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Over the Weather

I watched the kid’s sunhats bob and spin in the Twinner this morning as I pushed them up and down the neighborhood hills. Left and right, the wildflowers! Everywhere, embroidering the landscape with color. Like butterflies, we stopped at every honeysuckle to sample the sugar; Ford wouldn’t let a single vine pass unplucked. Australian cowdogs bounded to greet us, licking sunscreen off our hands, as we walked under the arching necks of blooming yuccas, a mature hedge that bordered their yard.

We spent another day at home, but mostly outdoors: pruning trees, training vines, repotting, chasing black bear caterpillars across pavement. In the middle of the day, we watched the storm pass in green darkness, spraying a horizontal rain and dropping hail between the boards of our patio the size of small grapes. Then the sky opened like a vault, and I got a wild hair to drive the kids down to the lake, where I waded into the water with a hand cultivator and a pickle jar, collecting aquatic plants.
I thought it would make the betta happy.

But we survived the last day of the flu: grimacing with every cough that blew my way; washing, washing, washing; spicy seafood soup with lemongrass and mushrooms from the Thai restaurant down the road; iced tea in mason jars with fresh spearmint; bundling up into the down comforter to watch Godzilla movies with Ford in blue twilight. His hair is thicker, no longer baby-like. I’m finding it difficult to snuggle with him, he has grown lean and long.

I laid there, in the rain, remembering cocooning like this in the Airstream. With Ford I would snuggle up in the same comforter, womblike and warm, under the air-conditioning’s permafrost. We’d lay there, wrapped in down and encircled with window: we’d curl up and watch the water crash on the rugged Kennebunkport coastline, or tractors plow by, or passersby swoon at our silver bullet bling.

I ran through the neighborhood again, backtracking alone. This time, to the stopwatch. I started out pounding but eventually glided, like I was pedalling up and down the hills. I have retrained my upper body to assist, my legs to reach higher. My eyes followed the powerlines, where birds were busy preening in peace: cardinals, mourning doves, Whitewing doves, Scrub jays, cowbirds. Above them swooped chimney swifts, and the whole lot of them were in song. A four-foot cedar stump jumped out at me from the bushes, black and damp. I never noticed it this morning, but I imagine it was bone dry and pale, then. But that’s the bunny in the magician’s hat, why I stayed to watch the show and left my gym bag in the car, only two inches further out the driveway.

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I Have Cabin Fever and I Need to Vent

It’s a crapshoot, this pediatrician’s office business; in my experience, one visit to the doctor’s office has the power to precipitate subsequent visits in the following weeks. Still, I had two kids with a high fever on Tuesday morning and I was forced to take them in to the pediatrician; Chas boiled in the bed at 105.4 F the night before. Still, take one immunocompromized child to an infirmary and he’s bound to pick up another bug. Which is why this visit to the doctor’s office on Monday was not the first visit but our third in the past week.

The previous Monday, I brought a happy, robust Chas into the office for a well-child visit. We walked around the huge lobby aquarium while we waited, patted the glass, scrambled over magazines, dumped jars of otolaryngoscope tips, pocketed tongue depressors for our garden (they make good labels) and dug through the children’s books before receiving a clean bill of health among those agonizing tears of hurt and betrayal that accompany immunizations.

Three days later, Chas was drowning in phlegm, trying to cough it all upwards yet forced to swallow it back down . After dropping Ford off at a playdate, Chas and I kept driving down the road towards the doctor’s office. Presenting with nothing but a happy disposition and a chunky cough, we returned to our car after our quick visit with a prescription for an antibiotic and meds to treat acute bronchitis.

My brother John’s wedding and Easter Sunday came and went, and so busy we were with all the drinking, barbeque-feasting, egg-dying, visiting and mayhem that it was hard to notice both kids getting progressively sicker. On Monday, we were all slumped over. I tripped three times while jogging, and nearly fell over in yoga while trying to find a focal point on a bleak, gray wall. Atticus spun in circles around Ford at the lake, as my poor kid sat on the diving platform, it seemed the entire neighborhood had converged at the lake to revel around him and his blah expression. By Monday night at midnight, Chas had developed the high fever to push us near the edge, on splinters, until morning came and we could take him to the doctor.

Dragging Ford along was difficult, more so than usual. But we made it through the door of the lobby, and Ford found the nearest bench on which to lie. I suggested the nurse to pull both kid’s charts.

This technique works well with siblings: I told Ford to demonstrate for Chas how to cooperate with the doctor’s exam, even though we were at the doctor’s office “only to treat Chas.” And do you know who had the fever? Who tested positive for influenza? Ford. Chas’ results were difficult to read, but we were intructed to treat both kids for the same thing, the flu.

I think I was wiser when I used to take Ford to the Texas Department of Health & Human Services for his routine immunizations. For one, it’s cheaper. The wait is usually less than twenty minutes. The nurses are always efficient, soulful black women with impeccable technique. And the best part? No sick kids to bump into. As for the “well child” portion: who can’t measure their own child’s dimensions and follow a developmental checklist?

It makes sense: $15 for immunizations at a clinic, with a 15 minute wait
vs.
$20 copay + ($100 abx & esoteric meds+ $20 copay) + ($40 copay + $40 addition meds) and HOURS lost. Am I right?

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Illustration Friday: Spotted

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On the granite coast, I kneel down to see layers of round shapes in a tidal pool: the glistening curve of blue beach glass, ground shell, bits of marl, littoral litter. It is the texture of a cold and unhemmed coastline, a study in extremes.

Here, you have to hold on to your life. You have to blend in to avoid being hunted, unbruised by the pounding waves, while managing to stay wet in the face of sun and wind, maintaining your heritage by staying pretty in order to attract the opposite sex. Your existence is hinged on the passage of time, good genes and pure luck: will you survive until high tide?

This little intertidal oasis, paradoxically gorgeous, has a rainbow of life crawling within it: red, brown and green tranlsucences, bumpy lumberers, glittering gems, but it is growing stagnant by the minute. At noon, the water is warming up under the intense sun; in fact, it’s so sensuous to lie in the small ripples at the rim of the pool that you can hardly tell, with eyes closed, where the water ends and the balmy air begins. Then a breeze reminds you, as a shadow sheds some cool on your skin.

The estuary beyond the dunes, nursery for marine life, reminds me less of motherhood than these beautifully unprotected cavities. Here, time is compressed. Weeks become seconds. With little time to think, intuition develops. I slowly begin to trust my intuition as it gains conviction, but the experience that feeds it is time that’s lost: will I still be here by high tide?