Dear Sasquatch Monkeyface, in your fifth month

Dear Sasquatch Monkeyface,

November is here, making it about five months since the last time I wrote in the treehouse.  I know that because also five months ago today you finally showed up.  Five months is too long not to write, but ever since you arrived and made my world your whirled, there is no sign of the elongated stretches of mental freedom I associate with writing a thoughtful entry on the Treehouse walls. I've hammered out random sentences in my leather journal and some semi-coherent reflections on random acts in my teaching journal, not to mention the thrown-together half-salient lesson plans that my students work so hard to endure.  So yeah really, baby, you've redefined the whole idea of "me time." Just like they all said you would.
If you weren't so joyful to watch while eating a book, or so very good at precision toothless smile delivery, I could focus enough to sit and compose scores of sentences revealing in detail the several years of experiences wrapped into these past four months and how all our uprooting and then settling-in time went by without the requisite reflection.  I would regale my Treehouse walls of stories about my paid frolic in the national forest during your infancy while your mom remained trailer-bound sharpening her new mommy skills.  Vats of vowels await use in describing the attractive tract of land we purchased in Kalispell, the move... that excruciating move an hour south into hobo and black widow spider battles and leaky faucet flood control.  Floodgates of story I could devote to the satisfying challenge of teaching completely new classes and writing new curriculum in a new city with new colleagues in the only IB school in Montana, of joining the only choir in the area and getting my chops back, and of strumming on the birthday banjo and my classical guitar that I can finally play F and B chords on. I can speak long diatribes detailing true delirium at having no sleep schedule, not using the homemade desk enough and the dog not walking enough and how he misses wide open country fields. There are, of course, the weeks upon months of 2 hour sleep chunks, frighteningly frantic mornings, the ensuing clueless days, the return home to start it all again, plus endlessly rocking cradles and rhythmic pats on bottoms, sore and stretched arm muscles from devotion to holding that one position that seems to put you to sleep, at least that one time. The couch nights and floor nights require less telling, but they are funny in their helplessness.

They pile on, all the small stories that dovetail and never cease now more than ever, each new one burying an older one beneath it like a few more fall leaves.  The stories I scrawl I realize, now, always scream about me and my perspective as I navigate life from the Treehouse poop deck.  Now, suddenly but gently, like a vapor plowing through a quiet room, I realize all the stories that matter now revolve around you.  Every story now seemingly watches out for signs of you, steps lightly over but picks up your growls and shrieks at some point, awaits your entrance.  And no story seems as good without you as it is with you.  How did you do that?  You are now so obviously the point, the reason. You are slowly and deliberately pushing yourself out of my brain and into the only story worth reporting: the story of how you are doing and who you are becoming.  Hmm... sounds familiar.

Sunset on the Tobacco River - last few weeks in Eureka

As good a place as any

We're in a bit of a kerfuffle over here.  That's right, a kerfuffle.  See, we've got this baby coming, and we've responded to the new member of the family with a barrage of improvements to the EHPT (Eureka Horse Pasture Trailer), ready to get settled into for the long haul.  A long desktop and three sets of spacious shelves were built and have been settled on and into.  Books have congregated all in one place for the first time in our relationship, a monster king size bed welcomes us for almost everything except bathing, and a softly colored nursery has been ready for almost a month.  Everything has taken its natural angle of repose, and it's perfect.

Both in and out, I see this as the place where It's gonna happen.. For each day of growing green or louder buzzing of bees, shortening of shadows or vanishing of snow in the mountains, life is growing into what it will be when it meets this Big Thing of a new life form in a few weeks.  I see now that this Big Thing, this momentous, dreamed-about moment, will happen in a place I never imagined... in a small town, a beaver board trailer, surrounded by more animals and trees than humans.  And here's as good a place as any.


Driving along the windy back road home and seeing my students walking in the ditches cleaning up garbage (voluntarily, not as court-mandated community service, though I teach those kids, too) sent me wondering for the next mile or so how many years they have known each other, been in the same groups together, doing this service project.  Then, how long have teachers been teaching these same families, teaching sons and daughters, then grandkids... and on and on.  As someone born into the relative anonymity of a large city, you don't have much of that here.  The people come, a lot of them leave, and a few stay to be rooted, and everything and everyone becomes familiar.  Borrowing from Kathleen Norris' book Dakota and her thoughts on staying put in a not-so-flourishing region, I can see how stability comes more from the land than the people, and the stories of that people's success and struggle form most of what others usually think of the town itself.

Gratitude abounds when you look at everyone as a gift, but few strangers stay in towns like this long enough to see and value those gifts.  You don't understand a place going highway speeds just passing through with eyes on the road ahead. You also can't really understand anything about a place until you've sat and stared out from its front porches.  Illinois, Tennessee, Washington, and now Montana, we've gravitated to the country our whole lives.

Turning into my driveway, I feel the pull of a possible third year here, realizing we have become familiar trees here now.  With that in mind, eyes pause on the sun pouring onto the front porch and warmly resting its light on the pillows of the chairs.  The dog greets the open door and backs up into a  living room now lined with homemade furniture.  I set my keys there.  The groceries go there. And that's how roots plant, whether deep for generations or just in the topsoil while we keep one foot out the door of a place.  But to plant roots seems to really be all about planting your foot more firmly on top of the memories you are creating daily.  Like moss.  You can pick it up and move it all you want, but it flourishes when stepped on and pushed into the ground a little more, then left alone.  Transplanted moss takes time and care, but it can become permanent.


We've taken the unusually long winter as a sign we need to suck the marrow from spring and summer.  Deep cold and pregnancy allowed us to slow down lately, emerging like a deciduous tree blossoming from the cold, and we've seen some notably quiet moments in and around the EHPT.  A tree blooming once more and the wind not taking away all its blooms.  The birdfeeder that stays full because it's not sunflower-eating time, but then there's the woodpecker with an insatiable appetite for creamy suet blocks and the way it braces its large self on the tiny feeder.  Grass that grows a half foot every couple of days mowed by a balding and grunting feller on a riding mower who appreciates how I've pruned the trees around the yard because those branches used to slap him on his bald head after they pushed his cap off.  The frisbee golf course that's sprung up, and how the dog runs after the frisbee knowing full well that I know full well he will never bring the frisbee back, making him a perfect golfing buddy.  Hummingbirds buzz around the cherry blossoms knowing the bees arrive just before the lilac bushes bloom their golden tubes of nectar.  Birds and bees compete for blossoms in nearby bushes until the bees win and settle into the lilacs and trees, then make nests.  The first light gets earlier -- now it's at 4:00 -- so that you're fully awake by 6:00, ready for the second part of the morning.  Paint-shipped porches with morning sun only, enveloping hammocks under fruit trees, regal lounge chairs hovering over dandelion grass.  Deer roaming game trails in our backyard.  The ever-present mountains greeting us at the driveway, silence all around you save the blowing wind you can hear miles away and the bird calls bouncing around the valley every five seconds.

We've borrowed this place and called it ours for almost two years, and now we're looking at having to give it back after a final green and blue summer here, heading back down the road for a new teaching opportunity.  It's only sixty miles away, barely an hour's drive.  You can bridge that gap with people you miss, but we're struggling most with leaving this place, particularly the wide open silent expanses that we claim as ours.  I know I'm too new a resident of these drumlins to write anything about this Eureka and the Tobacco Valley, but I can speak to what it's like to be travelling through here at 65 mph, then 45, then 35 and 25, and to stop and sit a while on a few front porches, then prepare to drive away a little slower.

Oh Baby!

Ohhhhh baby.  Baby baby baby.  Say, baby in the belly, do you have any notion of the craziness you are embarking upon by setting foot out into this world and into our arms?  Yes, there are political boiling points, religious wars, and hatred all over the place (we call it the globe, but it seems flat... I'll explain later), but are those really reasons to not give you a shot in it ?  Plus, you would miss all this music.  You will not believe the beauty of a major chord turning into a minor chord then into a diminished and then we flat the octave and add a ninth, and then wow, you can pretty much carve up the harmony after that, add some rhythm with your mouth (we'll work on that together) and then you become an instrument!  Then there's mud, and bugs, and livestock poop.  And WATER!  Holy cow, water is really something to see and feel... the tap is great but when you see it outside when it comes from the sky and hits mountains and... wait, MOUNTAINS!  See, you will love those, especially when you have water at the base of mountains.  Add trees, those bugs and that mud, and you have, well, the area immediately outside our little Eureka Horse Pasture Trailer.  That's only the tip of the iceberg.  Oh, wait, ICEBERGS!  We'll have to go to Greenland for those... I've never been, but maybe you'll take us?  Funny that Iceland is green and Greenland is icy... oh, so much to talk about.

But first, let's talk about how you are turning said Eureka Horse Pasture Trailer upside down.  You see, our room is becoming your room, and Mom's office is becoming our room, and the living room is becoming our office.  My bookshelf is becoming your bookshelf, and my desk (which once was a sewing table in another life in someone's house in Seattle) is becoming your vanity-bookshelf-thingy.  Mom's bookshelf is becoming my bookshelf, and Mom's taking over the our family bookshelf in the living room.

So, Mom just painted her-now-my bookshelf a darker blue than our-now-her bookshelf.  Look how pretty it is... the official color is Alladin's Wish, chosen to compliment the blues in both our couch and in the trout picture on the wall.  We hope you like it, and that you don't throw up on it.  The bookshelf, that is.


I'm almost done building our new desk, a nine foot long set of boards thirty inches wide sitting on three sets of shelves I also built, all made with wood from around here that your mom hand-picked from Landlord Lundeen's big old barn. Yes, the one you can see from the road.  Isn't it lovely so far?  The desk, that is.
This, too, doesn't need to be thrown up upon.


So, once the desk is ready and the shelf is ready, we're going to throw Mom's old desk out, find a new home for our old bed, and drop the big new luxurious king size dream bed leaning against the wall onto the floor of our new room  move the painted shelf and the new desk into the living room, then send your vanity and your shelves into your new room.   Then we'll be done moving, and when that all happens we will probably start to cry a lot, not just because we are sharing a desk and that'll be weird, but mostly because we'll finally have a place called Your Room, one that we can walk into with anticipation and wonder, fill with girly things, build your crib, paint over the beaver board walls, and so much more.  It will also be lovely to have a holding place for the hoards of awesome things coming into our life because of you, things that are piling up in odd places.  It will be epic, and it will never stop for the rest of our lives, crazy lives in which we are busy building space for you, and we can't wait to fill it with the tiny warm actual gift of you.  You will inspire poetry and songs in several languages.  Your friends are being born this very moment, and your husband or wife is beginning their life or is about to.

All of that makes each morning right now pivotal in some unknown way, important and significant for reasons yet unknown.  You are also a pain in your mom's ass right now; literally, her sciatic nerve is killing her gluteus maximus, and it's your rutabaga-sized self that is the cause!  But don't worry, she's a strong woman very much in tune with her body and your little body within it.  We got this.  We got you.  Just listen to the music and the rhythm we tap, respond to it with your dolphin kicks.  We love that.

A Snowed-in Story

Even though the snow fell too fast to stick and melted a while ago...

The thought of my pooch (who, by the way, needs more video time because he is entering the prime of his cleverness, cuteness, and awesomeness) stuck at home alone most of the week kills me, especially knowing that he watches through the windows as deer frolic lazily across the back hill, woodpeckers alight with a thud on the feeder and gorge themselves, and turkeys waggle their waddle in frenzied lines, pecking at whatever the woodpecker dropped.  The knowledge that the sun rises and sets without him feeling it on his hairy black back makes my stomach twitter.  And it was that guilt alone that drove me to leave during my prep period one Wednesday in order to come home, play with the trailer-bound dog, and brush my teeth, all before my 4pm dental cleaning.

It was all planned perfectly.  However, it had been snowing hard all day.  That snow, blizzard-like and falling thick, proved to be the bane of my existence. Well, the bane of my existence as it pertained to the 2-wheel-drive Chevy Impala rental with the oh-so-Montana sun roof.   I jump into its leather seat and hit the seat warmer button, luxuriate in the warmth crawling up my back, lock the doors and start the windshield wipers.

Eureka being a town laid out without much leveling, its streets undulate with the rolling hillside and stop at odd points, like the "street" the sedan is about to turn onto that requires one to stop, turn, go about 25 feet, and stop again, all on a fifteen to twenty degree slope, and without much else in the way of options to avoid using said silly street.  Naturally, the Impala stubbornly refuses to continue to the top of the slope, its wheels spinning and causing the car to turn in an ungraceful sideways motion, leaving me horizontal and halfway blocking all the roads.  The clock ticks on my window of dog/tooth-brushing time.

Behind me, two cars pull up and I embarrassingly see my students behind their wheels, ecstatically encouraging me to just back up and start over, a feat I realize I am totally incapable of doing.  So as they wait in a short line, I surf my ton of Florida retirement white sedan-ness on the white snow, slide down the slope, uncontrollably, narrowly missing a dumpster, until I finally nose the Impala back down the road.  I wave at my students in their four-wheel-drive trucks and plan a second attempt.  This involves not doing a 360 at the intersection but rather driving nearly out of town to find a safe, non-conspicuous spot to turn around in case others are watching. Five minutes later I make my way back to the same spot, eyeing traffic in every direction and, seeing no one through the blizzard, roll at about 25 mph through a stop sign, turning left, sliding up the slope, thus successfully navigating the second left turn at the intersection and, of course, not stopping at the second stop sign this time either.

Ahhh.  So, meandering along the serpentine road, snow falling even harder and now afraid of any incline or sharp turn, I come to another hill, the big one that leads to our home and, again eyeing traffic and seeing no one, I turn and momentum-push up the hill.  I get twenty-five feet and spin and sputter again, the sedan wheels refusing to grip any powder because they don't really know what to do with powder, forcing me to slow to a crawl in the half-foot snow, stuck once again.  Behind me, a school bus stops at the intersection I just blazed through.  It turns the other way, perhaps hearing my curses and seeing my precarious position in the middle of a long road up, but most likely filled with students wondering who that was angled in the road so weirdly. This time, I back down the road, pivot toward the road I came from, and sadly cancel my ticket to the dog-walking/tooth-brushing festival due to the utter futility of trying to go any further up that blasted hill.  So, I choose to drive to the dentist's office early, the thought of nature magazines in a waiting room somehow dissipating my disappointment.  Back down the roads I go, fortunately using all the downhill roads now, all of which end at the thoroughly-plowed main highway which, thankfully, also leads me to straight to the dentist's office.

Approaching the office driveway, my heart sinks as I see it has another fifteen-degree slope, and as I turn into it with momentum, I once more turn/surf/struggle and finally skid to a stop, revving the tires uselessly and stranding the Impala once more in a driveway, six feet from a row of parked cars, ten feet from the turned heads of waiting dentist patients, and about 20 feet from the ever-moving and rubbernecking cars rolling down the highway.  Now an A student of the Impala+snow=futility equation, I reverse and glide-slide down the driveway back to the road, almost as if I had planned it that way the whole time.  I turn left, find a parking spot in the laundromat about a hundred feet away, park the car, almost incinerating it with hate from my heart, and walk along the highway in the falling snow, arriving in the dentist's office right on time--a wet, sloppy, foul-mouthed mess--plopping myself in the chair of the way-too-smiley dental hygienist.  

She begins with some x-rays, and she asks me to open wide.  I stare straight ahead with a look of indifferent loathing at the snow out the window.  I open my mouth, receive the weird plastic cardboard thingy, calmly wait for the digital buzzing of x-ray weirdness to finish, open up, and deftly dislodge the plastic thingy from my clenched teeth, presenting it to her on the tip of my tongue.  So helpful on the outside am I, but my eyes staring straight ahead hide the death wishes I am exclaiming within.  Another round of x-rays go the same way, with me hoping the hygienist doesn't beg answers to any of her exuberant and well-meaning questions.  As she leaves I close my eyes and shoot daggers at random objects while my stomach does somersaults.  She returns to tell me that I take great photos.  I grunt with a slight smile, then close my eyes to receive the ice pick to my bocal bone structures.

Funny thing happened in that chair.  A dental cleaning brought peace to my troubled mind.

As you may know through unfortunate experience, there is an unusually helpless feeling found in in failing to command a large and reliable hunk of $20,000 metal up a fifteen degree slope or control its rapid sideways decent down said slope, with lives and cash and insurance claims helplessly falling into the tenuous balance with every misstep and spin.  To be at the mercy of such nasty weather makes one want to curl up, give up, pack it in, and seek the nearest possible comforting place.

In this case, laying back in the dentist's chair, following in my mind the ice pick as it stabs at the calc deposits on my teeth, explores every edge along the tender gum line, rakes between teeth with the sound of chalkboard fingernailings... all this focus on physical feeling (even nasty tooth scraping) took me away from thinking about the myriad, cumulative problems of lesson plans, assessments, ruminations on best practices for achieving Common Core standards, prom committee deadlines, yearbook deadlines, late work policies in winter sports seasons, and overall lack of motivation from my students.  All of this should be a shared responsibility with my students and colleagues to solve, but instead I put it squarely on my shoulders for some reason day after day in order to figure out my new profession in this new place.

In the end, analogies (i.e. a well-intentioned and perfectly capable car failing to make it up an easy hill coupled with the obvious solution of having the right tires to fit the road conditions and/or taking the path of least resistance) present themselves as long, extended, perfectly-placed metaphors.