Category: Family

Weed this and reap

Published on by NouveauSoileau3 Comments

This summer has been an unmitigated disaster, yard-wise. In fact, I’m pretty sure my neighborhood association is on a vicious crusade to make me feel really, really bad about myself, what with all the talk in the newsletter of “grass needs to be no more than 8 inches high” this and “don’t obscure your front windows with wild untrimmed hedges” that.

Please.

It’s not my fault the weather this year has caused an explosion of plants and weeds of nuclear, if not Biblical, proportions. Thistles as thick as my arm. Queen Anne’s Lace that I could actually use to make an epic wedding dress, including veil. Morning glories adrift in the middle of the front lawn, if you can believe that.

Hot damnI lay the blame on the super-hot temperatures we had in late June and early July. It was, honest-to-God, 105 degrees in the Fahrenheit one Saturday afternoon, and that pretty much killed any grass-like foliage I had growing both in front of and behind my house. Thus ensued Bare Spots, in which the dormant weeds, awakened by the monsoons rains which followed the HtG 105-degree weather, flourished.

My yard, ya see, until about 2003, lay in the middle of a large pasture, undeveloped and uninhabited — unless you count the gophers. They’re still here, by the way. Groundhog Central. Anyway, this pasture land, ungrazed by any animal and untended by any farmer, fostered the growth of the aforementioned thistles and Queen Anne’s Lace undisturbed for centuries. I mean, Indians trod on my wild thistleland. Cave men tripped on my morning glory’s forebears. So when the grass gave up the ghost, the dormant seeds, undeterred by a couple years’ worth of sod laid atop it, sprang forth and stormed across my lawn like conquering warlords.

Matters were made worse by the absence of my yard boy for part of the summer, who also is known in some circles as my son Christopher. He was away quite a bit, and when he returned he had to go to band camp … eyeroll … sheesh, kids these days. So despite the fact that the drought made mowing unnecessary for most of the summer, when he returned — and then vanished as a mowing entity — the weed warlords saw their opportunity and set themselves upon world domination. Er, make that the domination of my yard. This whole matter had made me think quite apocalyptically. (Is too a word.)

But he did return, and he did mow, so the pampas grassland that formerly was my back yard now has settled back into its normal state of resembling the shorn head of of marine recruit. (See photo below; scrutiny of airborne progeny and boyfriend of eldest optional.)

Up up and away!

Another interesting phenomenon is the planter on my front porch, planted with some sad petunias, some subdued greenery, and one whoppin’ big example of a forage plant.

This big thing here, which sprouted and took off during the monsoon portion of the summer’s proceedings, I believe to be an example of the millet plant. Its arrival isn’t too much of a mystery; last summer this particular flower pot sweated it out in the brutal conditions on my back deck, near the bird feeder. The untidy birds, as birds are wont to do, scattered about as much seed around the deck as they ate, some of which accumulated in the planters. Last spring I just dumped in a little fresh potting soil along with the new plants and went about my business. If some of last year’s birdseed sprouted, I just plucked it as I always do. But this whopper escaped me, and it charged out of the planter with astonishing energy, resulting in the vigorous crop of one plant you see before you today.

I find it amusing, as a peculiar addition to the wild crop of everything I’ve got growing in my yard this year. Oh I could be weeding and tidying every waking moment that I’m not working or feeding my hungry huddled masses, but something tells me it wouldn’t make a vast amount of difference. So I embrace my embarrassing yard, and the neighborhood association can just get over itself. If the apocalypse truly does come, I’ll be able to feed my family! I’ve got a crop of millet!

I wonder if morning glories are any good on toast.

Parenting in the new millinium

Published on by NouveauSoileau2 Comments

I have an iPhone with SIRI; you can speak into it and it translates your words into text. Amazing, right? So I use it a lot to text my text-mad teenagers.

Last night as I was getting my 7-year-old son Trassie out of the bath downstairs, I spoke a text to my 14-year-old son Christopher upstairs, whose bedroom is adjacent to the laundry room.

I said into the phone, “Get a pair of Trassie’s underwear out of the dryer and throw them down to me, please.”

Trassie looked at me, then the phone for a moment. He then asked —

“Can it do that?”

A guilty woman’s tour of New York

Published on by NouveauSoileau8 Comments

There are lots of ways to see New York. As a tourist, you go to the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, and Central Park. If you’re an art lover, you head straight to the Metropolitan Museum and, especially if you like saying it out loud, MOMA.

If you’re me, you eat a lot, discover a whole lot of what you don’t know, and feel guilty about both.

Take this for example.

Wouldn't we all

Thanks a lot, David Barton Gym. This is supposed to be motivational, I know, and in a world where there are TV series featuring serial killers as heros and chemistry teachers making meth, I shouldn’t be surprised. The sign looks a bit strange because like a lot of New York buildings, it’s being renovated and the scaffolding protects passers-by. Who presumably have murder on their minds.

But of course, after a couple days taking huge, salt-and-butter laden bites out of the Big Apple, I was starting to think such ghoulish thoughts sounded good.

Visiting my sister Cara, chef of a darling restaurant, Cafe Ghia in the Bushwick area of Brooklyn, means eating. A lot. She and our other sister, her twin Leah, are only 30 years old and ridiculously active. A few 1,000 calorie “starters” (what we in New York are now calling appetizers) sit lightly on their yoga-trimmed and cycle-pared thighs. Add 18 years and a lot of sitting around on your ass blogging, and such delights tend to drag down one’s derriere considerably.

So there’s that guilt trip: eat your way across New York and no matter how much walking up and down stairs to the subway you do, you still arrive back home in Kentucky with a newly minted double chin and a drawer full of jeans you can’t zip.

Chelsea HotelHere’s something else: The Hotel Chelsea. Heard of it? Maybe? Well, maybe I had too.

“It’s famous for something,” Leah allowed, as we walked past it to get to the Doughnut Plant next door. (Mmmm doughnuts. See above.)

“Well, it’s also closed,” I announced, seeing the sign on the door.

“Probably bedbugs,” was my mother’s Regis and Kelly-informed opinion.

Well, as it turns out, it too was being renovated, as a group of pretty good-looking guys rolling giant iron carts to the curb told me. Their accents were as thick as the iron too. I felt like I was in On the Waterfront. They couldda been contendas!

As it was, they approved of my photographing the building, wisely acknowledging its fame. I snapped away, wondering, what for?

Leonard Cohen! I know right?Ah, how good of the Chelsea, to provide historical-markeresque plaques for the rubes from the hinterlands. Reading along, I learned this was the famous hotel where writers would go to write, holed up in their New York-fueled frenzy, churning out Pulitzer Prize winning novels and one Great American Novel after another.

Welcome to the ChelseaGuess what? Sir Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey while at the Chelsea and oh, who else stayed there? Just a few nobodies like Mark Twain, Dylan Thomas, Arthur Miller, Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac, who wrote On the Road there.

Good stuff! Why then, the guilt? Oh, because I majored in LITERATURE for Pete’s sake! Literature of the English language! The literature written by people like Mark Twain, Dylan Thomas, Arthur Miller, Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac. You’d think the name “Chelsea” might have penetrated my consciousness at some point. Not to mention all the musicians who flopped, dropped acid, or were murdered within its walls (Nancy, girlfriend of the Sex Pistols’ Sid Viscious was found murdered there.) I SAW SID AND NANCY!

Ah well, I’m an older, wiser, and more well-traveled woman of the world now. I may have to slap on the Spanx and hold my breath for 15 minutes to get into my jeans now —  but by golly, I’ve eaten octopus and rabbit in Brooklyn and consumed pizza and fried dough in Manhattan. And I’ve stood on the sidewalk before the buildings where John Lennon died (the Dakota) and Nancy Spungen expired (the Chelsea).

Maybe it’s not necessary to do any killing to look better naked. Hanging around  New York literary hotspots might just make me thin by association.

Tales of a stealth mom

Published on by NouveauSoileau1 Comment

I heard a story on Morning Edition on NPR today that made me think, for the first time, that being an FBI agent might be an awful lot like being a mother.

The story was on “Tac Ops,” or tactical operations, which involves bugging, searching, or otherwise legally creeping around people’s homes and offices to gather information. The interview, which you can find here, featured an author who had interviewed these operatives and found out how they go about their covert business.

The mom/FBI Agent connection came near the end of the story, where the poorly timed death of an agent in the middle of an operation was detailed. What happened was the poor man died from heart failure in the middle of an oriental rug in a foreign embassy, with the resultant unfortunate mess that often occurs to the human body when it expires.

The creative operatives rolled up the rug and whisked it to an all-night D.C. cleaners, who promptly returned it to a more pristine state. It was, however, still wet. The agents solved that immediately — they simply painted a faux water stain on the ceiling directly above the wet carpet.

This is the kind of ingenuity we mothers with damp, smelly children have been employing since our water broke.

What mother of diapered dozens doesn’t have a cache of wipies in her bag, or even purse? These things could conquer the world. I remember another woman telling me once they’re even perfect for cleaning ceiling fans. Spit-up, leaking diaper contents, actual bottom clean up: there’s not much these things can’t do. Hail the Huggie wipe.

Another amusing tidbit about the tac-op agents was their bag of goodies they bring along. Say they have to move something on a desk, disturbing the dust pattern that had accumulated since the criminals departed. No problem-o. They bring their own dust. Think about that a minute: they travel with dirt so that they can put a room back to rights after they’ve gone over it with a fine-tooth comb for evidence. I once heard dust referred to by a particularly harried mother as the “protective coating” on her furniture. I’d love to know if there’s any way you can test for the authenticity of a room’s dust. We know (via This is Spinal Tap) that you can’t dust for vomit. I wonder if you can dust for dust.

The bag of tricks also apparently includes small, high-powered vacuum cleaners, to suck up the evidence that walls were penetrated to hide bugs, and some sort of high-tech paint-matching chemicals, for smoothing over the destruction of hiding things in people’s walls.

At home, the Stealth Mom merely moves a recliner or love seat and bam! all evidence of a toddler’s creativity after finding a deep-blue Sharpie is erased. Or say an actual bug or spider met his demise halfway up the dining-room wall. Well, that painting would look better on that wall anyway, now wouldn’t it?

I’m reminded of the old Flintstones cartoon, which featured Wilma in a failed attempt to hang a picture on the stone wall of her Bedrock hut. Predictably, the wall cracked in all directions the instant she hammered in the nail. No problem; Wilma the FBI Agent/Mother immediately painted leaves and flowers along the cracks, creating a unique mural that enhanced her lovely home.

Perhaps the Stealth Mom/FBI agent tie isn’t so surprising, come to think of it. After all, moms are women, aren’t we? Hear us roar! Even if we’re slumping around the house, picking up after children in our jammies or sweat pants, inside all of us are June Cleaver in pearls, daintily following the vacuum cleaner in high heels. I seem to recall rumors that J. Edgar Hoover enjoyed the same sort of attire.

Isn’t that darling? The FBI is one of us.