Not All Who Wander Are Lost

Half a long weekend in Brattleboro, and boy, are my senses tired. Here's a trifecta for each:

Sight: A flurry of white on a downtown street while a hundred morris dancers shook and rang around me like the world's cleanest street gang. Downy woodpeckers, a series of tiny hummingbirds, an iridescent indgio bunting up against the windowfeeders at my inlaw's house. The glisten of poison ivy everywhere along the banks of the everexpanding stream that cuts through their property.

Smell: Lilacs rotting on their branches. Mown grass with a hit of gas from a borrowed mower. The comforting stench of evening cowfields in the first hot humid days of summer.

Taste: Lamb's liver and moose pate at the farmer's market; rough-grained bread, green olives, and a cilantro chutney on the side. A cold blueberry yogurt soup, spicy and sweet, at brunch with old friend Dan this morning. Wolaver's Pale Ale straight out of the boat cooler, bitter and mature, drunk in the hot afternoon sun.

Touch: Cold riverwater off the speedboat bow. Wet grass against my ankles, and my tinychild's light grasp against my smallest finger as we run together through a still-dewy lawn while the rest of the family is out. My wife's knees against mine, a barstool intimacy among the latenight cacaphony of our old college microbrew haunt.

Hearing: Cassia, like the Finding Nemo seagulls, chanting mine!mine!mine! as her sister teases her with soft desirables in the back seat. Willow, serious in the rear view mirror: Daddy, from now on I wish I could be called "Willow Tree". A thousand bells, a hundred giggles, a dozen half-familiar voices, the roar of the wind as the river rushes past all around us.

The online forum for the town where I work continues to represent the worst of the Internet, but after this informative and hilarious exchange re: local firepit ordinances today, I continue to support the concept of the town forum.

Like the New Yorker before it, daily checkout Overheard in New York has begun a headline contest to mix up their usual hilariously-titled snippets of real stolen sidewalk coversation. Hope it doesn't have the same effect on their sense of humor.

Bumped into a VERY old friend over at the chatbox alongside new addiction Babble (Boggle + Scrabble). Fond memories in my head all day. Seems the virtual world is a small one, too.

Realized at supper today that we'd be all gussied up for prepschool prom and baccalaureate this weekend if we hadn't been summarily "rightsized" out of house and home at the end of last year. Thank God for soft landings. Had old school song Jerusalem stuck in my head all evening since.

Wil Wheaton is here. You are not.

So I'm flipping through the Onion AV Club, because it's Tuesday night and Tuesday night means new Onion material, and I hit the feature article, which is basically Wil Wheaton gushing about the E3 conference (The Electronic Entertainment Expo, which is a gamer's wet dream), wherein I come to the following passage:

The Guitar Hero craze has hit 33-year-olds like me with the same fervor and intensity of the Pokémon craze hitting our children five years ago.

And the part of my brain that was halfheartedly interested in the cultural ramifications of a video game that, essentially, combines air guitar and karaoke -- which is ultimately about as exciting as it sounds -- is suddenly obliterated by the realization that Wil Wheaton! The kid from Star Trek! The peasized hero of Stand By Me! Is 33!

Yes, Wil Wheaton, child actor turned blogosphere darling, is the same age as me. And there he is in one of the hippest satirespots on the Internet, gushing about the E3 conference and how he showed up without press credentials and now he's watching Tony Hawk skate a fifteen foot halfpipe.

Meanwhile, I met Tony Hawk in Egypt when we were both in high school. He was already slapping his name on sneakers and boards. I had my hair cut to look like Duran Duran.

Tony and Wil, Wil and Tony. They're my generation, them and Snoop Dog and a whole host of the other culturally ageless, and they're so much cooler than me. I mean, here I am nursing a pinched nerve after a long day at the workplace amidst high anxiety pinkslip rumors, typing this amidst the destroyed livingroom leavings of a traditional nuclear family. We don't even have TV, my wife is putting the kids to bed upstairs, I blog too much about my lawn and my kids, it's like I'm a stereotype of adulthood, and there's Wil Wheaton getting paid to write about video games. Or not getting paid, I suppose, which is worse.

Not that I actually want to be at E3 -- indie music-and-film fest SXSW is more my style. And I realize that it's my own choices, the ones I continue to make because they're right and good and amazingly worth it, that keeps me here releasing turtles into the wild with small children instead of on the road with String Cheese Incident. But you get the point.

The top five things I missed doing, and now it's too late: Bonnaroo, skydiving, driving from one coast to the other in a beat up old car with a good friend, two other things I'd mention here if my students didn't read this blog.

Someone will surely point out here that I can do these things (well, the first three) if I want, and nothing's stopping me. But something is.

Me.

See, here's the difference between me and the rich and famous: they can still take off for conferences, and I choose not to.

In the end, Wil tempers his own article with a similar point, though his features a phone call from his wife and plumbing repairs. He ends up making some inane point about how games (like the conference itself) are there to give release from the mundane world. His tagline bio, at article's end:

Wil Wheaton mows his lawn on Sunday mornings, and rocks out to Guitar Hero every night.

But Wil is laying it on thick, and he's not fooling anyone playing the "I'm old and married and boring" card at the E3 conference with Tony Hawk. My lawn looks like mange. My house is a mess. I'm not writing an article for the Onion. I would never leave my wife home while I went to a conference unless I was going to be home for supper. The rest of us don't get to go to the front of the line.

[Two caveats:

First, that I must not be that old, because I keep giggling when I look down at my life insurance form and seeing AD&D Benefits (Benefit 1: you know how to handle a mace-wielding Orc, should the need ever arise).

And second, I've been rereading High Fidelity, and I think both language and tone are getting to me. Does it show?]

We spent Sunday prying rocks out of a dying garden:
flagstones and slate revealed between the rows,
a history of hands and knees, straw hats,
fingers deep in the dirt of ownership.

The minister is moving up the street from us.
We've been moving her garden piecemeal for days,
skipping church to run our hands in the dirt.
Her dog barks at us through the window.

We fill our trunks with a pathway-to-be,
two cars and two trips, the kids underfoot.
We talk of stepping stones in a river of grass.

We go home to plant lillies along the scar of winter,
fill ruts with flowerstems, rebuild God's beauty
at the base of the poorly plowed driveway.

Yes, that lightning guy.

Babysitter.
Ice cream mixer.
Flower deliverer.
Bakery deliverer.
Sandwich maker.
Corps member, City Year Boston.
"The Lightning Guy".
Education Fellow, Museum of Science, Boston.
Data Entry (Temp.).
Math mentor.
Writing mentor.
Proofreader.
Preschool teacher.
Substitute teacher.
Artist in Residence.
One on One Aide.
Head Counselor.
Media Specialist.
Theater teacher.
History teacher.
Computers teacher.
Workshop presenter.
Lead Teacher.
Academic Technology/Information Literacy Coordinator.
Information Specialist.

The past week's constant downpour has turns into a series of overcast days, sprinkled with sunshine and an ocasional cloudburst. Streamwater runs yellow with washed-away pollen. The rains still come, but it's clearing.

Spent the bulk of the day cutting brush along the road at the base of our property: red birch, knee-high maples, here and there a few scattered oak tree shoots still red with new leaves. Something that might be poison ivy.

The birch smells like summer camp, birch beer and earth and boysweat coming home from a weekly trip into town, when you cut into the green trunk.

In the overgrowth behind the brick wall an old garden, a hidden legacy from our new home's previous owners: six fat ridges of straberries in flower, tall blueberry bushes, rhubarb low and redstemmed, thick brambles on their way towards something sticky and red.

I let the garden stand, for now.

By the driveway I unearthed a tiny red painted turtle, quarter-length shell emerging from the leaves like a moving sunspot. We put it in a mixing bowl on the counter, wet earth and leaves halfway up the slippery glass, a place of terrapin comfort amindst alien marble and artificial lighting.

Later before sunset we walked down the road, past the new calf and the waterfall, to where the slowmoving water backs up against the wrong side of the dam, and let it go. Willow cried, struggling to understand the ways of the wild. I held her hand as we left for home, and watched over her shoulder as it scrabbled back towards us, away from the water, a speck in the grass heading for the woods just as fast as its little legs could carry it.

Lonely playstructures of the world, unite!

Citing recent studies showing that 13% of sixth graders now have no recess whatsoever, CNN reports today on Rescuing Recess, a new Cartoon Network-slash-National PTA program designed to address the growing trend towards replacing recess with classroom time.

Certainly, there is still immense value in getting kids out of the structured environments. But its important to make the right case for recess. And by picking not one but two seriously silly arguments to focus on, CNN fails to provide real ammunition to those, like myself, who would advocate for recess to remain.

First, and more easily dealt with, CNN loses points for pagespace bemoaning the slow dwindling of Physical Education classes as part of their case for why recess is important.

The dwindling of the PE curriculum happens at our middle school, too -- our kids have an hour of gym 2 days out of every six, for only half the year. But the goals of Phys Ed are to provide bodytraining and exercise as part of healthy development, and it is the structure of the PE curriculum which makes this possible -- a fact that has and should have nothing to do with the loose runaround (or sitaround) possibilities of recess.

It's a serious issue, but one which doesn't belong here. To reiterate: PE is about activity; recess is about play; the two often coincide, but not inherently, and not in the parallel way that lets us consider one as an argument for addressing the other. The complications this nonetheless significant loss to the modern curriculum bring to the case for recess are absolutely distracting from the issue at hand.

More significantly disturbing, however, is the second hidden assumption of CNN's article, as show primarily through the words of parents like this one:

"The reason I get riled up -- and that most parents do -- is we see recess as an opportunity for children to play," said Diane Larson, a mother of four in Tacoma, Washington. "It's a time for children to be imaginative, to show innovation on the playground. And it's one of the times when kids actually get to interact with their friends."

Once upon a time, students really did need a break in the day for socialization and play. These days, however, our primary modes of classroom management lean increasingly on project-based collaborative learning, which in most schools involves significant time playing and peer-sharing in structured imaginative environments.

Look, unlike most teachers, my semi-metateacher's vocation allows me to spend time in other classrooms as a matter of course; in a given year, I end up observing part or all of numerous classes from almost every teacher in a given building, and I can assure you, it is an exceptionally rare day when student butts are in student seats for more than, say, two hours total. The modern classroom is characterized by exactly the kinds of peer interaction

Here's another parent that doesn't get it -- in this case, a PTA president in Virginia:

"The kids study all day, and they need some time for social activities," [PTA President Wendy] Logan said. "And those kids who struggle sitting the whole day -- they're the ones who need it the most."

Sitting all day? I've taught in schools public and private, from city to country, from kindergarten to high school, and I've yet to see "kids who struggle with sitting all day" -- because I've never, ever seen a school where kids sit more than half of their class hours.

And kids neither need nor always use recess time for social activities. The school of the millenium is a thousand times more social than the schools we grew up with. And, to be fair, recess is social in a way that reinforces cliques and allows for kids like I was to play solo, anti-socially, where class is much more about deliberately mixed socialization, under structure.

Either CNN -- and their PTA presidents and parents -- have never seen the inside of their kids' classrooms, or their schools are about twenty years behind the time. Sad, either way.

That the world grows, stretches, reaches for the sky. How the children push against each other, fill each other's silences in their struggle to be selves. The way the pollen turns everything green, after the rains have dried.

I figure it's worth noting, regardless. After all, it is our daily realities, the hard cold truths of nature and social strata settling, which frame the memorable moment, the bloggable gem. Without silence, our loud lives do not resonate.

A syllogism, then:

A. All writers write about writing.
B. All readers want to read about themselves.
C. Therefore, all writing should be about reading.

In the neighborhood the trees fill out into their summer selves. We watch the muscrat dive into the waterfalls, slide under the bridge like a bullet through butter. The neighbor's cow lows for her newborn calf into the night. When does the blogger stop metablogging?

Back in college my poetry professors encouraged me to major in something else, anything else: if you study writing, then you have nothing to write about but writing. It was a zen koan; I studied religion instead. Now I think about writing constantly, and write wonder at the world with wide eyes.

Write your own damn Captain Hook caption here.

My cartoon caption contest entries (for example, What can I do? They all have passes.) are hands-down funnier than anything the judges are putting on the short list for voting, and it's getting pretty annoying. I mean, who wants to be disappointed with the last page of their favorite high-slash-nobrow publication week after week? It wears on you.

For a while, I thought it was just the contest judges. I tried to shrug it off. But then, a few weeks ago, they published this terrible, horrible, no good very unfunny Shanahan disaster:

And suddenly, I realized it wasn't just the judges.

Happily, the vast majority of New Yorker articles & fiction still rock -- it's hard to beat anything Malcolm Gladwell writes, and the addition of David Sedaris to the usual cast of contributing characters is a masterstroke. And there are still some great gems among the cartoonists, and their fodder. Won't be cancelling that subscription just yet. Wouldn't be prudent.

But overall, that cartoon sensibility seems to be shifting.

And it's just not funny.

You can buy any contest cartoon with your own caption on it, but why give them the satisfaction? From now on, I'm keeping my captions to myself. And you, of course. Think this week's cartoon would do better with a Captain Hook reference, or something about that old campfire chestnut? Weigh in (or add your own caption) in the comments...

[UPDATE 10:09 pm: Irony of ironies, less than an hour after posting the above I recieved the following email:

As a continuing and semi-regular contributor of cartoons to The New Yorker, I'd like to thank you personally for your heroically humorous efforts in the caption contest. If you've won, congratulations! If not, you're still in very inspiring company. To wit—

There have been over 300,000 entries to this point. We've had a variety of entrants, from noted film critic Roger Ebert to local celebrity Edward Surek of Sheboygan, Wisconsin (my father-in-law). Neither has won yet, but keep up the good work.

Trust me, it's not easy being funny (or getting published). You might be interested to know that I average about 40 submissions for every one published. Plus, I've yet to have a cartoon grace the caption contest. But I'm not giving up and neither should you! Perhaps one day my cartoon and your caption will become one. I'm misting up just thinking about it. So take pleasure in your glorious caption quest and know that the cartoon gurus at the home office appreciate your efforts, as do the cartoonists. (After all, without you, there is no caption contest.)

So, good luck and keep those courageous captions coming!

Best wishes,

Michael Shaw
Cartoon Contributor, The New Yorker

'nuff said, eh?

Parent meeting ran late this afternoon, so I stopped off in the front office to call home before heading out -- at a time that Howdyspouse generally puts the baby down for a nap.

Luckily, however, the three year old knows how to answer the cordless...

Hi!

Hello, is this Willow?

Yes.

Do you know who this is?

Yes.

This is Daddy.

Hi, Daddy!

Hi, kid. Where's Mommy?

She's putting Cassia to sleep. Are you still at work, Daddy?

Yes, honey, but I'm coming home soon.

Are you in the car?

Not yet, I'm leaving now. Can you tell Mommy I'll be home soon?

She's upstairs putting Cassia to sleep!

Yes, I know. Can you tell her I called?

Okay, Daddy.

Thanks, sweetie. Love you.

Love you, Daddy!

Love you, kid. Okay, now hang up the phone.

Do I push a button?

Yes, honey. Push the button under the green light.

What light, Daddy?

The green light.

This green light, Daddy?

There's only one light, honey. Now push the button.

This button?

Yes, the button under the light.

The button next to the green light, or the button under the green light?

The one under the green light. Push it.

I don't know which button to push, Daddy.

Yes, I know, honey. It's under the green light.

Daddy, I think I better get Mommy.

No, don't do that. Just push the button.

Which button, Daddy?

Do you see the green light?

This light, Daddy?

Yes, fine. Now push the button under the light.

Here's Mommy, Daddy...

The front office ladies were quite amused, we've decided to put a sticker on the power button for the cordless, and, from now on, no one learns how to turn on anything until they are fully capable of turning it off.

A teacher's life is full of other people's mothers. If nothing else, the ongoing interaction is a constant reminder that every one of us can only be truly explicable alongside our parents, that traits are indeed inherited and passed along. You meet a mom for the first time after seeing their kid in the classroom all term, and suddenly everything makes sense, every quirk has context.

In my case, everything from my hyperactive wanderlust to my tendency towards easy tears spring from mom. I remind people of my father, mostly, but I owe mom much of my behavior, from my acute respect for careful language to my innate instinct for the psychological and emotive. I may have my father's brain, but I seem to have my mother's heart, and much of her soul.

We own the way we utilize our gifts, of course, and not all of what I inherit is turned towards good. My mother's oversensitivity presents itself in me as an anxiety; coupled with my father's perfectionism, rather than my mother's loose ADHD acceptance, it can heighten and complicate even the most banal of social and professional interactions. Somewhere inside me more often than not his logic gets overwhelmed by her desire to love and be loved.

Nature and nurture combined are a powerful thing. Sometimes I regret the strong otherwise-positive tendencies that I have allowed to rule myself. Sometimes I curse my mother, when I should be cursing -- and curing -- myself. Sometimes I forget that, in the end, it is we who choose to let the facets of ourselves dominate.

There is much to love in me that I love in her, I think. So much potential, and so much to be thankful for. So much generosity, and the desire to please; so much joy in nature, so much wonder at the world-as-it-is.

Without her, I would not wander, and so happily. Without her, I would be colder, darker. I would not see and live the world so interconnected.

So thanks, mom, for making me so much of who I am today. Good, bad, or otherwise, I wouldn't have me any other way.

One way public school teaching is vastly different from the private realm is the weight that parents have in the classroom. Where the boarding environment essentially left us teachers in the parental role, here parents come in for project night, check in as they pick up their kids daily, give money and time, and actively bring us yummy faculty appreciation luncheons to die for.

All the more hilarious, then, to hear the following comments as we made Mother's Day Cards* in my 7th and 8th grade computer classes this week.

Yeah, because every mother wants a card that says "hey mom, watch out for the scary giant bunny!"

That sucks. You must really hate your mom.

There's Pearl Jam on the cover because my mom is taking me to a Pearl Jam concert for mother's day.

There's sharks on mine because my mom is allergic to flowers.

My mother doesn't like poems. I'm writing her a rap.

My mom hates me. Can I do something else today?

Do I have to give this to my mother?

Now that we did this, I don't have to get a present, too, right Mr. F?

Hey Farbs, what rhymes with hell?

Is a greeting card a card?

Ah, the fourteen year old mentality -- gotta love it. The best of the Publisher-produced cards drip sentiment, ooze bittersweet pre-adolescent apologetic glory. Hope the moms appreciate the effort.

*Technically, the activity asked students to make "Mothers or Others' Day Cards". After all, though everyone has a female adult in their life somewhere, not all have moms, or live with 'em. If being preemptive about the possibilities of the modern PC family bothers you, avoid teaching like the plague.

Another tough week in the howdyhouse: Darcie's still sick, I'm still tired, the elderchild continues to rant and rail against the growing pains of school, sisterhood, and self.

In the midst of it all a tiny angel grins infectiously. Mischief maker, free sprite and sprit is my Cassia Jade. At one year and seventeen pounds she barely talks, wobble-walks, stalks dog and cat, pulls rocks from the lawn like nobody's business. She moos at cows, pulls grass for goats and kisses them.

She is oft the heart of our own stress -- mama would be well by now, surely, were there time to nap on her own throughout the day; my tiredness today and yesterday stems from interrupted parentsleep, up-all-night teething pains and screams; elderkid Willow loses points and freedom throughout the day primarily due to her continued struggle to find her place as her sister comes into her own, crowding the once-attention that is forever the lost lot of first children.

But she twees along with the flute as I play for relaxation, brings books to our sides demanding to be read to. She loves waterplay and cabinetry, themselves mostly safe activities. She climbs in and out of chairs all day without a fall. She can lighten a room with her smile. She gives away everything from pacifier to the pre-chewed as if it were her lot in life to make others happy.

Cause and coherence, then -- a bittersweet reality. But it's not her fault that having a baby is hard on all of us. And were she any other child, it would be harder still.

One day, perhaps in her future days of adolescent angst and rebellion, may we remember, and appreciate her all the more for making our days more precious, our lives more blessed, our selves more rewarded, merely through the natural wonder that she is.

In the meanwhile, may it be enough to make time to appreciate her, and respect that which she brings; to remember to care for her even when we are sick and tired and trying to find ourselves in the midst of the chaos; to be gentle and kind and caring even at three a.m. when we should be sleeping.

As I've mentioned here before, I am constitutionally nocturnal, a victim of Retarded Sleep Phase Syndrome, up long past midnight as a matter of course.

Once this was no problem. I did my best thesis writing between the hours of dark and sunrise; blogged late into the night, and made it to my classroom for the odd 8:30 class blurred but functional.

These days, however, what with commute and a seven thirty homeroom, my teaching mandates an early awakening. And I mean early. Like, before six.

End result: total suckage.

I've tried going to bed earlier as a matter of course (say, a civilized eleven fifteen) but for some reason, my brain and body seem to prefer to head to zombieville as the weekend nears. For a few weeks I managed to beat the odds by "accidentally" falling asleep putting the kids to bed at 8, which felt good as it happened. But this just as often caused me to rise in the wee hours of the morning afraid of missing the alarm, wander about for an hour, and end up overtired the next day.

I'm tired all the time, overcaffeinated and jittery when I should be alert. By Wednesday, I begin to arrive home with a shortened fuse, meandering about drunkenly without a drop to drink, napping on the couch when I should be enjoying those few precious kid hours between homecoming and bed. Thursdays I start nodding off on the drive home.

I'm starting to hate my life. Worse, I'm starting to sleepwalk through it.

So this week, in the interest of compromise, I've decided to start prepping for the morning ritual before bed. So far this evening I've ironed clothes for the week, hung 'em out for tomorrow, laid out wallet and pocket change by the door, and made sure the bathrobe and towel are handy. I even pre-filled the coffee pot.

Estimated net gain, at least by alarm clock standards: 20 minutes of extra sleep.

To be fair, twenty minutes doesn't sound like much. But I figure it's worth the same to the psyche as a serious midweek catch-up nap. At least, I hope so. Because this braindead-by-Thursday thing is seriously starting to kick my ass.

In addition to our wonderous new discovery (see Zoo Story, below), a trifecta of other trivialities today:

We finally bought a lawn sprinkler, because if you're going to have dirt, you might as well have wet dirt.

Post-it sticky-back photo paper is the best invention ever for three year olds, especially if your goal in life is to fetishize images of yourself on carousel horses.

Cassia has decided that the whole point of her new potty is to sit on it after she pees all over my leg.

As always, click on the pic for more photos from our day at the zoo...

Willow with wallaby - woo!

We're big proponents of tourism in bad weather, having once experienced a blissful 45 degree day at Disney World with no lines. So when the weather websites once again proved totally out of sync with the realities of New England sun-to-rain, we were more than prepared to hit the local zoo we had heard so much about.

Well, that, and after 15 hours of allergy-encrusted sleep between yesterday afternoon and this morning, I was itching to get off my ass and out of the house to spend some time with my wonderfully Daddy-tolerant family.

We arrived at Lupa Zoo just after 11 under overcast skies just beginning to let loose; bundled kids into the ever-handy double stroller befitted with oversized umbrella; scrounged up enough singles to make it through the gate only to discover that though there was no credit taken at the gate, the underage countergirl at the tiny gift shop was happy to call what was surely a mom-slash-owner to run the espresso machine and sell us a couple of boxes of animal snack crackers.

From there, we wandered what turned out to be an exquisitely intimate and friendly game farm that depends on visitors to feed the animals. Each pen, from Antelope to Zebra, allows closer-than-typical proximity to the animals, in order that bran crackers and purchased seed corn might be dropped down the everpresent chute or, in many cases, gifted open-hand through the crisscross fence to the lipping mounth of all sorts of fun exotics.

One note, for those (like myself) that have seen exotic animal care from behind the scenes: as our friendly and oddly ubiquitous young zookeeper mentioned over the course of our visit, the trade-off in making a zoo that is so visitor-oriented, so mellow and so intimate, so close-packed with face-to-face encounters of everything living and interesting is that a) there is no behind the scenes in which to care for and train animals, and b) the usual method of coaxing animals with food is lost to the "visitors feed everyone" phenomenon, which leaves little incentive for, say, the bear or coatimundi to behave for vets and caretakers.

But this is a minor quibble, one well worth (in this visitor's opinion) the experience that results. How often can you climb a staircase to handfeed a giraffe with a three year old? Or let the one-year-old walker rub noses with a baby Zebu? We saw more animals than people, which beats most zoo-goers experience anytime; never went more than 30 seconds without seeing another beast or bird close at hand. We stayed for over two hours, an unheard of success for kids this age past naptime on a rainy Saturday. Enough said, I say.

Overall, Lupa Zoo is a marvel of zoos, one which takes the typical "each animal a separate viewing spectacle" phenom of the modern zoo and replaces it with adjacency, an easy walk from one animal to the next, and even a single indoor space in the zoo center teeming with simians cages that twist around each other, bats up close, small monkeys clutching surprisingly human-like babies up to their chests mere inches away from our peering faces, aligators in an honest-to-god bathtub.

It doesn't feel like a spectacle, or a planned experience. It has no real commercial component; has two tiny gift shops of cameras and snacks, but it doesn't even have professionally made souveniers. Heck, the halloween decorations are still up from last year.

Lupa Zoo rocks, and that's all there is to it. It feels like a petting zoo, a community, an open barn in someone's backyard. It feels safe, open, and inviting. They run on biodiesel, compost heavily, and encourage visitors to bike in. They guy who built it lives in a nice house just past the aviary and the bobcats; you can see in his windows.

In fact, I'm planning on calling sometime soon to see if they take volunteers -- or want to hire this old museum educator for weekend educational programs, maybe.

If you're ever driving through Ludlow, Ma, call ahead and we'll meet you at Lupa Zoo. Just don't forget to bring cash to get in.

Arrived home to find Willow's been pushing her tiny sister around all day, and Mama's lost her voice to the same glandswelling something that hit me earlier. Shopping meant the ability to strap the kids down out of eyesight, so we all went off, bought spitcooked deli chicken and real bread, played it light for the evening, and it seemed to help.

The baby went down early, though, so while Mama and baby snuggled behind blinds Willow and I wandered off into the waning daylight. Highlights:

New calf close-up and mother-protected in the pasture across the street, still wobbly and wet.

Pooh-sticks with the season's first dandelions under the waterfall bridge.

This season's first frog, fat and green, jumping high at our feet, scared back into the water from the slippery slope above.

Bark souveniers from the beaver-chewed tree by the banks, it's scarred surface rough under our intertwined fingers.

A tick each, discovered and knocked free, and thank goodness we found them.

Ah, the discoveries of Spring. Home under a halfmoon with the half pint, a livingroom slowdance in the almostdark, and all is well again.

Funny how wide the pendulum swings in a day, sometimes. Not so funny, how vast and infuriating the shift from competitive to cuddly when her sister leaves the room.

And so it begins. If we're lucky, we've got a minimum of fifteen more years of this sibling rivalry, at least under our roof. At least we know how she feels, we two first children raising their own first.

6 miles from the Connecticut border. 20 miles from the nearest Starbucks.

One bar. One school -- 80 kids per grade but it fields a pretty strong softball team. One market, one drugstore, one laundromat. Two kittycorner gas stations with dual service bays.

Total population: 8 thousand, including us four.

Friendly townies of bluecollar stock most in their third or fourth generation wander the streets in the afternoon. Farmers, carpenters, roofers, motorcyclists; sneakers and workboot feature prominently in adult couture.

There is no rush hour. At 3 in the afternoon school gets out, the streets begin to fill up with pick-up trucks, teenagers out driving their parent's cars, white utility vans. The market lot stays crowded until it closes at seven.

Sitting in a local barber shop while the car gets a long-overdue inspection offers, almost demands we revisit the smalltown life we have chosen. Here the gossip over the scissor snip; there on the window colorcopy flyers promote church ham suppers, fly fishing tournaments, the high school production. On TV they're interviewing a woman three towns over. The world passes by the windows. And it is good.

Green lawns line the roadside up and down the mountain. Some are populated by dandelions; most have delineated edges where woods begins and yard ends. The biggest, most lush homesteads have already grown enough to mow, sport finely trimmed lawns with perfectly parallel lines to and fro, like a freshly vacuumed carpet.

All around us, people spend their Sundays on the greening lawn, hose in hand, tossing water like rain. Meanwhile, our grass seed lies dead upon the hardpacked earth. Small tufts of green grow here and there, clustered like daffodil stems in the midst of an otherwise wasteland.

We debate buying a sprinkler. We try to buy a sprinkler, but life gets in the way. Plus, the Agway is closed on Sundays.

It looks like rain, but it doesn't rain. We take the kids through the car wash instead. Baby Cassia, new to the experience, reaches for the slapping cloth that slams against her window, and does not cry.

Next year, I promise myself. Next year we will have a lawn. For now, it is more than enough to have earth, and a family to put down root in it.