…I’d say crazy devil in-laws are a myth. Mine are awesome. I got to see every single one of them this week! Mikey and Andy (and Dave, Dallas, Clint and Walt) opened for Will Oldham on Monday night, so everyone descended on our town for some vis’tin (and babysitting so Angie and I could both go to the show – yay!)

Also, a whole little crew of people from my hometown came to see Mikey play.

Brain-bending things happened. I saw people I haven’t seen in four years (Claire!), I saw people that I have only been around in totally different contexts (most excitedly with the lovely attached to this arm), and almost every single one of my “worlds” was all mingled together in the same bar. I am very George Costanza about this happening.

I feel like I woke up on Tuesday morning in some alternate universe that looked exactly like the old one but was somehow different in microscopic ways that I can’t pinpoint. We thought Janet’s cell phone had gotten left behind in the old one, but really Hazel had just “put it away” in her puppet tub.

In New Universe I am somehow way more motivated to GET RID OF SHIT BECAUSE WE’RE MOVING IN FOUR WEEKS. Yeehaw.

Things I worry about as a mother: When is Hazel going to wean and will it be easy or difficult for her? What do we do if she ever wants barbie dolls or “princess” stuff? What do we do if she ever says “can I shoot one of Grandpa’s guns?” What happens if she gets hurt? What happens if she gets sick? Do we homeschool / public school / some alternative school? How many siblings is a good amount? What if she gets bullied? What if she dates a mean boy (or girl!)? What if she wants to pierce things that shouldn’t be pierced? What if she wants lame tattoos? What if she’s not happy? What if she doesn’t like her life? What if she doesn’t like US?

This weekend all of that has been pushed aside for: What do we do when she leaves home? How do we take her to some town for college, buy her with a bunch of crappy food and a set of plastic drawers and XL twin sheets and just LEAVE HER THERE? What if she wants to go to college in CALIFORNIA? I am watching all these nervous parents moving their kids into their dorms this weekend and I want to cry. And the parents of every friend I’ve ever had who has gone to another country for school or work or life (um, hi Mom).

I have at least sixteen years. But we are already half-way to the point where we need to make some serious school decisions. Panic.

At least I have stricken the following worry from my repertoire: What happens when we have another baby? Because I think I know that one. Hazel LOVES babies, all of a sudden. She has been cradling stuffed animals and dolls and board books open to pictures of babies and singing to “baby Yo-wee” and hugging and kissing them. She will be just fine. Thrilled, in fact, to have a baby brother or sister.

She loves baby Zoe. She also loves Clint and Kelly A LOT.

Listening: Vic Chesnutt
(I am) Reading: haven’t touched a book in days
(Hazel is) Reading: The Bee Man of Orn, in that picture up there and all day yesterday
Working on: Etsy, Etsy, Etsy…
Thinking about working on: fall PJ pants for Hazel, baby gifts, some wall art (for what walls? I don’t know – I have no walls)

Whilst waiting out a torrential downpour in our tent last week, I ran out of animals / vegetables / minerals to draw for Hazel, and for some reason thought to draw West Virginia. Then we made a list of people from WV. Then Mikey drew Ohio and we listed people from there. We were desperate to keep her entertained, and she seems to enjoy memorizing lists lately.

“How about Clint… Clint is from West Virginia. Who else?”

“Hawvey.”

Hazel has met Clint & Kelly’s dog, Harvey, only three or four times ever. He’s a youngin’. She saw them two weeks ago and can deduce that since Clint is from West Virginia, his dog must be, too.

I feel like I’ve been saying this a lot lately, but HOW DID WE GET HERE. My BABY is DEDUCING INFORMATION. Terrifying.

Of course, we blew the whole thing twenty seconds later when we informed her that Paisley is, in fact, from Ohio.

Two West Virginia natives (one by way of Indiana) meet, adopt a buckeye dog and manufacture a Canadian child. Figure that one out, kid.

Today she examined photos clipped to a string on the wall and instead of naming the people, named their dogs. I died a little.

“Ea-wuh, Paisee, Hawvey, Cah-win.”

Earl, Paisley, Harvey, Carlin. We met my parents this afternoon to reclaim that buckeye mutt of ours. I missed her and Hazel missed her. I don’t know about Mikey, sometimes. Clint says “I’ve never known someone who had such loathing for their dog.”

I know my parents are really good dogsitters because Paisley is always depressed and won’t eat for two days when she comes back from their house. Thanks, parents. Welcome home, daggit.

The first week of August hangs at the very top of the summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color. Often at night there is lightning, but it quivers all alone. There is no thunder, no relieving rain. These are strange and breathless days, the dog days, when people are led to do things they are sure to be sorry for after.

(I’ve been thinking about a childhood favorite all summer, and then Erin posted this – this is why we’re friends.)

Music music music, tiny family, far-away friends, cramming into tents to wait out downpours, ice-cold beer, dancing, happy kid, her “I love my life” and everyone else’s “I love mine, too” while passing around a jar of moonshine and bobbing in the coldest swimming hole in Fayette county (at least…)

…bliss that you could cut with a knife.

We’re all stuck in here together like a big family… let’s drink.

Clifftop 2009

Today we left for Clifftop. I planned diligently, squirreled things into a tidy heap for weeks, made food, made lists, made it the most organized trip ever. Got on the road two minutes ahead of schedule – just in time to get us there a few hours before dark when it would be nice & cool for setting up camp and finding friends, two minutes early EVEN after a mad half-hour search and rescue of Andy Floppinberg (and two worried phonecalls to places that she might have been left behind)…realized ten minutes from home that the only thing we’d forgotten was one of our camping lanterns …not a big deal. Picked up a couple of last minute things in town and Hazel was almost asleep, sure to remain that way for the whole two and a half hours of driving that lay ahead, banjos and fiddles comin’ through the ipod, killing time until the real things put me to sleep later this evening.

And then we hit traffic at construction and sat still for awhile. And then our air conditioner died. And then we hit more traffic at an accident, where we sat at a standstill for 45 minutes while sweat poured in buckets from my child’s head and she kicked me repeatedly and I actually YELLED at her (Mikey’s banjo & guitar get to ride shotgun). And then we heard a weird rattle under our hood and smelled something funny for about four and a half seconds, that may have been us or may have been the huge truck we were behind. And then we made calls for car advice. And then we stopped at an auto parts store to check our coolant (fine) and belts (fine) and figured we must just need freon in our AC (deal with it later) and decided to get on our way and just set up the bare minimum of camp in the dark and get totally settled in the morning. And then we needed to make an impossibly fast dinner stop and chose Taco Bell. Couldn’t find it (seriously? we’re 15 minutes from home), did a u-turn at a bank and stopped for some cash while we were there. Called friends to let them know we were on our way south, and that if something else happened traffic-wise we might not make it to the campground before they stopped letting new people in for the night – if so, knowing they have a group this week, a random tent in their yard in the morning would be us. Weird rattling noise started again as we idled in the bank parking lot, talking on the phone. Drove next door to a(nother) auto parts store. Employee and random customer and Mikey stare at the innards of our car for 15 minutes. Still nothing visibly wrong and it won’t make the rattling noise of course. Mikey is very mad. Hazel is SCREAMING. It has been three hours since we left home and we are only actually twenty minutes away. We should have set up camp an hour ago. Walt tells us to bring our car to his house so he can look at it. We do. The noise magically happens but nothing is going to fall off of it anytime soon, he says. We each drink a beer in his driveway. I get 27 bug bites, Hazel gets none. We go to Black Bear as a consolation prize (and since we’re saving the $30 we would have paid to camp tonight). Hazel freaks. We order our food to go. I hug an old friend I haven’t seen since 2006. I iphotograph a giant yellow moth laying eggs in the parking garage. We drive back home and unpack a single toothbrush, a binky and four beers.

Today we came home from Clifftop.

Try again tomorrow.

…just as fast as my feet can fly…

August, please don’t leave me as fast as July is seeming to slip through my fingers. How is it possible that we were just digging ourselves out of more than three feet of snow and now we’re making piles of stuff to pack for Clifftop, and this morning Maggie and I trekked to our favorite consignment shop to get fall clothes for our little ladies? How how how?

It has been insanely hot for the past couple of weeks, and over the weekend our godfamily came to stay over night as heat-refugees from their inferno of an apartment. We had a delicious feast that reminded me that in the summer, really all I want to do is roll around in the delicious food and mourn the fact that there is no rational / logical way for a family of drifters to put food by for the winter. We just… don’t eat tomatoes or strawberries for months on end. Will I buy a four-dollar pint of strawberries from California in December because my precious, fruit-fly toddler pleads for them with her big brown eyes in the grocery store? Probably… on occasion.

And also, I really just want to have another baby so we can have more compadres. They’re all the fun and awesomeness rolled up in love and funny of real family, but, you know… you hand-pick them. Ha!

(delicious little rainbow of tealights / PJ-homebrew and Kate-made butter / the essence of summer / a feast / ohmygod I love comparing the aesthetics of a meal on several different colors of Fiestaware / the g-fam)

Bring a song and a smile for the banjo
Better get while the gettin’s good
Hitch a ride to the end of the highway
Where the neons turn to wood…

- CCR

(I know that song is supposedly about draft-dodging, but really, I just feel like it’s about summer.)

Listening: CCR
(I am) Reading: Never Let Me Go (which so far I totally do not understand, but it seems really amazing in a The-Giver-for-adults kind of way, possibly…)
(Hazel is) Reading: Freight Train
Working on: random little things – I need to try to make Hazel a strap for her little toy banjo, but I’m still pondering this one. Sew? Crochet?

…and now I have this kid. This tiny little Scout Finch lookin’ kid with whom I can play footsies under a blanket as we lounge at opposite ends of the couch for half an hour before dinner. Me reading the new Mothering and she watching a 70s episode of Sesame Street, saying the next letter seven or eight times while listening to an alphabet song.

This kid who responds with a list when asked “what’s in the sky?”

“Moon… buhds… ay-payne… stahs… wain… sun…

The kid who points to my “H” necklace and says “H… Hazies.”

This kid who tells me to “back up!” when I’m in her way. Who casually names the animals and people who live at Grandma’s house while she pees on the potty. Who lifted up her shirt and “nursed” Andy today. Who stares at a bunch of photos of she & her people clipped to a string on the wall and ticks of a list of everyone in them: Ca-ca… Cana… G’ma & Pa-Pa… Dada… Pais… Walties… Mama… Cinty & Mah-yo… Mo…

This kid who applauds wildly and exclaims “yays!” at the end of her own songs, of anything Mikey plays on guitar and banjo, and at the end of an assortment of recorded songs, most consistently Bad Moon Rising.

Most of her songs are about dogs and Andy. She looks for her daddy first thing every morning, pats his back gently (because he’s always asleep on his stomach), mutters “Dada” and cuddles against him for a few more minutes of rest. She bursts into tears if she sees another person crying. She talks about Luca and Aunt “Miney” about seven thousand times a day. She wants to know the name of every person and animal and thing in the world. She tries to keep every single grain of sand in the sandbox. She pages through at least fifty books a day – on her own, aside from what we read to her – in their entirety. She is starting to talk about things she did a few days ago or a week ago. I think that so far we disagree less than most parent-toddler teams. I feel like our ratio of hangout time : simply taking care of her time is getting more even every single day.

Her intellectual growth over the past month or six weeks has been the fastest and most alarming thing yet about having an always-getting-bigger offspring in my care. And also the most entertaining, fun & fascinating. I am so excited to watch the rest of her life more than ever.

May God bless and keep you always,
May your wishes all come true,
May you always do for others
And let others do for you.
May you build a ladder to the stars
And climb on every rung,
May you stay forever young,
Forever young, forever young,
May you stay forever young.

-Bob Dylan

Last night was so good. I mean, I live with this guy, and for the most part we are home together all day every day (even though he’s always holed up working on school work and I hole up and do my work first thing in the morning and after supper), but I still don’t get enough of him. I was happy to know we can still find things to talk about for three hours straight, even if a lot of it involved beefs with the catholic church, and even if we kept halting our conversations so he could sing Steve Winwood’s “Back in the High Life Again” to all the bartenders at Black Bear. He’s been trying to decide if he should cover it for a (possible) show with all of his siblings & Walt. I don’t think I’d ever recover from laughing. It’s one of those songs that no one actually realizes that they know almost all the words to until someone starts to sing it, and then you think “oh yeaaahhh, this is the song I hear every time I am picking out bananas in the grocery store”, and the more they sing, the more you think “wow, this is actually kind of a good song”, but you are still laughing. Those are his favorite things to cover. Few & far between, my friends. And this song is on a very thin line. The bartenders all said YES (and one of them told him to do CCR’s “Lodi”, which I suggested about a month ago and now he’s actually considering it). Andy said “We’ve got this, Iafrate” and Angie said “I don’t drink anymore” (but she could possibly still be persuaded) and we don’t even have to ask Janet. Walt said something like “I’m going to pretend you didn’t text me this question on your anniversary date night”. For now, I am going to have Steve Winwood in my head for weeks. Only I don’t have the specific memories of my dad’s tape in an old VW camper van like they do.

Just buying bananas as an adult.

I’ve been meaning to publicly address a question from Kate, because I know a lot of other people have it: “Are you still in Morgantown for the time being? I’m confused about your life and whereabouts”

Until the past few days we, too, have been confused about our life and whereabouts. Well, not whereabouts. We are still here, house sitting until fall. We’ll be going to the CCA conference at the end of September, and will either move in with Mikey’s mom before or after that, since D&T return from their travels in October. He had another possibility come up but it fell through, and he’s admittedly a little relieved to just move in with his mom so he can have another year to completely devote to school work. We’ll stay there until next summer, I suppose, when he will hopefully have landed fulfilling and gainful employment for the 2011 school year. And hopefully by the time that happens he’ll be very near to finished with this degree. I mean, I know it happens to other people. We just aren’t seeing the light at the end of the tunnel yet, or at least I’m not. He has one more exam before he’s ABD so maybe it’ll seem a little more realistic at that point. There are a hundred reasons why cohabitation with my MIL is a really good idea. And we’re getting used to being drifters.

Someday we’ll have all of our own furniture and hang things on the walls and paint.

For now, we drift.

(I gave up on the monthly banners for awhile. We’ll be at Clifftop during the first week of August, so I just made something that would last the rest of summer.)

…I was too busy double-toddler-minding…

…meal-cooking, trying to make “monies!!” (<– H’s new favorite word), getting a guitar lesson (with the “Mikey wrapping his arms around me and putting my hands where they need to go” method – not sure how far I’ll get), showering (gasp) and then watching New Moon whilst knitting. I was so out of it by the end of the day that Hazel’s diapers are still hanging on the clothesline this morning, and I didn’t even boggle on my iphone before I fell asleep. I hadn’t seen the second movie yet and I need to be caught up* for a collective girlfriend viewing of Eclipse tomorrow, so I stayed up much too late. Even though I have acquired a “team Jacob” shirt, I gotta say – I have always thought Bella’s dad is the most adorable and endearing of the Twilight men. Too bad about his unfortunate facial hair and the fact that he’s a cop.

Anyway.

Happy Canada Day (yesterday), from my favorite little Canadian.

Also – I have a custom Etsy order in the works that is requiring lots of bird books that I can cut up. If you have any kicking around in your dusty, unused piles of books, I will pay cash dollars (but not many).

* I couldn’t use this evening for movie catch-up because Mikey and I are going on an actual, by ourselves, leaving Hazel with Aunt Angie & Luca DATE. Even though we renewed our wedding vows last week at a double-wedding (with Kelly & PJ) coordinated by Ella (don’t we look beautiful?), we still feel the need to go out to dinner to celebrate our five years. Alone. For some reason I am thinking of Andrea here, and hoping for a meal full of conversation that does NOT revolve around any of the following: Hazel / having another baby, school, job hunting, money, or sex.

Happy anniversary, my love!

Honeymoonin’, July 2005

Now everyone dreams of a love lasting and true
But you and I know what this world can do
So let’s make our steps clear that the other may see
And I’ll wait for you
If I should fall behind
Wait for me

-Springsteen