Notes

I ask Bernadette if she's going to tell me a bedtime story. "OK, but it's scary," she says. One of the characters was named Foo Foo Fluff. A side note about the young storyteller: Sometimes she lapses into song or makes noises where you'd thing she was going to use words. There's a bit of nonsense, but I love it.

The young Mara:
Likes: mama, nursing, sleeping, snuggling, any combination of the above, Isaiah's singing in the car.
Dislikes: silverware clattering on plates, diaper changes, kittens (competition for food; just kidding; who hates kittens?).

Thinking about going rodeoing. Just got pajamas on an uncooperative 2-year-old.

Some discussion of the blood mobile today as Grandma was making brownies for the people who donated. Isaiah's theory was that the blood is squeezed from dead enemies, while Bernadette was concerned about spurting when the needles are removed and whether the people who give die.

Isaiah's prediction after the first soccer practice: By the timetbe game is over, the whole team will be on the bench.
Me: Why.
Isaiah: Too many penalties.

Isaiah: Did you know nature is a hotel?
Us, puzzled: What?
Isaiah: Well, from the perspective of animals.

Notes

Two nights of cold. Ice in the chicken waterer. Cutting firewood. Burning it in the fireplace.

Frequent drives with sleeping kids: Rutted roads, sagging limestone, rusted bridges, abandoned farmhouses. The sale barn has a steel plate 6 feet tall, 15 feet wide painted red, worn in spots by the passing cattle, splattered with brown; it could hang in MOMA  (the catalog might mention Rothko and Ofili and Pollock and found art). Observing light that painters try to capture, some of it cast upon the new windmills to the west.

I suspect the fashion designer who went in for all those browns in the 1960s/70s was a Midwesterner transplanted to New York with a vision of capturing the glorious subtlety of fall out here, only to be devastated by how muddy it all became when rendered in polyester.

The landscape is more industrial than when I was a kid. New, giant machine sheds. More lights. Bigger equipment. Of course, it was industrial then, too, mechanically turned soil, highly manipulated genetics, a grid of roads.

First cider is drinkable.

one boys' feet in a stream/fat tadpoles in a pond/red-winged blackbirds in a swamp