Big Bad Wolf

It's another late-ish night, and I have sent the boys off to Dreamland with their milk and cookies...well, actually, with much grumbling and whining...Josh is now completely convinced that Jon and I have to crash when he does...and keeps demanding that we go to bed too...so that he can wait for us to get under the covers before launching a stealth invasion that could put Navy Seals to shame. Nah-baba-nah...as Papa Dave has so often said. The other night he was in at exactly 12:06, and I had just, JUST shut down...and had to drag him squirming and howling back to his room. I'm okay with him showing up with us later in the morning, but he's too big and too dang kick-y to do the all-nighters anymore. Grandma Wish (Rhonda) keeps smirking and explaining that she knew of a certain person who kept crawling into his parents bed every night until his was eight. Ack!!!

M'OWee is at my feet, alternately attacking one big toe and then the other...it's her way of encouraging the creative process. Koda has had his monthly flea meds, and is in solitary until tomorrow evening so that it can dry properly. If he could, he would be channeling Princess Vespa from Spaceballs ..."Nobody knows the trouble I seen" Unlike Vespa, Koda isn't a bass...he's just a whiny white pile of durf who is capable of going from hysterical silent hisses to B-Movie, mind-meltingly stupid...M'OWee doesn't help matters...She leaps grandly onto the kennel, spread-eagled like a cheap Garfield window toy, and essentially just grins at Koda like a mad thing. Leaving her out at night poses other problems...she's still a baby, so anything that moves is fair game...this usually means she's sharpening her teeth on our sleeping fingers and cheeks and noses, and sharpening her claws on the sleeping feet under the blankets. Sheesh! And she continues her attempts to win Koda over in the middle of the night at the darnedest times conceivable...which results in blood-curdling yowls from the Great White Durf. The other night, I foolishly left them both out and it was lovely and quiet, and we all fell asleep...until 2:45 the following morning when the two of them launched themselves at each other like extras in a Jackie Chan flick. Jon is not comforted that they are more or less settling into a routine and getting used to each other....I can safely bet that if some cat doesn't chill out around another some cat, some Wife-y may be choked on general principle, as I was the one who got him into this mess.

But onto the doin's of the last couple of weeks...

* * * * *

Mom and Dad had Josh twice in a matter of weeks...the first time, was at the end of August, and Jon and I decided we'd try catching a matinee of the Lion King. I can't remember if it had been another short night (read: Josh was in with us) but I know I was beat...Grandpa Dave was there, and Uncle "That'd be Awesome!!!" Jamie showed up later on... Josh had been pouring ice cold pool water on Grandma Marsha (something I always encourage heartily, so long as he doesn't aim that bucket at me), we had played with Truffles...and I had to remind Josh and warn Mom that M'OWee seems to have no bones and lets Josh get away with absolutely everything...and that other little animals weren't so willing to be made into fuzzy taffy pulls. I lived in fear the rest of the weekend that I'd get a call saying Truffles or Roxie had ceased their three-dimensional-status.

Before we arrived, Josh and I had hit the mall to wick off some of that energy and give Mom and crew a fighting chance...it didn't matter...by the time I prepared to leave, I was more beat than Josh was, and all I really wanted was a few minutes to just catch my breath and head out....Josh, as usual, had other plans. He was going up to each person, batting his eyes at them and in full-out-adorable mode, he would ask each person, "please, wanna go outside-play baseball...pwetty pwease?" Of course, by that time of night, everyone else was beat, too...so he finally went up to Truffles the dog, looked her deeply in the eyes and begged her: "pwease Twuffles, wanna play baseball...wanna go outside?" I believe Jay was the one who finally caved, overcome by the cuteness.

The Lion King turned out to be quiet lovely...the girl who sang the part of the adult "Nala" had pipes of pure gold...and I will have to keep an eye out for her down the road...I will also have to keep an eye out for some of the puppet wranglers in the future...I had just mentioned to Jon that the guys with the flying bird puppets were kind of playing a bit fast and loose with their charges, and no sooner were the words out of my mouth than some poor old fellow in a row by the stage got full-out clobbered by a bird to the brain. He seemed to recover reasonably well...but what made it so sad was that he spent the next twenty minutes trying to figure out how to safely "store" the renegade puppet...and in the packed theater, there was simply no place to put it...If it were me, and I had been concussed by a stage prop, I'd be darn certain to keep the bird...and I will wonder for the rest of my life if the gentleman returned his attacker...or kept it, stuffed and mounted on his mantle...or come to think of it, perhaps the old fellow should have been the one on the bird's mantle...

* * * * *

I may have mentioned that there's a new occupant of the Doll House (i.e. - the farmhouse across the street that had belonged to Irene and Helen's mother)...Uncle Larry has moved in, and every one's attention has shifted to their new "toy"...The first order of business has been to get Larry's heath seen to...Apparently he has lung issues, blockage issues, heart issues, back issues, and at least one MRI a week so far...but Harry and Irene and Helen are just ecstatic to have him home...and the ladies have been cleaning his house and cooking his meals and keeping him company -- waaaaay past Ms. Irene's bedtime, I might add (she's usually out by six p.m.). He seems nice enough...much like a very hyper little boy who wants to please everybody...and even Tim has been out and about more thanks to Larry's arrival -- they are up on his porch everyday chatting things up...but I'm beginning to wonder if the two of them may need a chaperon...Every time I hear them talking, they are discussing flames and um, certain bodily gases...and I just know that once Larry doesn't have to rely on the tractor to get up and down that hill that I'll find the two of them out behind a shed somewhere smoking up a storm, with a pile of cherry bombs, slingshots and beer -- just exactly like two squirrely boys skipping school and hiding out from a truant officer.

* * * * *

Josh crashed at Mom's for the second time as we made our way to another one of Jon's lovely union meetings...an event that tends to consistently be more fun for me than it usually is for him. While he was chomping his way through "Group Think -- We're Such A Great Union- Yay, Us!!" exercises with people he barely knows and rarely sees, I was making friends with assorted seagulls...paying too much attention to the gift shop for Jon's own good, and generally just traipsing about the trails in the Maumee Nature Preserve...The grass in the wetland area is lovely and whispery...and somehow looks like wheat that wanted to be corn. The breeze seemed to be filled with laughter...gentle and cool...like little girls hiding behind a sheet on the clothesline...whispering their secrets and shrieking in delighted hysterics when found by an accidental adult. Maumee has taken the unexpected initiative in choosing to maintain their preserve by providing what seems to be three miles of boardwalk for this particular trail. At any given point, you can walk safely three or four feet above the ground on the weathered planks...enjoying the beauty of the deep forest...of the marsh...marking time with each foot upon the wooden path, and each brush and crunch of leaves. Sometimes, on the trail, I tapped my phone, and let Luminosa echo through the forest...or the Navajo song I have become so addicted to...hearing the voices of the boys' choir echo high above the sea grass, or the plaintive, guttural chants of the unknown medicine man moving through the soft afternoon like an audio shadow...it made things more magical...and less lonely...It's a known fact, a person simply can't wander around in sea grass for hours on end and NOT feel lonely... and I tend to fall into a bit of a morose mood when there's a perfectly romantic place...and Jon isn't able to share it with me. My mood lifted a little when Jon was able to join me on a quick return hike about the boardwalk before dinner...but then he was wrapped in all things Union-y again, and I made the mistake of pulling up a k.d. lang cd...which was lovely...but made me all wistful and sad again.

Our room was tiny...and Jon's feet had to hang off of his bed (tiny room, two tiny beds), but the view made up for everything...All we had to do is open the screen door and walk out about fifty yards and we could walk down the breaker-steps and splash our feet in Lake Erie...though why you would want to splash your feet in Lake Erie just yet, I do not know. Even if the pollution level has gone down, I have still watched that Dirty Jobs episode where Mike kept getting attacked by Lake Erie snakes, and with my luck, assuming I even had the grace and skill necessary to navigate the steep, slippery steps, and my feet did not dissolve in a pile of Lake Erie ooze...I just know that I would have come back up the steps with a ticked off Erie Snake attached firmly to my fore or aft. No sir, not gonna do it. We had some coffee out on our patio...meandered around...were accosted by the biggest freakin' seagulls I have ever seen (I kid you not, there were several that were at least the size of Jack Russell Terriers....and one was stalking me with a vengeance)....we swam in the heated pool...hopped in a jacuzzi...but the day started at a quarter of six...and by that point, we knew that any further delay would have us melted into goo before we could drag our sorry selves to our tiny beds. For all of their microscopic size, the beds were lovely. Firm mattresses, cloud-like covers, and pillows that were just about perfect. Oddly enough, the one time I didn't have to worry about Josh on one side, Koda on the other, and poor Jon somewhere around the edge, I piled all of the pillows up around me and snuggled in tight...and slept the sleep of the gods. When the alarm went off the next day, I made the coffee, and brought out the breakfast stash (I had learned to pack a breakfast/snack stash the last time - the Xanterra parks are lovely, but as a rule, their breakfast waitstaff seems distracted...nice, but very, very distracted)...and Jon drank his coffee and munched happily on his cinnamon roll, and I munched on my cereal, and we contemplated the great fog that had eaten the lake beyond our patio door, and the storm (the remains of the second-to-last hurricane) that was coming in to the shore. At least, Jon said, we could no longer see the coast of Michigan...but I think Jon was still unamused because of the odd color game the Union-ies had played the night before...After a series of questions, Jon's colors were designated as "Gold and Blue"...meaning that he had one kind of working style, as opposed to whatever the other working styles were...but in the land of the MAD, FROTHY, Ohio State fans (for the love of all that's holy, do not tell these people that Ohio State's colors are Pink and Gray -- even if it really looks like they are Pink and Gray on any television...They are Scarlet and Gray...Scarlet...as in the color dripping from your nose for suggesting otherwise), Jon felt that he would get severely smooshed just his proximity to the Unmentionable Land of M...and to be assigned their team colors on top of that, well, he was fairly certain he was going to A Special Hell when the others found out.

* * * * *

Perhaps the most notable things that have happened occurred just a few days ago...Hurricane Ike was coming in for a landing, and Denni and her animal posse had departed for Carrie's place...and while I confess a certain evil amusement at the thought of the clash of their respective zoos, and my excited nephew AND my poor hugely be-preggered little sister trying to cope...it occurred to me that the standard by which I live my life -- if things are crazy, they will get crazier-- might suddenly come into play. Sure enough, Carrie has popped her second sprog this week-- tentatively named "Alexander"...and both are doing fine...or at least were before Ike caught the northern part of the herd on the chin. I forget the totals, but in C., there were over 11, 000 power outages...Mom and Dad were out for two and a half days and haven't been able to check in with her...and as for us...well, baby, never let it be said that we don't know how to have a good time.

The wind was whipping around us more fiercely than I had ever seen it...and Jon went outside without his shoes to check the sky conditions...then he told me that we needed to get out and go to Tim's...I thought we were in for a tornado...and wondered about heading for the trailer...but I grabbed Josh and tried to hunt down his shoes (I had always heard shoes were crucial for the tornado aftermath when you might be wading through broken glass and such) while I grabbed what spare cash we had in the house, and tried to corral the two still-obviously-hating-each-other-cats into the small traveling kennels...I expected we'd be heading for the cellar shortly, but I wasn't going to leave them behind. Torey came in, all distracted and hyperventilating and yelled at me that Tim said I needed to leave the house NOW!!! -- and then he tried to stomp out, still in hysterics. I didn't react well (I swear that boy just BOGGLES me sometimes!!!). I had my hands full, and I told Torey to at least take Josh and get him out, and I would get there as quickly as possible. I finally got the idiot cats and bolted...and only when I was at Tim's did I find out what was really going on... Half of a locust tree had been ripped apart by the winds, and had fallen on to the power line connecting to our house. If the line was damaged or snapped, Tim's place would have blown a breaker. However, because the line connected right into our house, one rip in the line meant a house fire. As the wind continued its tirade, the branch dropped even harder onto the line, and now, a large portion of the branch was also on top of our tin porch roof. Jon went back in just long enough to turn the main breaker off, and then dashed back out. God, but it was awful. Jon didn't have shoes or a shirt and was cold and making himself sick because he had no control over the situation...Josh was cranked to high heaven because he knew something was up, but didn't care because he could show off to Papa Tim and Grandma Wish... The poor cats tried to be invisible...we couldn't even set up a place for them because we weren't certain about the old dog's reaction...So we camped out on a mattress on the floor, with Josh snuggled contentedly between us, the cats disturbingly quiet in their carriers, and alternately slept badly and awoke with a start, certain that we would see that awful orange glow coming from our home, but miracle of miracles, it never came. The next morning, we took the bedraggled cats to the vet to board them, feed them and clean them up (it wouldn't have been safe to try with the wind factor the night before). Jon stayed home because there were still some wind issues and he thought the electric company would need him to sign off on things...but he really should have gone in...at least at work, he could have felt like he was doing something...and waiting has never been his strong suit. He was still cold...he was still without shoes...but the wind had died down, and he and I carefully crept around the branches and into our own house and pulled out a couple of things we wanted to salvage...well, I wanted to salvage...What Jon wanted wasn't a tangible thing...he wanted the calm of his house...he wanted to sleep in his own bed. Tim and Rhonda were so gracious, and such good sports, and both of us really appreciated their help...but their house just isn't our home...and that, more than anything was what Jon wanted to keep safe. Jon packed the laptop and some necessary clothes but didn't want to take anything else. We stayed in our home probably longer than it was safe to do so...marveling at the calm...the pleasant noises of our house...it felt like a comforting hand on our shoulders...but even so, we knew we had to leave it again.

We spent another fitful night at the in-laws...Josh was still having a great time...he's always the life of the party...and he could think of no better fun than to bounce insanely about on the mattress we slept on...but later that night, he begged and begged for us to take him home...The next morning, I demanded that Jon go to work, even though we still hadn't heard from the electric company, and the branch was definitely causing the wire to dip low...The wind had stopped, we felt comfortable turning the main breaker on (to save the recent purchases in the fridge) I didn't have to worry about the cats now, and I knew that some semblance of normalcy was going to be the only thing that would help Jon feel better...and sadly, I knew that Josh was going to require a great deal of attention that day (he always seems to go on sensory overload at their house for some reason), and I knew I couldn't focus on helping Jon when Josh was going to be cranked. Tim tried to lighten the situation by suggesting that he and Larry and Harry were just going to get a couple of power saws and take matters into their own hands, but Jon wasn't in any state to appreciate his attempt at humor, but thankfully, he did head out.

Josh kept asking about going home...and I kept looking at the things I had "salvaged". I couldn't help feeling amazed and a little stunned that the most important thing-things in my life could fill a small hamper and an even smaller box. There was Grandma Esther's creche...brought long ago from the forests of Germany...my silly little jewelry box with my tiny collection of jewelry, including three similar watches with broken bands belonging to my Grandpa Charles and Uncle Jim...six photo albums, two binders with my stories in them, A wedding picture, a camera and flash drive, a picture of my grandparent's old home, a framed picture of one of Josh's earliest drawings, a few toys for Josh, two letters - one from when we were married, one from when we had Josh -- a blanket that had come home with Josh from the hospital...a tiny plaster hand print...I kept recalling that if a person was broken down into their chemical components, he'd amount to about ten dollars worth of material...and since I was calmer...and things seemed safer now, I wondered if anyone else would ever see why I valued these little things. Watching Jon's tangible distress, I felt shamed by my need to keep these trifles close, but I still wouldn't have left them to burn.

On Tuesday, a fireman was apparently going door to door to make sure all bases were covered. At one point there had been over seven hundred power outages in our area alone...and they wanted to make sure that everyone was okay. He came over to our house in the morning, apparently said, "Oh, Man! That's really dangerous!!! That could go at anytime!!! I don't even feel safe standing near it!!!" Really? You don't say? We'd only been saying the exact same thing to the power company for days, but yes (Mom), I do realize there were other situations that took a higher priority...Still, when it comes to the potential destruction of my home, I reserve the right to get a bit snippy. Around noon on Tuesday, the guys with the orange truck and the cherry bucket arrived, and didn't even want me to turn the main breaker off...Thirty minutes later, we had a neat pile of logs by the side of our house and surprisingly, a completely undamaged powerline. The only real damage came to my beloved froggy-windchime...a bit of arty brass and glass that was honestly on its last (no pun intended) legs anyhow, and the highwinds demolished it leaving only a large glass teardrop and a stained glass lilypad to show for it's existence. When I think of what almost was...I can live with that.

Tim gave me an hour after those wonderful tree-trimmers had left. I scrubbed my hair until I thought it would fall out in the world's fastest bath...and then I crawled onto the couch and I watched the season ender of The Closer. In my own home...On my own couch...Safe and sound. Harry took the second shift of the Josh watching...and they charged around the field with gusto...I listened to the humming tractor in the distance...I wondered how the fuzzy ones were enjoying their "Camp"... and I waited happily for my husband...

Even after all of the drama, this little house is still our haven...and I think, somehow, that it's really glad that we are back where we belong.