Skipping Town

Today was a blur of packing. We leave tomorrow for a prolonged stay in NH, which requires a substantial amount of preparation. In true family fashion, our most pressing concern was packing enough books. We're probably staying for two weeks but then we thought we MIGHT stay for three, sending all of us into a flurry as we made a few additional selections. I have a lot of amazing books in my TBR right now. I'm looking forward to doing very little but reading and walking in the woods and fields for the foreseeable future. I forced L&G to help with a massive cleanup today, too, because their rooms and the basement had become untenably messy. There's nothing I hate more than coming home from a vacation to a messy house, so besides packing I also cleaned, which--as you should know by now!--is not my preferred way of spending even one second. But at least the house is ready to be returned to. We do have to pause with our Great Whole-House Cleanout while we're away, but t

Andrew's been doing a lot of family-tree research, thanks to some old docs we found in our big file cleanout, and last night he discovered that his great-great-great-great-great grandfather, who was a captain in the New Jersey militia during the Revolutionary War, serving under Washington (which we knew), is buried in a cemetery in Springfield, five minutes away from our house (which we didn't know). So this morning we drove out to the cemetery, and Andrew found the gravestone. Andrew also found a ballad called "Captain Eliakim Littell," a long rhyming poem/song that details Captain Littell's service at the Battle of Springfield in 1780 when zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz Sorry. Sorry. Anyhoo, Andrew found this ballad in a book called Ballads of New Jersey in the Revolution, published in 1896, and...DING DING DING DING! We have a winner, for the ABSOLUTELY SNOOZIEST BOOK ANDREW HAS EVER EMBRACED!! Forgetting for a second the connection to Andrew's family history,

Rainy and gloomy today, but that was okay--we were all busy. I tackled a huge part of the whole-house cleanout by going through my entire closet and dresser, trying on every piece of clothing and making hard and not so hard choices of whether to keep or donate. I found an entire Rural King bag of stuff to give away (a Rural King trash bag is an enormous-size trash bag, FYI, non-PA people). There were dresses in my closet that I bought in 1999. Time to go. Our cleanout work late last night involved files from the attic--a big pile of files that included house reno stuff, old bills, and much much more. We whittled it all down. We might be able to eliminate the two filing cabinets we have in the attic and transfer the files to file boxes for easier storage. We'll see. (A cliffhanger, I know.) While I cleaned, Andrew fell down a rabbit hole of ancestral research, and the kids played with Legos in the basement. When I say they played nonstop for six hours, I'm not exaggerating.

Today in excavation, I went through two boxes of files from graduate school. That's right: a program whose coursework I completed in 2003. That's seventeen years ago. I kept the papers I wrote but otherwise stacked up all the handouts from courses like Technologies of Heartbreak, Eloquence of Objects, Reviewing, Twentieth-Century Literary Nonfiction, The Literary Representation of Social Reality, Arts of Ecstasy, Writing America, Conspiracy & Paranoia, and Poets on Poets. The stack comes up past my knee. I also found workshop notes from the seven-page short story that eventually--many, many years later--became the 250-page Each Vagabond by Name. This cleanout is a personal reckoning and an eerie experiment in time travel. It all ends up in bags by the curb, bags and bags and bags, but all that is just the runoff of many many experiences and changes and mistakes and wrong turns and wonder and serendiptous events. None of that disappears, even though I can safely say I do

Officially changing my post titles to Summer, because quarantine has long ceased to be some remarkable, temporary period of time and is now looking like the New Normal for the foreseeable future. In NJ, things are opening up, but we're still pretty locked down in our house. I just can't see going out to eat anytime soon. I read something that said six people touch your fork before it makes its way to you at your table, which, as a former waitress, seems totally possible. Everyone has their own comfort level. Mine is very very very low. Or high? Whatever. I am not comfortable going out in public, is what I'm trying to say. The girls were out of sync this morning, probably because I unwisely let Lucia sleep till 11am, so when she woke up she was crabby and spacey. She is a sleeper, that one. So there was a lot of petty bickering until after lunch, and then they just kind of did their own thing and read in their rooms. They had piano lessons. We read some Harry Potter togeth

So Monday wasn't the last day of school. Yesterday was the last day of school. Whatever. Both girls had final messages from their teachers and that's a wrap. I did manage to do first-and-last-day pictures, because I want to keep my parenting license, but nothing else about this end of the school year feels normal. We're sliding into a new phase that seems pretty much how things have seemed for a while now. But the kids feel summer freedom. Yesterday they swam for much of the day. They were snorkeling in the pool--searching for some rings they'd thrown in--and were completely silent. This is a stark difference from their usual pooltime, which is pretty much constant screams and loud shrieks. Today they played in the basement and swam, and then spent a good chunk of lunchtime outside on a picnic blanket, eating lunch and reading Fox Trots together and then playing Mastermind. It was super cute and quintessential summer. I revamped their Bonus Books baskets, and they bot

Last official day of school. It feels so scattered that Lucia didn't even attend her final Google meet with her teacher; we didn't know about it and TBH it's felt like we've been done for a week. Sigh. Greta had a virtual clap-out since she's moving onto a new school next year (the next school building is grades 3-5). Then Greta and I went to a park near her school so she could say goodbye to her teachers and receive her belongings and her oldster medal, a tradition in the multiage class. It was sad saying goodbye. We've been with these teachers for four years since Lucia had them for multiage too. End of an era. The kids spent the afternoon playing in the basement, helping me sort and prepare more things for sale, and swimming. Then there was a neighborhood clap-out for the kids moving on to new schools. Then there was the spring piano recital on Zoom. The girls did great. It was an emotionally intense day. Besides all the end-of-school intensity, it's

Friday was the last real day of school for the kids. Greta had a virtual moving on ceremony since this is her final year in the two-year multiage class. Missing out on the in-person ceremony is definitely one of the sadder losses of this virtual school year. Lucia said goodbye to her class too, though it's unclear if she'll see them again tomorrow. In any case, school is done. What next year will look like is anyone's guess. Andrew and I have undertaken a huge task: cleaning out our house. It's dire, I'm afraid. We have spent the past 8 years filling this house with junk. We're overwhelmed. We've decided to tackle one area at a time. Today we worked on the crawl space in the basement, because nothing says Father's Day like cleaning out a basement crawl space. We found a box marked CORKS, and indeed, it was a large cardboard box filled to the brim with corks, which I'm fairly certain we moved here from California. It went on from there. I'm tryi

We're definitely feeling the transition to the end of the school year. Everyone's at loose ends. The kids are supposed to do a "passion project" over the summer, and I'm trying to steer them into working on making cabinets of curiosities, mostly because a) I myself want to make a cabinet of curiosities, and b) I have two enormous old printer's trays that would be absolutely perfect for this. I envision a lot of collecting, researching, identifying, labeling, categorizing. It's an amazing idea, IMHO. Now the kids just have to understand that THIS IS THEIR PASSION and we can get started. (Or we'll do cats and Greek myths for their project, which is what they CLAIM they want to do, and do this on the side.) Today was gloomy. The fridge got fixed. The girls had zoom piano lessons. I'm determined to clean out all the junk in our house and have been listing stuff for sale. Big-volume stuff. This house is out of control. And the coins desperately need t

The days keep going. How much longer should I label my blog posts "quarantine"? It feels like a weird blend of lockdown and real life now, even though we're still operating in our house as though the lockdown is total. I know things are opening up--in Maplewood, there's outdoor dining options now and stores are opening up--but I'm not ready to emerge yet. We're doing just fine here at home. We took a day trip into Westchester on Monday and--gasp--left Farrah at home by herself for the first time since mid-March. I was so worried. But we had a high school girl come over twice to walk and play with her, and Farrah seems to have survived. She literally hadn't been without us all around her for months. Yesterday we set up our new inflatable pool. It's going to be fun to have. It's smaller than I'd thought it would be--not as deep as I'd imagined--but it'll do. We set it up on the patio and leveled it with some folded up old yoga mats. T

The days got away from me in PA and I didn't manage to blog. But it was a great week. Molly and Luca ended up coming to Connellsville on Wednesday, expanding our quarantine bubble a bit further, and the three kids had lots of fun together. The highlight was making their first movie--a murder mystery with an evil baker and lots of dress-up clothes. Even more thrilling was the very professional trailer Molly's fiance made with the movie footage, including dramatic music. The kids were so excited. Molly and I also took the kids to East Park, where they explored the creek and an old cemetery. Throughout the week both girls loved practicing piano with my mom, and Greta made countless cat bookmarks from paint chips with my dad. Piano playing and paper crafting = a great week. Andrew and I went into Pittsburgh again on Friday and Molly took the kids on a bike ride and played their favorite outside game, Hello Neighbor. Andrew's birthday was Friday too, and we celebrated quaran

Greetings, greetings. I've been lax, but it's because we're now in Pennsylvania, visiting my parents and expanding our quarantine bubble. I have to be honest, it's weird. New Jersey lockdown is a whole different beast then a SW PA lockdown. This area wasn't hit very hard, so things are much looser than they are back home. It's hard to let go of that sense of complete fear and paranoia. Andrew and I actually ran an errand today, to Rural King. About 50% of the customers were wearing masks (of course we were among them). One woman, biker-chic and tattooed, had a mask around her upper arm. One unmasked man wore a t-shirt that read in all-caps, FRAC ON. Oh, SW PA. I've missed you. We paid for our pay-by-the-pound pig ears and hand sanitizer and got out as fast as we could. (The pig ears are for Farrah, FYI.) Andrew stopped to buy some beer on the way home from Rural King, wearing his mask. He complimented the cashier guy on the excellent beer selection, and

A quick story.  When I lived in New York, after I finished graduate school, I worked for a time as a personal assistant for the wife of an investment banking CEO. She and the CEO had seven personal assistants. I was the lowest on the totem pole, the only non-career assistant, and I was given all manner of menia jobs. One job I had was turning her scribbled correspondence into neatly typed letters, which I printed on stationery that cost more than my salary. Some of this correspondence was from her Maltese terrier to other dogs on the Upper East Side. The letters were written in the first person, in the dog's voice, and the envelopes were addressed to the dogs. For this and many other tasks, I received $25/hour and a lifetime of cocktail party stories. Writing the "dog correspondence" is something I've roundly mocked for over twenty years. And yet--all of that was before the existence of Dog Instagram. If you have a dog, and you're the sort of person to make an

Felt like summer. The girls are begging to put up the pool, but we leave for PA on Saturday so it'll have to wait till we get back. They did their schoolwork (not much today, TBH) and then played outside the rest of the day. Farrah insists on being outside with them at all times now. It's pretty cute. Lucia's long-awaited book STILL hasn't come. Stupid covid shipping delays. I'm going to have to order another one that will be delivered in PA. We haven't gotten any mail for two days. Not a sign of the mailman. I have a live virtual reading tomorrow, part of Hidden Timber Books's Small Press Author Reading Series. I'm not promoting it too widely right now, with the world being on fire (I tried to postpone it, but the organizer wanted to move forward), but if you'd like to listen in (it's on Zoom), you can register here (it's free):  https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEld--upjsoGNTTwdI7XBgFIDeiPFPc5YAv What We're Reading: Mar

It's more than a little absurd to write about the nuts and bolts of daily life when society is in free fall. There are words to say on this. I'm not the one to say them. I'm donating money to needed organizations and buying books by black authors from black-owned bookstores. (The kids' bonus-books baskets will have an influx of new titles soon.) Small things that I can do for now. And going about daily life, I guess, though homeschool feels more pointless by the day. We still have about three weeks to go, and I wish they'd find a way to just...call it done. Give the kids a reading list of books that speak to this moment, and call it a day. Legos are still taking up every second of the kids' spare time, and the School for Good and Evil books are still their focus. The new one was released today; I'd preordered it, but it didn't arrive. Lucia was checking the porch every five minutes all day. I hope it comes tomorrow. That's it. Off to read and w