Dear Evver

This morning, I am reminded of our beautiful and dearly departed Aunt Gloria. I talk about her to you, as I lament my ineptitudes at developing a green thumb. She is known for her lush greenery and foliage. Her front and backyards were alive with edible and inedible flora and fauna. She blessed us with lavender when we lived there near her and showed us aromatherapy, before it was cool. Her house was aromatherapy. More carbondioxide was processed at her house and more oxygen produced than any other house, I know. This morning, I am remembering her haircare. I was always awestruck that her hair was always perfect. I think that she cared for her hair and it wasn't for any other person, but herself. She was a widow and she cared about others, but she first cared about herself. Her hair was most similar to mine and so I looked very deeply into her eyes when she talked about her hair care. The antithesis of Grandma Ruth, who would make me want to cut all my hair off and never look at it again; Aunt Gloria pulled me aside as though we were peers. She said, I found such a great way to do my hair. I washed it and put rollers and took a drive in the car and the most perfect curls came out. I used the drive as a blowdryer. What an energy saver? I agreed and was grateful for her generous contribution to my difficult personal care. She loved me enough to talk me up, when I was discouraged beyond anything. Her spoonfuls of sugar made me think about caring when I couldn't have cared less. She was a dear and we miss her, here on earth. I hope that you can learn to encourage others like that.

Let's plan a picnic in the park for Easter?

I love it! Aren't you ambitious and a typical Walker sister? I would watch them work, in awe of their ability to plan and carry out the direction of brothers and mother and father with precision and flawlessly make memories for the family.
You have obviously inherited their ambition and abilities. It takes determination and grit, which may come from eating grits as much as we do. You've got it, Ladybug. Lets do it!

Forever! For EVA!

Today, you are very sick, You have a sad fever and I can't feed you like I want. I miss talking to you. I love you so much and am grateful for your companionship.
You were my little ladybug and I can't tell you how much I am grateful for you! Forever ForEVA I am your MOM and you are my baby girl For EVA!
Happy Valentine's Day- Sweetpea!

A Smallpox Epidemic?

Perhaps, just perhaps, I am making a mountain out of a molehill. In our family, it certainly is. My other children, usually accommodate my rants and raves about personal peeves. They usually walk away and don't challenge my maternal intuitions. Not my Evvy. She has intuitions of her own. This morning it was barefeet.

It is February. A mild February, granted, but February it is, just the same. I am deemed by all in the household the colorblind and others to be the least style conscious. They all have to dress me, if my colors would match. But, I am still the mother. Today was dress up day, in Public School, whatever that means. It looked like style day, to me. Only one glitch, somebody was going to school with her feet completely bare, sandals. Not the type of sandals with a strip of leather or something, to cover most of the feet and only toes hanging out, or heels hanging out, but the entire foot open except for spaghetti straps. I simply mentioned that they were inappropriate for the rainy weather and the fact that it is February.

I am not used to defending my arguments and taking out all of the stops about such things with my children. My Enoch, usually carries the children to obey their mother, even against their wills. They don't even have a chance to demand a hearing, with him. He couldn't get to her feet. He couldn't threaten her, with a glare. I had to articulate my argument.



I chose humor, since we daily have laugh fests about this or that thing. Usually my style inadeqacies are the humor. Today, I chose Pocohantas. I said you do look like Vanessa Williams, but you are not trying out for the part of Pocohantas, so get those sandals off your feet. It didn't work. Tears, sparks, flames, words, back and forth we went. Each time, I tried to choose the humorous anecdote, as opposed to the command tone. I had no movement of her will. Not even, I will think about it. Not even, I see your point but. No and stubbornly no. What do you know about this, no!

In my mind's eye I could see the young Pocohantas going before the Queen of England. If she had a mother, her mother would have told her to wear her shoes and maybe she would have lived past 21 years old. (maybe she wouldn't have been a legend, either). I saw the years past where "The Mother at Home" book made me see the life and death importance of having some command of the will of your child. I had to win this challenge. I went down every path of Pocohantas logic. I tried grossing her out. Only stubborn tears and accusations ensued. Such is the teenage daughter's mind. I remembered, with fondness, the times of challenge with the older two girls and how much I love them as women and the challenge that they have become.

The Pox of rebellion had a demi-pliette and I pulled out the Epipen of maternal prayer and persistence and Half-Nelsoned that girl in the wrestling match. When all else fails, might makes right. You get those shoes off those feet and sing to the blue corn moon when you get home, do you hear me. Smallpox may be eradicated, but obeying your mother is not. She stepped in it with me this morning and the ring of wrestling is still bustling with the sound of our battle of wills. I won the battle of the shoes, this morning and we both learned alot about eachother's points. I love teenagers, but I am glad that we only have two more waves of them, after this one.

I titled this challenge Pocohantas Go Home!

I am very grateful for another year. 50!

Friday night I sat with my youtube and enjoyed the music of Kenny Loggins and Paul Simon and Dan Fogleberg. I remembered the misfit teenager who was listening to such different and countercultural music and wishing to visit the Netherlands to Graceland. What far and distant lands, these writers led me through. Places I may never see with my eyes, but have visited with my heart. I am grateful for the imagination to have seen and travelled with many a prolific American writer, through their music. I am grateful for the hippie generation, before me and the folk writers who taught us to dream of other lands and to dream of peace and better lives.
I give the study of the beauty of American songsters and others to my children and wish them to grow into the fruition of the dreams that the "Innocent Ages" lend to them. Dan Fogleberg especially comforted my aging heart with his lyrics of beauty and true exposing of himself. He was real. This is me, he seemed to say, Not at all perfect, just growing.

On Thanksgiving/Creamed onions,Sauteed Mushrooms, Lima beans and Corn, Mashed Potatoes, Stuffed Shells, String Bean casserole...etcetera, etcetera...

I was stuffed with delights and fond new memories that I could write about for days. The clouds ran out of the way as if to say, we cannot believe that you are going to the mountains. Even we can't interrupt that party. Not a cloud was in the sky, we wouldn't want you to think that we were trying to dampen your party, they said, by their conspicuous absence.
The table was set, divinely. I took my plate and looked at the buffet, where the fixens were set. Oh Wow! My favorite! I could have taken a plate of each of the fixens, separately. I showed decorum and didn't just gobble the mushrooms from the serving bowl. I wanted to drink them straight, but, I acted in the fashion, my momma taught me and saved some for everyone else. I really wanted all of the mushrooms and then, I saw the onions. MY, oh my! Where will I put it all? If I put all the onions on the other side of the plate from the mushrooms, they will think that I am making a statement of something. I must put...Limas, Limas? They have limas? I love it!
I was going to start talking about Grandma Ruth's limas and how I missed them and how wonderful they are, now. How my gram would be so shocked to see me eating anything healthy. I couldn't. There were other memories to make and other things to put on my plate. I couldn't eat it all.
The food was delicious, but the memories that they evoked were more precious and inexplicable.

...And then there was Abby!

We called the first boy "Boy". That was his name to us. There didn't seem a need to call him anything else. There was no one else to answer to that name in our house. After about 18 months there was a need to diversify his name.

If we seemed unimaginative to name the first boy in our house, the opposite was true for the second. He had every name. We called him anything but boy. His name was Abdul. A princely name and serious name. We called him Dully, Dulcy, Dulcimus, Ashy{a rib about his skin texture}, but, mostly Abby. It seemed he was destined to spend only a short time with us. I wish that I had known that from the beginning, though.

I remember every minute that we spent outside Dr. Hewlett's office, waiting for this boy. I was old enough to know that the stork wasn't coming this time. And old enough to be very annoyed at the inconvenience of going to the Dr's office so often after school. He appeared on the scene, two weeks late and knocked my mother out of her wits. We didn't see that mother again. She birthed him and came back a new woman: A tennis player, adventurous, competitive. Abby and I spent hours with the water bottle and the patting on the back at Rochdale Tennis courts. Mom playing and us learning to rough it, a little. I remember his rough skin on my face and his raspy cry, in my ears. Mommy----the baby is crying again. Okay, Jayne, one more ball and you pat his back, maybe he will go back to sleep. He never went back to sleep, he cried and bauled in that growly kind of way that he did. We had no sympathy for him, we just growled back at him. We learned to love that little "truglidite"{ a term my father coined for the lot of us} Park children. We were there from the time school ended, till into the night, daily. Then, he learned to walk.

I'd say the frogs taught him to walk. Seems they were his best friends. He and Jo would go nature hunting together and gather frogs to bring for us to examine. We never were able to figure out how to keep them. We brought them home and they always got away.

Nature boy was another name that we called him. He was always covered in dirt and mud. I think that is why his skin improved somewhat, as he grew.

On long evenings, he and I would sit and I would lotion his ankles, trying to soften his skin from the scalp to the feeties. The funnest thing, when we were left home, was to play airplane with him on our feet.

There was no law about car seats, so we would ride to drop Dad off to the subway, with Abb laying across the whole lot of us. Our funnest trick was to watch his eyes open wide when we drove under the trestle and it got dark. We all would stare at him closely and his eyes would dialate, really really wide. He was somewhat examined closely by us. Not, because he liked it. I loved to put him on my shoulders and help him touch the ceiling. We would walk around the house and he would put hand prints on the ceiling.

I was ten going on 11 when he was born and entirely too big for my britches. He was my guinea pig in numerous experiments, not just the eye watching one. We rolled him around on the feet, like a baby bear. Grandma Ruth used to say, you girls are going to make his face as bad as his legs are, kissing him, like you do. We did, anyway.