Vile Intruder

I would tar and feather it if I could. Burn it in effigy while dancing in a circle. But I can't stand to touch the little plastic thing. Can't stand to look it in its narrow hard face. Cannot bear for it to touch me with one stiff thin antennae. My son knows this, and he thinks its hilarious.

Dammit. My husband swore he'd take the blasted thing back to work, get it out of my house and out of my life. But he hasn't. He only takes it away from my eldest son now and then, smiles with a "now cut that out" expression, and tucks it away somewhere he thinks is safe. Well, as you can imagine, every few months my son discovers it anew, then begins to laugh oddly for no reason I can see. That is until I come around the corner and he throws it at my feet or I open a drawer and it pops out at me in full grotesque glory. He can set me up several times in a day, and I scream every time, jump back, and tell him to get rid of it, cut it out, don't do it again. But I can never bring myself to touch the thing, to actually show nonchalance or jaded amusement. So it goes on and on until I'm half laughing and crying, and my four-year-old comes to hug me and says, "It's alright, Mama. I'm here."

To understand my irrational fear of something which I know is fake, you must know about the times when I have discovered the real deal in my proximity.

The first memorable confrontation in Arizona took place in our apartment when I was eight months pregnant with my eldest son. It crawled out of the drainage pipe in the sink, its body at least three inches long, as I went to wash my hands. I flung myself back against the wall and wailed with an undulating scream to rival any I produced in natural labor. My husband came skidding into the bathroom.

"What...are you...?" he panted, looking my full trembling body up and down.

"Cock...roach," I breathed and pointed.

"What? You can't scream like that for a cockroach!" he scolded, blithely approaching the sink to beat the hell out of it. "I thought you were in labor." (It was our first pregnancy, you understand. He had no clue what a laboring woman should sound like at feeling that first contraction.)

But the time I remember best, the time that still makes me glance to the ceiling in dread now and then, is the time when my husband had to do full battle with the cockroach of all cockroaches - the General Woundwort, the Napolean, the Sauron, the Genghis Khan of cockroaches. It simply wouldn't die easily.

We were watching The Kennedy Honors on TV, a most respectable and cultured means of entertainment when your children are asleep. Whoever was being honored was someone we found truly fascinating. Nevertheless, my eyes roamed at one point up toward the ceiling, and there it was - the ghastly thing! - black, large...on the stinkin' ceiling. I flattened myself against the couch cushion, drew my legs up - ready to dive, spring or hide - and asked Matthew while pointing with an unsteady finger, "What is...that?"

I feared I knew. He got up, examined it with wide eyes, and said softly, "A cockroach....get me something."

I looked about for something heavy, something to inflict pain on this vile intruder. I didn't want to move from my position, but I ventured centimeters away from the couch, stretched my arm out to hand My Man a rolled-up magazine.  He took aim, swung, missed, and the thing took off running. It didn't scurry or crawl. The thing darted like an insect cheetah across our ceiling. I give My Man props, because he took off after it instead of huddling pitifully in the corner, whimpering and negotiating - offering it all the junk food in our house if it would just leave us alive (as I would have done).

He finally knocked it off the ceiling, but then we searched, and we couldn't find the carcass. We were determined. We needed proof, something to put on a toothpick in the front yard to intimidate fellow nasty insects. But nothing. Nothing! Until it occurred to us that it might have fallen into the bin of Christmas wrapping paper that was still residing in our house that chill February evening.

My husband carted the plastic bin gingerly outside, and the brave, brave man began to sift through its contents to find the evidence of the giant cockroach's demise as I watched from the safety of our doorway. Nearing the bottom, he tipped the bin over on the driveway, and out the damn thing ran, right at him. Such flailing of arms! Such wild prancing as he chased it, thumping the magazine down the length of the drive in a fight to the death. At length he stood over that Woundwort of Cockroaches, just beating it every few seconds to make sure it wouldn't reanimate itself like some horror movie villian. Then, weary, he took a crumpled bit of festive paper, picked up its mangled remains and dumped it in the outside trash can.

He stumbled to the door and pronounced, "It is done."

No, not really. He came shaking his head and said something like, "Wow," and, "I knew I had to get rid of it or you'd never let me rest."

So true. Now, I am sane. Truly. I do know COUS (Cockroaches of Unusual Size) are everywhere on this planet, eating our food when we're not looking, infecting us with horrible diseases, throwing parties in our cupboards when it's dark and we can't catch them. I also know that the city where I live regularly sprays the sewer heads in this town to control cockroach numbers, and that's why every little bit the revolting creatures have the audacity to come into homes, trying to escape their fate. Because they come into our homes and make us wet our pants, urban legends exist such as, An enormous cockroach ate my lap dog, or I found a cockroach in my kitchen, reclining in the chip bag and drinking my tequila, and An army of gargantuan cockroaches invaded my shower; I had to scale the glass sliding doors and pitch myself over the top to escape.

I don't know if those urban legends are true, but my story about the battle between My Man and General Woundwort Cockroach is sadly so. It's why for months after that incident I couldn't come out into our dark living room, my baby son in arms to nurse, without feeling incredibly uneasy and/or queasy as my eyes scaled the twilight of the ceiling wondering what was looking back at me. It's why to this day I kick, pat, or knock against the furniture on dark nights to discourage any insects from bearing me company in my chair.

I can't get rid of cockroaches. They're part of life, like spiders, crickets or flies (none of which I mind nearly as bad). But I have taken my stance against the plastic impostor kind, and the nine-year-old boy who aides and abets it. If he attempts to scare me again with that hideous thing, he'll be standing in the corner for an hour. And if it ever ends up in my clothes, hair, purse or car seat, I will get my husband's hammer and pummel it gleefully to see if plastic is really as strong as everyone claims it is.

Funny Girls

We're a couple of bagels on a plate of onion rolls, she and I.

We had a spontaneous combustion of friendship when I moved to Idaho from Tennessee and she moved from Cascade to Boise in our junior year of high school. We were such fast friends by early senior year that I referred to her as my sister Sarah. Eventually I didn't bother correcting myself. It felt true.

A couple weeks ago my Sarah came to visit me. We had not seen each other in 14 years, not since the summer after graduation. We jumped and screamed at the sight of each other, and our men laughed. Our children acted like cousins that had never met due to bizarre circumstances, and Sarah and I sat and reminisced that first evening of our reunion.

We talked about the time she made me laugh so hard in an all night diner that the muscles in my face froze, I began to hyperventilate in some panic, and then keeled over due to the loss of oxygen in my brain. We talked about how she always had older boyfriends while I could be found at lunchtime munching peanut M&M's and playing poker with a bunch of sophomore boys. We laughed at how we hunted each other down in the middle of a period near the end of our senior year to tell each other about the C on our English papers (and we thought we would be writers!) We remembered the snowy days when we skipped school, having no money to do anything fun but ditching responsibility anyway, because we thought snow flurries were pretty.

Then there was the adventure of living by ourselves for two months in our senior year. She drove and worked parttime. I joke that I was the stay-at-home one, and I didn't even cook (she doesn't remember us eating at all during the time; I remember eating endless cans of Beans with Bacon soup).To thank her for giving me rides and bringing in money on top of what my parents gave us, I locked her out of the house on a bitterly cold night when she was out late, and she slept in her car with the engine and heater on until our neighbors called the cops. As she tells it, the police knocked on the window loudly, fearing she was dead, and she sat up with blurry and mascara-smeared eyes, assuring them that she was alive but near frozen.

During that time there was also that frightening incident where Sarah in true panic did the best Curly, Three Stooges impersonation I've ever seen. Just home from school one afternoon, Sarah entered the house first. Right behind, I was aware of the danger in a moment, having seen the threat gleaming in his beady black eyes as the small rodent crouched and panted beyond her in the kitchen.

"Sarah," I said as calmly as possible, my body stiff and ready. "Don't move."

The "Why?' as she spun to look at me had barely escaped her lips when my squirrel Okkado leaped upon her back from the kitchen counter. She ran in a small frantic circle (the Curly impersonation) and screamed while my little friend scaled the length of her body, gripping with his claws. I tried to catch him to no avail - they were both whirling so fast - until he sprang from her when he could take the crazy ride no more. She bolted down the hall in terror, and I heard an ear-splitting bang as her bedroom door slammed to. It took me at least two hours to calm Okkado enough to lure him back into his floor-to-ceiling cage with a handful of nuts. It took even longer to calm Sarah, who is no animal person she admits. She stayed in the back room the whole time, only rarely peeling the door back an inch to call, "Is he in yet?" "No," I yelled back again and again, and again and again the door was sealed with due speed.

Good times. Well, at least times, anyway. Time together for sure friends is precious in most circumstances. Even when squirrels attack. Or at least when you're looking back on the time when your best friend's squirrel attacked.

On the second day of Sarah's visit to Arizona, we knew we had to do one very important thing before we parted. I hunted it down, the movie I had bought several years ago specifically because the introduction to it was a gift from my Sarah and one which will always remind me of her. Ah the marvelous Funny Girl, the Barbra Streisand hit musical. Like old times, we admired her voice, her comedic timing, her beautiful long white hands and her outstanding nose as we enjoyed our skip down memory lane. We laughed and then got sad again when Nick Arnstein took his wrong turn, made his fatal decision for pride against love. We shushed the boys in the room when the finale "My Man" commenced. When it was over, they all applauded enthusiastically, not because Babs had sung her heart out but because she had sung her last note, and we marveled again at the blindness of men, because Streisand is obviously one of the most original, beautiful and talented women ever to walk the planet.



And that's my Sarah, too, a thoroughly original and lovely woman - "a bagel on a plate of onion rolls" - one who taught me a great deal about being kind first and striving to be nonjudgmental, one who taught me about strength and resilience, who became like a fourth daughter to my parents. Someone who dreamed and schemed with me about how unusual our lives would be, and someone to laugh with now about all the usual but mostly blessed paths our lives have taken thus far.

Sarah and I are alike and different, of course, but from that first day we met in an uptight Boise high school that had prison-like slits for windows, there was that irresistible pull of friendship. Some natures are meant to bond. We had a mere two years to build that bond, and it has held during 14 years of absence.

I missed her when she left after our visit, but all that evening as I wandered around my home, belting out in mock-Barbra style on an almost endless reel, "Oh, my man I love him so!/ He'll never know/ All my life is just despair.../ But I don't care!", I had the comfort of thinking of her and of our extraordinary and enduring friendship.

A post in pictures...Beautiful Behemoth

Beautiful Behemoth is my pet name for a mountain that I adore called South Mountain. I would say its proper name is uninspired, a directional label that does not attempt to encapsulate the humble, friendly spirit of its scrubby, cacti-dotted slopes. But I consider everything pertaining to this mountain, including its pedestrian name, to be special by association.

This mountain brings me joy just to look at it, just to drive down the street nearly every morning toward it. When its gentle lines are smeared with the smog of this wide city or rare storm clouds obscure its shape, it disheartens me. My eye is always searching for it; it's my natural compass in a vast valley of human contrivance. Thus I am anxious for true blue of sky to carve it plain against the western horizon.

A couple days after Christmas, my family hiked its trails with a friend and her family, at last Matthew keeping his promise to take me up it. It was a post-Christmas celebration of nature in the Southwest, and I loved every minute of it, even when the shortest trails were closed for wildlife, even when for tactical reasons (in favor of future hiking) I relieved my husband of the hiking backpack with our youngest in it (Matthew warned me how heavy it was even as I stoutly insisted he give me a turn, my shot at the physical burn), and even as couples and solitary urban adventurers marveled and exclaimed at our bravery in traversing its crests and valleys with a gaggle of six children in tow.

In fact, I was glad to have the company of those children, especially of my own for whom hiking is a fresh experience. And I thought it fortunate that we had to take the long route and that our feet were forced in longer communion with the mountain. I was glad of the company of my good friend and her family, because without them, my husband would have paused at the first good rise in the trail, clapped his hands together, and announced with finality that it was time to go home. The company of my friend's pug Buster was a blessing, too, because my eldest son had the little dog's company on the hike among so many little girls, and it built his confidence when he was able to keep the eager little animal from nipping at the pounding feet of runners or from chasing the hypnotic wheels of the bicyclists.

It was a long hike for a family so foreign to the exercise. I am proud to write that our kids did not complain but instead were invigorated by the views and by the climb, eager to plan the next trip. Miraculously, my muscles did not squeal the next day when I attempted to walk. My husband's and my own shoulders ached a little from carrying our youngest, but they didn't cramp at all. Even more of a marvel, my husband said he was not adverse to doing a hike again, someday, if the trail was shorter.

This hike was meant to be, I plainly and gladly believe, the first of many up South Mountain. I can't wait to drive to its base another fine, clear winter morning, jumping with anticipation and ready for my visit with Mother Nature.

                            

Short post - fantasy, candy canes and No. 4

Many years ago as a young teenager, I spent a January and February in an old chair in my room sucking on leftover Christmas candy canes and reading The Lord of the Rings trilogy by Tolkien. My rabbit Freddy reclined on my lap, and if while engrossed in a particularly exciting part, I neglected to stroke his soft black fur, he turned his head and sank his sharp little teeth into the flesh of my hand. Peppermint sticks, black rabbits, and little gold rings with deceptive power are now forever linked in my brain.

That winter still comes back to mind each year, begging for me to scour the tree for any forgotten candy ornaments and renew my relationship with books. As a mother of four kids, I find it hard to keep that relationship going. I can either write sometimes or read novels sometimes, but not both. I do still lean against the walls in my home now and then, perusing a chunk of the newspaper before I give it, and all its sundry information, up to recycling. But its not the same as curling myself around a book, letting my house go to pot, and hearing my children whine, "Mama, are you done with that chapter yet? You promised to come outside."

"I'm almost done!" I'd call back to their sighs.

This year I haven't even begun. And what I really need right now to conjure up that old excitement in the story is Book 4 of Kelven's Riddle, but I can't have it. Or so I've been told.

I have great memories of nursing my younger two children and putting various responsibilities on hold while eagerly ingesting Kelven's Riddle in it various forms. As the daughter of the man who wrote them, I was trusted with the rougher drafts of the story. When Dad gave me a section of the first one, I was pregnant with my youngest girl and stayed up way too late, already exhausted, and read it. At that time he hadn't even given me the ending. I read it in its entirety later on. When Book 2, The Walking Flame, came out, I left the house to its own destructive devices and got up from my chair only to feed the children, grab a snack for myself or use the restroom. I would end up reading the last incredible chapter of that book over and over again as I wished and waited for the third book. Then at last! Book 3, The Sword of Heaven, was in my hands, and again my house was buried in the mess with no hope from me as I read and nursed my young son and tried to balance my baby and dad's manuscript on my lap. That time I was actually allowed to read the final chapters before the book was released on Amazon.

Throughout all these literary entrapments, my husband was patient and forbearing with my neglect of our home, but I suspect that was only because the books had been written by Dad. And after I had Book 3's manuscript in my hand and confided in him with a laugh that Dad had actually named a character after him, Matthew (who does not read for pleasure, only business) began the series, and miracles of miracles! Read the whole thing by nightlight in the evenings while waiting for our youngest girl to drift to sleep.

Now Dad tells me he'll give me Book 4 soon, but won't say exactly when. Still he teases me with the details of the story - with war scenes and devastation and forecasts of how the whole series will go down but no solid information. He tells me frankly that Book 4's ending will be more astounding than Book 2's, and I'm trying to imagine how. I'm puzzling over which of my favorite characters he might be inclined to kill off, and if it's Thaniel he dooms (Thaniel is a brave, proud and reserved being, the main character Aram's closest friend and a fellow warrior), I just might consider not speaking to Dad for a while. But I don't think he'd do that to me or any of his readers. I don't think he would.

But I don't know, do I? Because I don't have Book 4. Do I think that by writing this post, my dad will hurry to finish the manuscript and send it off to his youngest child with love? No, not really, but I wish he would. I still have one leftover candy cane, and no new book to enjoy with it.

# 4 short, (mostly) unedited post - Park Season

I am always glad on January 2nd, after all the frivolity is done and only Three King's Day yet glimmers on the horizon, that there is something really grand to look forward to here in the lowlands of Arizona. It would be called spring in other states (forget the calendar, for that's what it is if one trusts the weather). To me it is known fondly as park season.

It's that time of year when I find every possible excuse to shuttle my kids to the park. The time of year when I get to whoosh down the slides behind them, climb the monkey bars after my youngest, hop down the jungle gym steps with glee, and steal my kids' scooters or bikes when they're not looking in order to take a rollicking tour on the sidewalk. It's the time of year when all is right with the world, when the child within me is reborn in mild weather.

When others up north and back east are shut in their homes, cursing the lingering but now burdensome snow, feeling cabin fever and making love to their steaming cups of coffee, most Arizonans are taking to the outdoors, offering ourselves up to the sunshine. It accepts us and carresses us and keeps its promise not to roast us until sometime about mid-June. It will then be our turn to lock ourselves indoors, cursing not the snow and cold but a blinding, scorching, piercing, drunk-with-its-own-power, absolutely maniacal star that acts like its the center of our solar system.

But until then we'll be wearing shorts in January, playing golf until May, acting like giddy fools with our kids at the park for months to come and wishing everyone a happy, jolly, very merry park season!