked under the clothes, feeling stupid because there weren't enough of them to hide a child and I knew I was reaching past hope. I had yelled, full strength, in every room in the house, including that one. And he was just right there, laughing when he woke up to think that his mother had lost him when he was "just right there!"

So I am reevaluating my parenting, reassessing nap schedules, age-appropriate levels of supervision, and how much I can really trust my kids to look after their own self interest. I'm also thinking that losing a kid on the couch doesn't speak very well for my housekeeping skills.

Someday I will think about the experience without my heart pounding and, as my sister pointed out, it will actually be funny. That day isn't this week, though. I'm still picking that kid up every time I walk by him, checking on all of them in their sleep, and feeling ten years older and up against impossible odds.

In the midst of all the planting and spreading and trauma, there has also been T-ball, the art project I've been doing three days each week at school, kindergarten screening, and the usual business stuff. I had started this blog entry with the title, "Something Has to Give," yesterday afternoon. But then Jackson announced he was having a beach party.

He was out in the greenhouse that opens with a sliding door just behind where my computer is and had found the bottom piece to a big plastic pot, a water tray sort of thing. It looked to him like a party platter, so he was filling it up with the rocks from the greenhouse floor, carefully washing each one, and calling out his creations--barbecued oysters, fried shrimp, calamari, and a Fabulous Dipping Sauce. He brought some out to me, holding the tray in one arm against his body, taking a rock in the other hand, carefully dipping it, twice, in the Fabulous Dipping Sauce, and holding it out to me. As you can imagine, it was just what I needed, light and fun, and the sauce really was fabulous.

Then Jackson said everything was ready for Cliffy when he got home (which was going to be soon) and then he thought Cliffy might be really hungry, like for real food, so could we have some of that, too? I had just gone to the co-op the day before, so we had watermelon, oranges and apples to slice up and I found a metal platter that he could take to the porch. Harley suggested root beer and I let him go get one to share from the box in the pantry (Boylan's root beer, which is really good and devoid of high-fructose corn syrup). Cliffy and Pam's daughter, Taliesin, came up the road and Jackson invited them to the party. Taliesin went to ask her mom if she could come and the answer was yes and she was back in a minute. And it was great. Oliver loved his watermelon and Harley decided a party should have dancing, and Jackson was a generous host, walking around with his tray and refilling root beer cups. Cliffy was indeed famished and camped out by the snacks and told us about his day at school.

There's a line in a Pam Houston story that I think about a lot. It goes like this: Life give you what you need when you need it; receiving what it gives you is a whole other thing. So although there is not enough Earl to go around or time in the day to keep constant watch over my children, or to keep the house clean, life gave me Jackson, and Harley and Cliffy and Oliver. And yesterday, Jackson gave us all a beach party.