Seeds and Stems.

My Beloved Mister, if nothing ever else, still makes me laugh my ass off.

And of course, there's plenty else. Some of it ill-fitting, some an uphill climb, some just right cozy like a comfy chair or porridge of the proper temperature. We'll have been married for five years this October, and this week marks the anniversary of the same vintage of one of the darkest and most relationship changing chapters of our time together.

Last night, laying in bed with the fan rattling and the baby boy suckling away and the books surrounding us, a library copy of Barbara Kingsolver's "Small Wonder" poking me sharply in the hip, I laugh and laugh and laugh myself silly when my Mister says, "You gotta wash that thang!" I'd commented on heat and neglect and bother. I'll leave the remainder of the conversation to your imagination. Given my propensity for idiotic bursts of hilarity, your made-up version will likely be better than the real thing.



"Uh oh," says Ziggy, for the umpteenth time. "Sumpin' down there."

He points to the place between the head of the bed and the wall. Once upon a long, long, long time ago, maybe a book fell there, but nothing since, though to hear Ziggy tell it, it's a regular happening, like, every few minutes some nights.

"Mommy! Uh oh. Uh oh. Sumpin' down there."

"What is it?" I ask, hoping to convey the proper concern despite my exhaustion and the mental worry beads I'm massaging over how to pay the latest round of hospital bills, put a deposit down on the new (as yet unfound) place, set aside the tax money from earnings, and hire someone to move all our heaps of stuff instead of doing it ourselves in dribs and drabs.

"Goldfish crackers!" says Ziggy, wholly delighted with himself.

I laugh. The Mister laughs from where he's pasting up the boy's toothbrush.

"Uh oh, Mommy! Sumpin' down there."

"What is it this time?"

"Bug!"

The next time it is graham crackers. I fully expect the bug to graduate to eating or baking the blasted things between the head of the bed and wall.



Somehow I conned the Mister into changing foul poopy (thank you, eye teeth!) diaper number three last night.

While he's cleaning up the heinie and preparing the boy for bath, something suddenly reminds me that I've forgotten to share Ziggy's latest joke and I run in to tell him that it's, "Junie Moon, August."

Clever boy.



Yesterday early morning the Mister and I make plans of action as if we are battle ships or pirates at sea or even a mostly happily married couple raising a baby and working too hard for as much fun as we'd like. We settle on a yard sale date, agree on timetables and budgets and familial requirements with regard to this unsettling of our lives that's been thrust upon us by our landlord couples' decision to sell the house we live in and begin the scraping of toxic paint sooner rather than later. We agree, in far less silly words, that there's a rainbow at the the end of all this somewhere. (The lovers, the dreamers, and me; all of us under it....)

I skitter out to the backyard, coffee in hand and quickly beckon the Mister out to see what I'm on about. All my seeds have sprouted, including the difficult cilantro and the butternut squash that I felt sure Ziggy and Bert the Dog had pulled from its place.

From the Swiss chard to the Black Beauty zucchini, these seeds will make stunning little transplants that I plant to pot right up with its carefully cultivated lasagna bedding, to find a home where the rest of us land in the next month or so.

Only my rosemary, started from a small organic plant, suffers and dies a way bit by bit, unhappy in the ceramic pot given us by a friend who hauled it from Kansas City to be at our wedding to eat hot chicken and dance with the bride.

And maybe it's suiting. The herb for remembrance seems to tell me, some things perhaps should just fade away and be forgotten.


Scraped all together, rolled up tight, this is a good life.