Grunties

Grunties.  It's more than just a British word that's fun to say and has to do with what you may think it does.  It's also more than the chuckling middle of a Monty Python sketch involving silly people that you may have heard already.  Rather, "grunties" will always be Emilia's first phase of vocalizations for me, though they will never eclipse the great big HEY! she yelled to her Ma when first she made her appearance in this world.

Emilia, you made grunties, non-stop, starting shortly after you were born in the summer of '14. For us, that little esophageal burst of air accompanied with a even quieter noise, over and over and over again for weeks, became so ubiquitous we had to give you the nickname. We'd pick you up in your cocoon swaddle, and you'd turn into Grunties as your head swiveled to follow the moving scenery. We'd change your diaper, and Grunties emerged with each contortion we put you through.  Head on shoulder napping, lounging in bed eating, resting in the hammock under fruit trees, your every life move required a sound from Grunties.

This #14 is dedicated to your first summer, up there in good ol' Eureka, when, among the moving boxes and general stirring of our life, Grunties serenaded the horse pasture trailer as we prepared to depart it. You grunted outside while the trees waved at you and the sun danced through their branches.  Grunties joined the bird song and the sound of wind through pine, poplar and willow, and helped break the beautiful, long country silences.  Grunties will also always be the first new and exciting thing you did that we watched you grow out of.

I'm thankful you were born into a place and time where nature touched your senses more often than traffic or technology.  I'm also thankful you responded so gruntily.

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.