Heat

Finally it's hot in Portland -- in the 80s every day this week, and I will not be one of those complaining, even in a house with no air-conditioners, a menopausal mom, a dried out flower garden, and a daughter and dog who wither in the sun.  After this winter of snow, ice, shoveling, breath hanging in the air, slippery sidewalks, huge heating bills, and too many temperatures in the teens, all lasting far into April, I will enjoy every drop of sweat I endure.  

Not my two charges though.  Kanha, from the day she came home from Cambodia - a country where the average temperature year-round is around 90 degrees - would emerge from a half hour on the playground on a warm New England day with a head of hair so soaked it appeared she had been for a swim rather than a swing.  The wet head look has diminished over the years, as the pediatrician predicted, but she still tosses and turns in the warmth of her bedroom even with the fan on high.  It's hard to imagine how she would have managed if she hadn't left her original tropical home.

It turns out Theo has the same challenge.  With a body of thick, beautifully brindled hair that doesn't shed, I can't see him enjoying life in western Tennessee where he was born.  Last week, after watching him mope lethargically around our house for several days and discovering that the poor puppy, like all dogs apparently, can't sweat out his discomfort (must have missed that in 7th grade science...), I called every dog groomer within 20 miles until I found one who could cut his hair immediately.  I took him in the next morning and by noon he had emerged a new man.  

With all that hair gone, we could see his real body -- the spindly legs, the cylindrical torso, the big brown eyes unhidden by wisps of fur.  He looked fresh and innocent, and not one little bit like the dog we had taken in -- except for his bushy, oh-so-confident, erect tail that the groomer had left to its own devices.  He was a puppy with a bigger bounce in his step that day, relieved to be a few pounds lighter and a whole lot cooler.

As for me, I sweat on -- or I suppose, when I'm feeling feminine, I "glow."  It's a small price to pay for days that might include an intense workout running up and down the stairs in the park around the corner, a barefoot walk through the surf on a magical Maine beach, a hike through a fairy house building zone up to a view of terns and gulls flying above a tiny estuary that extends to the ocean, and a dinner created from farmer's market delectables at my beautiful mosaic table on our lawn.  So the flowers are drooping and I must dab my brow often.  I'm warm, in many ways.  

Theo's Incredible Journey with His Pal Hunter

Theo, it appears, is not only energetic and adorable but also very very clever.  Yesterday, when the plumber who my contractor Nick hired to outfit my new bathroom inadvertently left the gate to our new fence open, Theo hustled up his buddy, Hunter, his tall thin theoretically more mature friend (Nick's girlfriend's dog who spends most days calmly pacing our yard while Nick works) and the two of them escaped onto the streets of Portland.  Truthfully, it could have been Hunter leading the way -- he lives a few blocks in one direction of our house and his "mom" works a few blocks the other way -- perhaps he just wanted to go home, and Theo would have been happy to sign up for the adventure.  In any case, I can just see Theo's gleeful little face, tongue wagging, paws bouncing down the sidewalk, his pal Hunter at his side, with nary a look back to Grandma, aka me, working away, entirely clueless that her little baby was off, exposed to the dangers of the city.

I'm not sure how long they were gone -- probably just a few minutes --  before the plumber walked through my front door, which was open to the yard, and said, "Are the dogs in here?"  It wasn't terror that struck me, just disbelief.  Wasn't this why I paid $1300 for two small sections of fence?!  I was up and off, with Nick close behind, sprinting down various streets in the West End, shouting  HUNTER!  THEO!  I asked people along the way if they had seen a couple of Mutt and Jeff dogs scampering about and they only looked back with pity.  I purposely stayed on our side of State Street, the major three lane artery carrying all the traffic from Portland over the Casco Bay Bridge to South Portland -- its cars move with a sense of unimpeded urgency -- just their constant stream would keep any unleashed dog from trying to cross, I was sure.   

After about ten minutes, I stopped back at my house to grab my cellphone and there it was -- a blinking light on my voice mail.  It appeared the $2 tag on Theo's collar had been a better investment than the fence.  I listened to a young woman named Annie report she had a dog on her front steps with this phone number around his neck.   When I called her back, she reported Hunter was there too -- thankfully the partners in crime had stuck together.  And where were they?  I'm sure you can guess.  Not only on the other side of State Street, but on the other side of High, the equivalent "vein" taking all the traffic out of South Portland from the bridge back into the city.  Somehow the two of them had managed to cross all six lanes of bustling cars without getting a mark on them.  I like to imagine one looked out for the other, making sure neither got hit, but probably it was just patient drivers who really did brake for the animals in front of them.

I arrived at the address Annie provided a few minutes later on foot with Nick showing up simultaneously in his truck.  We found three smiling and obviously dog-loving twenty-something women sitting on the granite steps of their apartment house petting the two canine pals.  The women had brought down a giant bowl of water that the dogs had indulged in -- the excitement of their journey had gotten them a little tired and thirsty, I guess.  I'm sure they would have been just as happy to hang out there with their new human friends but we said our profuse thank yous quickly and ferried them on their way, Theo walking home with me, Hunter riding back in the truck.  The time had come to split up the perpetrators, to end the caper, to get dogs and humans back home safe, sound, and relieved.

The Price of Cleaning

I spent yesterday morning cleaning, because my cleaning lady was coming.  Or should I say my cleaning guy and gal?    -- the hip twenty-somethings from the eco-friendly cleaning service Green Clean Maine  I hired recently to clean our house.  I must say, there are so many reasons I don't like my cleaning people -- I think of them as the James Franco and Anne Hathaway of the cleaning world, doing a thankless job in front of an unappreciative audience.  (Just to be clear -- this is nothing personal -- they're really quite polite and friendly young people.)

First there's the cost. I pay them $100 every two weeks to mop the floors and dust the windowsills and scrub the tub, a rate that comes out to about $35/hour/cleaning star.  I know they're not pocketing that since they are employed by a real business with a company van, an office, and a boss, but from the purchaser's perspective -- that would be me -- it's a pretty impressive rate of pay for the simple labor they perform.  

Then there's this cleaning before the cleaning issue.  You may wonder why this is necessary, which would prove that you have never paid someone else to clean your house -- or that you're my friend Lynn, whose house never ever has looked like it needed to be cleaned, even in the midst of a fifteen-person dinner party.  But Lynn's house is not my house and after two weeks of Kanha, Theo, and I living our normal lives in our house with too many walls and no closets, the interior looks like fifteen dinner-partiers were here too -- they took their coats off, ate a good meal, read a few magazines and a book or two, helped Kanha with her homework, and even took a quick roll in our beds, and left all of the evidence behind and none of it where I thought it was supposed to be.  (Looking around, I'd imagine they'd report it was a very good party.)  As a result, in order for James and Anne to be able to get to the floors and shelves and table tops to clean them, I must pick up the mess.  

Then, once I've completed the unveiling of as many surfaces as possible, I must vacate my own house.  If I had a job, with an office and a boss (even without the company car), this would not be a problem -- I would trip out the door over the pile of shoes, past the pills of dust, away from the streaks of dirt, drop Kanha at school, do my productive day of work, and come happily home to a shiny clean and and oh-so-so environmentally correct home.  But I have no office other than the one in my bedroom, and that needs to be cleaned too.  Moreover it's unnerving to hang out and see, out of the corner of one eye, Anne scrubbing my soap scum off the bathroom sink or James wiping up last night's cheese crumbs from the counter.  The company's environmental bend assuages just a tiny bit of my liberal guilt over having someone else clean up my mess -- there's plenty left for me to wallow in.  So I make up an errand or two and head out for an hour and a half and try to feel more productive than penitent.  

Yesterday my timing was slightly off.  Anne and James were just finishing up when I got back from the post office and grocery store and vacuum shop and pharmacy -- I couldn't come up with anything else needing doing -- so I came in and let Theo out while they were donning their rain boots and loading up their jars of no chemicals cleaning solvents.  I turned away for a minute as they headed out and Theo, in the unpredictable way of all dogs, came racing back in, tracking every drop of rain water and dirt that could be contained in four little dog paws across the beautiful and formerly very clean floors of our house.  I'm thinking of just calling the fifteen partiers back over right now -- and perhaps Anne and James will want to come too...

The Incompetent Gardener

A glorious day in Portland, Maine, and we deserve it, if I do say so, on behalf of all of my fellow Mainers who have survived a cold and very white winter and cold and very gray spring.  When this past winter snuck up on me -- my first winter back in Maine after five away -- I had, somehow, forgotten how nasty a winter up here can be.  Winters in Massachusetts can be unpleasant but just two hours north brings a few more degrees of cold and a few more inches of snow in a typical year, and that is enough to huddle inside in front of the fireplace and step up your planning for that Florida condo.  Worse, spring comes later, colder, and even a bit less bright -- it seems a complete indignity to me that one still needs a pair of gloves on a morning run on many May days up here in the north.

Ahh, but I started my story on a positive note so I must return.  It's sunny and warm enough today to go without a jacket and the birds are chirping and the flowers are showing their colors.  Whoops, I'm starting to frown again.  You see, all of a sudden I have a garden, a real garden, with mulch and wood chips and plants I don't know the names for and an irrigation system.  To many of you, I suspect this would seem great good fortune, not impending terror, and on the days when I am just looking out the window and feeling grateful for my cool old house and its patch of yard and the haven of plants, trees, and flowers that form its border with the city streets, I too see the garden as a blessing.  However, on a day like today, a Saturday, when the sun is shining and the clock is not calling me to work and my neighbors are out in their yards, sweeping out the last dead leaves and planting bushes and cutting their grass, sadly, my heart is not light -- it is filled with dread at my total incompetence amongst a gaggle of greenery.  

Not that I haven't tried, but over the years, we -- my gardens and I -- have never gained a sense of mutual love, never mind respect.  There was the patch of vegetables I planted at my first real house in Natick, a Boston suburb, that quickly became overgrown with weeds.  I didn't understand why I only got zucchini, which, as we know, cannot be killed even by the blackest-thumbed gardener, until my friend told me that you really had to pull out the weeds that were scaling the vegetable plants, even if you thought they looked cool.  There were the brussels sprouts my ex and I planted one summer in the eight inch wide strip of dirt at the front of our parking area at our old house in Portland, stalks of which we pulled out of the thawing snow the following March.  They almost looked edible although we didn't dare try eating them at that point -- the eating season was long gone, never mind the growing one.  There was the comprehensive and detailed garden of mostly seeds planted in the raised beds in my adorable backyard in Cambridge a couple of years ago as a joint project with Kanha and my niece and her future husband.  I provided the real estate and the three of them did the planting -- tomatoes, basil, cucumbers, lettuce, radishes, peppers, and probably a few more vegetables that one would dream of pulling out of their own ground and devouring right in that spot on a beautiful New England summer day.  I'm sure it won't surprise you that the only thing we ever saw in full grown, edible form were the tomatoes and basil --  they had started their lives as baby versions of themselves and not just seeds, giving them a fighting chance of survival that our gardening skills did not.  By the end of the summer, the blight going around had even destroyed most of the tomatoes and, in fact, most of my gardening will.  

But here I go again.  Perhaps I'll do better this time.  I'm working with plants here, not vegetables -- maybe they're easier.  (Or maybe not...).  I have an incredible head start -- the garden is already mature, someone with real talent and love for the greenness of life created it and all I have to do is keep it alive. I'm committed to making this house my home so perhaps that commitment will blossom into skill when I drag out the trowel and hoe.  

Today I spent an hour, digging up weeds  -- well, really, digging up dandelions because they were the only green things I was sure were weeds.  It's a start.  I've invited my friend Barbara, gardener extraordinaire, over to exchange libations for advice.  I'm humble and hopeful.  Let the spring blossom, throughout the city and in my garden.  

The Nightly News

Last night Kanha and I were watching the news together.  OK, I realize this is somewhat of a questionable practice.  We all realize that on any given night, on one of the network channels, there's a lot -- a torrent, really --  of bad news that comes across the screen:   horrible weather catastrophes, wars from here to there and back, rapes and murders, reports on the latest crisis in health care or the budget or our school systems.  (On the show I watch the most often, NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, I find it somewhat humorous that every night they end with a three or four minute piece called Making A Difference -- as if this brief report on one person or group in one small community doing one piece of good can counterbalance the mountain of bad news they've covered for the last twenty minutes.  Perhaps that makes them more hopeful than me.)

But these days the evening news is practically the only way I get any news.   I know, it's so retro -- hardly should be admitted to on an electronic, on-line, techno-ish blog.  But I don't like reading long articles on-line (although short blog blurbs are great!) -- the New York Times just isn't the same without that crisp sound as I flip each page.  And the news I get on the websites I frequent -- Yahoo, RoadRunner -- may be less doom and gloom but it's definitely more "what planet am I on?"  -- endless stories about the royal wedding, creative ways to make your bed, and whose face sells the most magazines.  And my other retro options -- listening to NPR, actually flipping all those pages of the paper -- seem to have dropped out of my life due to lack of time, money, and hours in the car.    

Perhaps, you think, I should just give up, throw in the towel, as many of us have.  If the news is so bad, why listen to it anyhow?  Why not just live in the worlds we feel some control over, the worlds where we can star in our own Making a Difference segment by cooking casseroles for a seriously ill friend or springing for dinner for someone out of work -- actions that can mitigate the bad news those we know experience -- and leave the wider world to someone else?    Sounds wise, I think, for a few minutes -- but I just can't do it.  My dad watched the news every night right after his 6 pm dinner, and then quizzed us on what was happening the next night.   He wanted to be aware, for better or worse, and he wanted us to be also, and it got under my skin.   So I keep up, I stay aware, by sitting in front of that TV each evening.

And I let Kanha sit there too.  I know everyone won't agree with that choice but I'm not the mom who is creating the perfect, protected childhood for her kid.  Perhaps I should but I figure the world will catch up with her soon enough -- shouldn't she know a little bit about what's in it?  So we watch the news.

And then, last night, she asks me, in the midst of a scene of violent battle, "Mommy, why are they fighting?"   By the time the commercial comes and I can answer, I can't even remember which war she's referring to.  Is it the ongoing violence in Libya where civilians are being massacred or the recent uprising in Syria, a country late to the rebellion party, or the massive prison break in Afghanistan where Americans -- the older brothers and sisters of kids her age -- are dying?  And how can I possibly explain?  I will admit to trying, and I will admit to not coming close to succeeding.  And I wonder if I should just turn the TV off.  

Missing Body Parts

I'm home this weekend by myself -- and really, literally, all alone, by myself.  No kid, no dog, no guests, almost no social plans.  Which should feel like a relief, and mostly it does.  No one to make breakfast for -- fried egg sandwich or bowl of dog food, no one to urge out the front door for the next gymnastics practice, no one to worry about what he's got in his mouth.  Time to follow some of Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, a rare self-help book from which I actually have retained a few of the suggested action items that might help me.  I have time to do those unimportant, un-urgent things that I simply want to do -- to read my book, do my yoga, go for a brisk walk -- and, more important in fact, I actually have time to do the things that are in that crucial furthest quadrant of his chart

-- the important but un-urgent things that usually get swept away, or indefinitely postponed, in the crises of the day.  I've organized my desk so I can see an open space of wood, I've washed the throw blankets on the living room couch that Theo has been crawling all over for weeks, I've figured out 90% of Kanha's summer camp schedule.  In just a few hours, I've regained a sense of mental organization that matches my clean desk -- there's a reasonably large chunk of uncluttered space again.  

What remains surprising to me, after all these years -- almost six -- of being on my own is that I never completely get used to these solo weekends, these respites from the grind of my parenting life. I typically don't mention this to my "married with children and hectic lives" friends, because I know to them it probably sounds like nirvana:  a read book, a brisk walk, a clean desk -- who wouldn't want one of those?  Especially when the last time you experienced it, at least without guilt, was in the last millennium.  But it's as if I'm missing a body part for these couple of days -- not an arm or leg as I'm functioning ok, but the sensation is similar to the "phantom limb" phenomenon that I've heard veterans discuss.  It's as if Kanha is still here, nearby, yet I turn and no, she's not.  She's not here to hear about the day's weather report or look at a funny cartoon I found on the web or ask what she wants for dinner.  I even miss Theo -- I am constantly imagining I'm about to trip over him and keep heading for the front door to let him out until I realize there's no furry ball sitting there patiently waiting.   It seems clear the body part they've actually taken away is a tiny sliver of my heart.  I'm always so grateful when it gets returned on Sunday evenings.  And I'm glad that's only a few hours away. 

Not Going Away

I'm sitting here, trying to work away, the puppy on the other side of the room chewing away on some type of animal's trachea (and, even though I'm an animal lover and it sounds disgusting, I couldn't be happier because he's not chewing me or my stuff), my contractor Nick banging away on the floor upstairs, his girlfriend's dog Hunter, tied up out front, barking away -- as you can imagine, I wish I could just get away.

But I am happy Nick is here and has started on the work.  The plan is to turn the upstairs space into a living suite for me -- bedroom, three-quarters bath, office, and walk-in closet.  The woman who sold me the house had had the same plan for the space and had some initial work done, then, it appears, threw her hands up into the air and walked out with it one-tenth finished.  Come to find out, her act of despair isn't all that surprising considering that the insulation, the initial framing, and the plumbing were all done wrong, a fact I have discovered largely since I committed to having the space refinished.  Every day comes a new surprise -- the old work permit is no longer acceptable by Portland City Hall so I have to pay for a new version (a few hundred $$), new drawings to go along with the new permit would help (another couple of hundred $$), better insulate the full basement along with the attic (now we're into several thousand $$).  I realize it's what everyone says about a renovation project -- it always always always costs more than you expect.  But somehow, shockingly!, it feels like new news when it's happening to me.  

Having said all that, I'm thrilled with Nick.  He's already my second contractor -- I had to fire the first one, an old friend who created a fabulous kitchen for my ex and I, after I couldn't get him to talk to me.  After sending emails, leaving phone messages, and trying to corral him in the dining room while he breezed through with the plumber and electrician in tow, far too busy to talk with me, I could see this had all the markings of a one-sided love affair.  I was going to spend my hours imploring him to spend more time with me, to listen to my ideas and my needs, and he was going to constantly be shaking me off.  Bottom line, I needed someone who would pay more attention to me.  If I couldn't get it in my last relationship, I was going to find it in my builder, doggone it.  And I seem to have, with Nick.  He's got a creative flair -- he was the one who came up with the idea to turn the dining room into the kitchen and vice versa, he found the surplus blue glass tiles for the shower at a super cheap price, he suggested the bannister for the stairs that will come down along the inside treads like a fireman's pole.  And he's happy to hear what I think, and even take me up on some of my ideas -- as long as I keep paying him, of course.  A very fair trade I've decided.  

It will probably take another month or so for the upstairs to get finished as we have to wait for City Hall to bless the plans and the historical commission to approve the window design.  In the meantime, I will wait as patiently as possible as we live amongst the stuff and the noise.  I will not go away.