The now – Life Off Headset

Things that ground me this week – NaBloPoMo Day 10

A few weeks ago, I signed on to a free online parenting class offered by the Parenting Encouragement Program. It is supposed to be a seven week course, but I could only make one night out of seven. The class I went to was about rituals and routines. At one point the class leader asked, “What routines do you have that make you feel grounded?”

I found myself raising my hand. “What do you mean by ‘grounded’?” I asked.

I can’t for the life of me remember exactly what the response was, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot during this busy busy season. To me, it means those things that make me feel stable and human. Those things that, when it seems like life is out of control and I’m starting to spin in my head, those things that remind me that we are human beings, not human doings. Rituals and routines that give me a bit of mental space so that I have the capacity for more inputs.

I do feel silly about how hard I found this past week. I mean I make opera; I don’t perform heart surgeries on babies. It’s not life and death. (I mean, not literally.) But it was a hard week, mentally and physically for me.

When I was writing the title of this post, asking myself, “What things ground me this week?” I thought – well, to be honest, tech really ground me to a pulp this week. Isn’t there a beautiful irony in that? The things that make me feel grounded are the things that I really need when life is grinding me up and spitting me out.

Here are a few things:

Tea in a mug. I often bring tea in my travel mug, but lately I’ve been re-discovering the tactile sense of connection of drinking out of a mug, the heat seeping into my hands and warming all of me. Drinking hot tea, strong and steaming, pulls me into a moment of just being and feeling present.

Short hot hot hot hot showers. I’m not a shower every day kind of person. I’m not even a shower every other day person. But this past week, I found that three minutes under a steaming hot blast of water was cathartic. I would drag myself up in the morning, after getting home past midnight. Sometimes during tech I decide sleep trumps showers. But these days I have to be up to pack lunches anyway, so I get up, feeling like the hard hard rehearsal the night before was still clinging to me. And even though I barely had time in the morning, I turn the water on super hot and jump in the shower, just long enough to breathe the steam and feel the sting of water burning my skin. And came out feeling like I’m going to make it through the day.

Classical music on the way into work. I have an audiobook for my long commutes to the theatre, but this week, on the way in, I just wanted to listen to classical music – I wanted the soothing, wordless melodies – anything with words would be too much. My mind could trace the musical lines as I listened, but also my mind could wander and problem solve and think about the day ahead. I think while part of being grounded is about being fully present in the moment, there is part of being in the moment that is also about thinking of the problems ahead. The challenges of the day are also part of the present moment. I know that people talk about mindfulness as being in the now, but I think the now is also made up of aspects of past and future as well.

Holding my son’s hand. The seven year old is in my show. (Which, on reflection, wasn’t a great idea for the family – it’s certainly has pushed us to activity capacity and the late nights have messed up a lot of things.) Some days he comes to the theatre before the child minder is on duty, so I take him out to the house with me where he sits in the seats behind me as I put cues in my book. He holds my hand as we walk around backstage and that little warm firm grasp reminds me that here is a living breathing human that I somehow pushed into the world, and how awesome is that?

The routine. Getting up in the morning and packing lunches – two slices of bread, two slices of cheese, two slices of ham. Apple, sliced. Five slices of cucumbers. One cookie. Feed the kids. What is important right now? Not obsessing about how to fit in 40 minutes of chorus break in a 4 hour rehearsal, but rather, packing this lunch so that the kids aren’t hungry at lunchtime. I don’t know how I’m going to fit in all those breaks, but I do know that we will get in the car at 9:55am to catch the school bus at 9:06am.

Expressing gratitude. For the Husband, for good colleagues, for the fine weather (that I don’t get to see). For being so very damn lucky that I get to make opera for a living.

What grounds you these days? What is grinding you up these day?

I’m writing this post as part of NaBloPoMo – click on the icon below to see who else if participating. You can also leave me questions for an upcoming “Ask me Anything” post via this link. Happy reading and writing everyone!

Shavasana with a baby

One of the things I’ve been trying to get back into is a short morning yoga routine. Even though YouTube abounds with yoga practices, I find I can focus better without the visual element so I usually use yoga podcasts to guide me. I know I could always just turn the volume off of a YouTube video, but I find that the people who lead the practice are less descriptive when there is a visual component. My current ideal yoga routine length is about twenty to twenty five minutes. I can do a longer practice in a class, but for some reason when on my own, I can’t focus as long. (I know the point of yoga is focus, so this is a little ironic).

The kids are now of an age that they can fend for themselves for twenty minutes in the morning while I slip away to the basement and roll out my yoga mat and put my earphones in. I’m not quite sure what they do for those twenty minutes, but I don’t think they are getting into the knives or burning the house down, so I figure they’ll be fine. Sometimes they are getting into my chocolate stash, though, which is almost as dire. On a good day, they are getting dressed.

The other day, as I was doing my yoga, the baby came down. She thinks it’s great fun to crawl all over me while I’m doing yoga. Something about the various poses screams “HUMAN JUNGLE GYM!!! OPEN FOR CLIMBING!!!”. She’ll sit on me while I do bridge pose, and giggle as she goes up and down with my pelvis. Warrior two finds her climbing up on my bent leg to hang on to my arms. Downward dog makes a tunnel for her to crawl under. It does make it a little difficult to move into chaturanga or plank pose to have her lying under me. Sometimes we play “squish” the baby when that happens.

In a way, it reminds me of when the kids were just born and I took a post-natal yoga class at my local hospital. They were held on weekday mornings and the new moms would always come in gingerly with their little squishy babies. The instructor was so amazing and she taught us to be as gentle with ourselves as we were with our little babies. Some classes, I spent the entire 45 minutes nursing, though I did manage to figure out how to nurse a baby while in bridge pose…. I’m listing this as one of my hidden talents.

At a birthday party recently, I talked to someone recently whose son was in the same pre-school class as my five year old. Turns out we had been in the same post natal yoga class with these boys who are now about to start Kindergarten. She commented on how she felt like she spent the whole class nursing and was always a little frustrated by that. “I finally got out of the house to do something,” she said, “And I still ended up attached to the baby. I felt so frustrated because I just wanted to spend some time doing something. It was supposed to be me time!”

I feel that resentment sometimes when the baby interrupts my yoga. This is me time, not mommy baby time. Yet the other day, when she came down and proceeded to insert herself into my routine, I tamped down my annoyance and tried to lean into it. I tried to savour her playfulness and her big smiles as she looked at me from below as I attempted some kind of Warrior. I took on her weight when she jumped on me as I was doing a seated forward fold. And I gave her kisses as I went from cow to cat and back again.

And then I settled into shavasana – aka corpse pose, aka the pose at the end of the practice where you just lie on your back and let go. The moment I was supine, the baby crawled on top of me and put her head on my chest. Well, actually at first she dug her pointy little chin on my chest, which was not relaxing. So I said, “Can you put your cheek on my chest?” and she turned her head to one side and laid her pillowy round cheek over my heart. And as the voice in my ear told me to relax and breathe and empty my mind, I thought, “With a thirty pound toddler on me? You’re kidding right?”

Then something happened as I tried to obey the voice in my ear that told me to breath and let go. I took deep breaths, and the baby breathed with me. And as we lay there, breathing together, I realized, “Okay, this is ‘me time’ too.” And all my resentment went away. Because I realized, right now, in this season of life, these kids are a part of me. I don’t mean that in the scary self-erasing, symbiotic almost parasitic sense that I sometimes feel when my kids are draining the energy from me. Nor was it one of those sentiments where I’m sacrificing myself and my tranquility on the altar of motherhood for these little terrors, you know, all the toxicity of the tired mom trope.

It was just this realization that our lives have been so intertwined and close, particularly these past two years, and that yeah, I do identify a lot as a mom these days, and it’s absolutely okay to allow myself to feel so defined by that. If a lot of the stress and anger and despair I feel within me some days come from parenting, then certainly a lot of the joy and wonder and peace does to. Like this moment, trying to squeeze in some yoga with a toddler interjecting at every turn. Come the following week, the kids will all be in school, and me time may look very different. For now, though, me time can be mom time, savoring the sweet weight of a little person doing Shavasana with me.

Going to work is the break

There was a day last week which, on paper, looked to be almost leisurely. Rehearsal didn’t start until 11pm, so I had the morning to catch up on things, and I had scheduled the kids’ passport appointments to get them out of the way before I headed in to work.

But… it didn’t turn out that way.

For one, I had been up late the night before filling out the passport forms – my own fault for procrastinating. But it did mean that I didn’t get much sleep.

Then the jar of bean soup that I had pulled from the freezer to thaw in the fridge cracked as I was getting it out to pack for lunch. The bottom of the mason jar just fell clean off and there was a flood of bean soup everywhere, even in the little crevices of the refrigerator door. Curses and clean up followed. I was a little sad because the bean soup had been in the freezer for over two years and I was excited to finally eat it in a show of frugality. Oh well. But this was an added level of mess I didn’t need in the midst of packing everyone else’s lunches and breakfasts.

It was also the morning that our County summer camp registration opened and at 8:25a, I was glued to my computer waiting for the system to open at 8:30a. The camp slots go quickly, so this is the kind of thing that goes in my calendar and I set the alarm for. Luckily I was able to get the ten year old into the same camp as her friend from last summer, but the whole registration experience made me realize that there are some inherent equity issues with this system. I mean, 8:30am is an absolutely terrible time for camp registration to open. I was lucky that my mom walked the kids to school that morning, but if a working parent has to do school drop off or what not, they might not be able to log on right at 8:30am. It’s like you need childcare to sign up for childcare. Also – internet.

Anyhow, after that was done, I had an hour to get dressed, eat some breakfast, pay a couple bills, and make dinner in the InstantPot for the family to have when they got home since I had to work late. I actually felt pretty good about that hour. But of course, pride goeth….

9:30am, I had the two little kids in the car on the way to our passport appointment. I pull up twenty minutes early, get out to pay the meter and realize I had left my wallet at home, having taken it out to pay for summer camp. So I get the kids back in the car, drive back home, hit terrible traffic on the way home due to a malfunctioning traffic light, try not to panic, get home, find my wallet after some searching – I had left it in the bathroom of all places – arrive back at the post office only five minutes late for the passport appointment. I get to the passport window, pull out my wallet … and can’t find my ID. I realized that I had taken it out of my wallet the night before to make a scan of it to submit with out papers. I can’t freakin’ believe it.

Well, as long as I was there, I asked the postal worker taking passport applications to look at the baby’s passport photo just to make sure it would pass muster. And it doesn’t. Apparently, the baby giving her skeptical side-eye, was not looking straight into the camera enough. I felt like yelling, “Do you know how hard it is to get a two year old to stand still for a picture, let alone stand and look straight into a camera?!?!” Or maybe it’s just my two year old.

So I guess the appointment wasn’t all wasted, because now I know that her picture would have been rejected and I would have had to come back again anyway.

By the time we left the post office, it was only 10:30am. I was pretty much drained for the day.

This is life though, right? I don’t have a job that I can just take a personal day to do these things. And things do still have to get done. I mean there is plenty that doesn’t need doing, but even still, sometimes the scheduled list just seems packed. (A friend and I joked that next year we should get together on camp registration day and have breakfast and mimosas.) On the other hand, I do have lots of time between gigs that I can probably be better about planning when some things (ahem passport appointments) get done so that it causes the least amount of friction and stress.

And truth to tell, even though I felt depleted at 10:30am on that day, by the time I got to work there was something refreshing about putting on a different hat and solving different problems and shelving the disaster of a morning. Not that my job doesn’t have it’s challenges… But I go to work and listen to people with gorgeous voices sing Mozart. It’s not terrible. And no one whines at me or cries because I won’t let them put their egg in their cup of milk. It’s certainly easier to get fifty choristers onstage with the right prop than it is to put three kids to bed.

I had a text exchange before I started this gig with a friend. She wrote:

How are things with you? Is the job still on or do you have a break now.

And I wrote back:

Oh, man – going to work *is* the break!

Light moments

The light as we walk to the bus stop this week has been especially gorgeous, all soft and golden, bathing everything with a special glow. Well, at least when it wasn’t raining. It seems like this is the time of year when the light is beautiful at the moments when I most need it. The sun’s warm rays touch the baby’s hair, as I rush down the street, turning her dark locks a burnished auburn. I’m worried about missing the bus, I’m worried that I yelled at the kids too much to get them out the door, I’m worried about forgetting something back at the house, I’m worried that the ten year old who runs ahead might forget to look for traffic before crossing the street. All these things. And then I see the sun kiss everything and turn it all gold and I remember to breathe and see beautiful things.

And then in the evening, as I’m trying to rush the kids home to pull dinner out of thin air, the sun, only this time coming from the opposite directions, once again tells me that I don’t need to rush quite yet. I can take the time to walk slowly and talk to my kid who I sometimes feel is is growing too quickly and maturing too slowly for my liking. After three weeks of driving to school, she says to me on our walk home, “I’d forgotten how nice it is to walk home in the fresh air!”

I know the way the light falls is just how the earth spins and tilts, but it seems like there is some cosmic plan here. Why else would the world look so beautiful just when I don’t feel like I have the time to slow down and not miss it? I mean now, when it is so cold outside and the dirty slush soaks through my poor choice of footwear? When all I want to do is be back inside my house, something is telling me that, “No, actually, what you need is fresh air. There is plenty out here if only you will pause and look and breathe.”

Of course I know that in a few weeks, the sun will hit that special horizon spot at a different point in my day. It will be there slanting through the kitchen window as I make breakfast, lunch and prep dinner. Morning activities that once felt practically nocturnal when carried out in the pre-dawn darkness will now feel very much part of the day. Maybe then, I’ll feel like the sunlight is saying, “This food that you are preparing is important. Take time to realize that!” Then in the evening, the light will come through the living room and stab us in the eye as we sit down for dinner and say grace, lighting up the one moment in the day where all five of us sit down, hands folded and quiet.

And then come summer, the inviting light will be there late into the evening, beckoning the kids to come out and play even though it is well past bedtime. And in the morning it will stream through their windows as they laze in bed, blankets pulled over their heads, exhausted from staying up late the night before.

I guess the sunlight will always peek through the trees and over rooftops twice a day. The rays will come through the kitchen window in the morning and flood the living room in the afternoon. It’s a predictable yet moving moment. Moving in the sense of changing from day to day, but also, I think in the sense of sentiment. These moving beams serve as a nice reminder, highlighting different moments of my day. As the year progresses and time marches on, the light reminds my distracted self not to take these moments for granted, even if it isn’t part of some larger cosmic message.

On curry powder and concoctions

The baby’s head smells like curry powder. So does the kitchen.

She has figured out how to open doors. She comes out of her bedroom in the morning (or in the middle of the night), and finds her way to our room, opening door after door until she can hoist herself into our bed. Lately she has really liked opening the door to the pantry and getting into the spices. She shakes them, and then if she can manage she opens the tiny jars. And if she manages to open more than one jar, she pours the contents form one jar to the other, mixing spices and herbs like a little apothecarist.

The other day, I found an empty jar of whole cloves sitting on its side in the kitchen. Puzzled, I searched all over for where she could have dumped them, sniffing here and there for any telltale traces, unearthing not one clove. Shrugging, I told myself, “Well, maybe the jar was empty to begin with….”

A couple days later, I opened up the jar of mustard seed only to find it full of ginger powder. And there nestled in the ground ginger and mustard seeds were little brown clove bulbs, their spiky bulbs poking up through the pale yellow powder and little yellow spheres. A strange little concoction. Mystery solved.

The curry powder incident was another of her unmonitored sessions. I was in my room doing some work on the computer when I heard loud crying. Rushing downstairs, I found that not only had she dumped a whole packed of chana masala powder on the floor, she had then rubbed her eyes, stinging them with the spices.

When I was about nine or ten or twelve, my parents owned a restaurant. One of my jobs was to fill the salt and pepper shakers. One day, I rubbed my eyes in the middle of this task and the burning pain was instantaneous and horrible. My mother (or maybe my brother, I can’t remember) took me to the bathroom and helped me rinse out my eyes, but the sting lasted a good while. For a lifetime, one could say.

I am reminded of this as the four year old, runs up to the baby. His arms are spread wide. “Wee-oo, wee-oo, wee-oo!” he trills, imitating an ambulance as her gives his crying sister a hug.

Lots of hugs and a wet washcloth to the eyes later, the baby and I are cuddled in a chair as she recovers from the pain, and the shocking surprise of the pain. I hold her close and smell her curry scented hair. It’s not a bad perfume.

The house smells like curry for days afterwards. I don’t mind – I love the warm homey smell.

These days, I feel like I’m ten steps behind discovering what my children are up to. While I’m making dinner or puttering around the house, they play and meddle and poke around and explore and discover. Later, I will find measuring cups in the toy school bus, plastic storage containers in the with the bakeware, books flung in all corners of the house. I’m sure there is a metaphor there for children and what they are capable of when you aren’t watching. Or perhaps it is a cautionary tale to savor and watch them while you can. I’m not sure, though I’m sure both are lessons I should be embracing.

But in the meantime, I’ve put a childproof cover on the doorknob of the pantry.

The country we call home

In the wake of the spa shootings in Atlanta that left eight people dead, six of whom were Asian Americans, I’ve increasingly seen tossed around idea that people should “check in” on their Asian American friends and acquaintances. The spa shootings were just the latest in a string of attacks on Asians in the country. It seems that in the past year, anti-Asian sentiment has been exacerbated by a pandemic that started in China. The “China flu” or “Kung flu”, the whole list of xenophobic labelling has certainly been indicative of a casual and pervasive racist attitude, one that was amplified by our former president. It has made me so unspeakably angry.

I’ve been thinking of the idea of “checking in” a lot lately. No one has asked me how I feel or how my community is doing, and truth to be told, I think I would find it a little awkward if someone I don’t regularly have contact with were to contact me just to “check in”.

At the same time, I’m not going to lie, the radio silence does sort of sting – not because I personally want a spotlight on myself as an Asian American. Rather, the lack of discussion on the topic in my day to day conversations has left me wondering if the anti-Asian bias that I’m seeing is all in my head. Were these shootings just another American mass killing, that really isn’t about race? Is the anti-Asian sentiment which I feel has really come to the fore in the past year – is it something that I am imagining? Does being a model minority mean that we are expected just to ignore this and not make waves? When we don’t talk about racism (or ageism or ableism or sexism, or misogyny, what not) it gives the impression that it isn’t perceived as a problem in the world we live in.

I don’t want my children to feel like being half Asian is a burden, or makes them a target. I don’t think they quite understand that very real possibility yet. And while it would be great if they could go through life thinking that they have the privilege of being white, I want them to understand that there is a very real bias that they could face in life. It is a bias that may lead to them being fetishized, passed up for jobs, stereotyped, bullied or teased. I mean maybe not, hopefully no, but I’m not going to tell my kids that this will never happen. I tell them that this is something we as a society need to work on, even myself.

I understand the hesitancy to talk about this with one’s Asian friends, acquaintances and colleagues. Heck, I even wondered if I should have said something to our favorite sandwich guy who is Korean. I didn’t and I kind of regret it. I understand not knowing if one is doing or saying the right thing. And, to be fair, there is no one size fits all for this kind of thing. Some people would appreciate to be asked. Some people would rather not. Some people would welcome the opportunity to contribute to the narrative. Some people would resent being seen as a spokesperson for a whole continent. Some people would appreciate the sincerity. Some people would label it just another in a long string of performative gestures. It’s difficult to navigate – I get it.

But even if we aren’t talking about it, I hope people are thinking about it. I hope people are acknowledging that even if anti-Asian sentiment is not something they themselves see, it is indeed a very real and scary and is a legitimate reality. I hope people realize that it is not okay for these things to be happening.

I for one, though I might find the conversation awkward, would never fault anyone for doing what they felt was the right thing. Connecting is hard enough as it is, and any opportunity to do so is good, right? Awkward conversations are still conversations.

Anyhow if you were to “check in” with me, this is what I would say:

My father walks several miles a day. Lately he has taken to carrying a pointy stick with him on these walks. I would like to tease him about it and dismiss him as being paranoid and melodramatic, but I can’t. For him, being a victim of violence because of his race is a very very real fear. My parents, who have been on this continent for over fifty years, have done all the right things to be good Americans (and before that, good Canadians). They have contributed only good things to the society and economy of this country. And it really sucks immensely that this is how unwelcome they feel living in the country that they call home.

On savoring dishes

So I’ve been slowly working my way through “The Science of Well Being” course – also known as the Yale course on happiness. Each week one is given some “rewirements” – scientifically proven actions that increase happiness. I’ve been tracking my progress on these rewirements in my notebook.

Some of the categories are: savoring, gratitude, exercise, sleep, meditation, connection, kindness. This last one has been pretty hard to practice during COVID times, but the others are quite COVID friendly. Practicing and tracking how I do on these things has given me a certain intentionality in my week, if only in retrospect some days.

A couple weeks in, however, it occured to me that I wasn’t doing very well on the assignment to “savor” something. I seem to be bad at realizing in the moment that the moment is worth savoring. So last week I decided to pre-select something to savor every day. That way, I wouldn’t have to wonder as I went through my day, “Am I savoring this?” “Is this a good savoring moment?” “Should I have savored that more?”

In an attempt to find some joy in a somewhat tedious chore, I chose to savor doing the dishes every day.

Doing the dishes is somewhat of a mental hurdle for me – the stack of plates, the work ahead of me so…. obvious in every scrap of stuck on food – it all seems like a huge amount of effort. But I decided that I would try to embrace the chore and attempt to turn it into an immersive activity.

Turns out, there were indeed some satisfying aspects in doing dishes: The scalding heat of hot water, encasing my hands in spa-like warmth through my rubber gloves – almost like the paraffin wax dip at the Tallgrass Salon. The steam that rises from that very hot water, fogging my glasses but also bringing a welcome warm moist heat on a cold dry day. The satisfaction of scrubbing and scrubbing and seeing the pot get cleaner with each pass of the sponge. The mountain of suds, growing as the pot fills with water. Listening to music as I work – some nights show tunes, some nights Brahams.

(Side note – Some nights, truth be told, it’s Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great, or some such middle grade audiobook. I bribe the the nine year old to help with post dinner clean up by letting her listen to audio books. I try not to resent the aural intrusion into what I want to consider my time. Sometimes the twenty minutes at the kitchen sink is the only time I have to immerse myself in listening and it’s hard to give up my podcast/ music time to Judy Blume. (Gah! that sounds so petty! I mean it’s Judy Blume!) Ultimately, though, I usually decide that giving up my listening time is a reasonable price for the nine year old’s cooperation. Maybe I should invest in bluetooth headphones. Or maybe I should just revisit my childhood and the novels of Judy Blume. )

Then there is the satisfaction of taking my gloves off and seeing that the pile of dirty pot and dishes that had been on one side of the sink now sit dripping and gleaming on the drying mat on the other side. The joy and satisfaction of our bottle drying rack – one of the few third baby purchases that fill me with joy. (Another side note: I mean this bottle drying rack is amazing – it’s vertical and takes up a third of the counter space that our other bottle racks had taken up. And it’s so easy to use and clean. When you look at bottle drying racks, they all kind of are the same and are cesspools for mildew and general crud. Then there is this one that kind of blows the paradigm apart. Get it. Even if you don’t have babies. It’s also great for drying ziploc bags. I mean I’m not making any money off this or anything- I just love it; one of my top ten baby purchases.)

I won’t say that savoring dishwashing makes it any less of a chore, but it does help take my mind off how tedious it can be. If I’m going to have to do something every day (or, switching off with the Husband, every other day), I may as well find little moments of mindfulness and pleaseure in it. Which I guess is part of the science of happiness.

Haikus for December

Wispy, silky hair.
Kisses on doughy cheeks.
Savor this baby.

Trying to savor
this tiny person spitting
banana on me.

Onesie snaps are like
“Rock, paper, scissors.” Aim for
Best two out of three.

Toast is my refuge –
Crisp, buttery comfort, and
deafeningly loud.

Silence and water
cocoon me in the shower.
Treasured solitude.

Short Walk/ Long Walk

Some days getting the kids outside is a challenge. Once they are outside, they generally are okay, but the initial push is always hard. Who can blame them? These days there are screens and cozy couches and a room overflowing with toys and books to keep them indoors. But I know everyone feels so much better when we get outside, so I push as hard as I can. I start with one child – bathroom, coat, hat, gloves, boots, out the door into the back yard – then move on to the next, and then the next, and then myself, hoping against hope that by the time I get the baby bundled and my own coat on, the first child to go outside has not tired of it and is wanting to come inside.

The other day – one of those drizzly wet days that we’ve gotten quite a few of this winter – a glance at the forecast seemed to indicate that the morning drizzle was as dry as it was going to get. Drizzly walk was better than soaking wet walk, I thought. (Though, truth be told, I am discovering that my kids actually find a run in a torrential rain quite fun.) The eight year old was in class, so it was just me and the three year old and the baby. And there was much resistance from the three year old.

He didn’t want to go out.

It was too wet.

He didn’t like his boots.

He wanted to stay inside and read books.

and so on.

“Let’s just go for a short walk,” I say. “We will just go around the block.”

A walk around the block in the drizzle would be doable, I thought. The baby can manage that so I wouldn’t have to get the stroller out. We would keep to our block so probably won’t encounter any people. Regardless it would probably be our only chance for fresh air that day.

“Okay, fine,” the three year old finally agreed.

So boots, coat, and out the door.

We walked down the street. And then stopped to splash in a tiny puddle. Stomp stomp stomp, went the three year old. Stomp stomp stomp, went the baby.

And then there were sticks and leaves to drop into the gutter and watch as the rainwater carried it away.

And then there was the search for the perfect stick to grasp. Each stick on the ground must be examined and compared to the one in hand.

And then we stopped to read license plates of the cars in the driveways we passed. It’s a good way to practice numbers and letters for the three year old. An colours too, as we point out yellow cars and white cars.

And then we stop to watch the UPS truck pull up and deliver packages.

And next was the white postal truck. “A new postal truck, just like mine!” the three year old exclaims. Last year he received a toy postal truck for Christmas and he still gets very excited to see its real life doppelganger.

And then there was the worm- just a regular old earthworm in the middle of the sidewalk. We squatted and watched its pink brown body contract and expand as it moved incrementally across the pavement. Slowly it drew its body together. Slowly it pushed itself forward. Millimeter by millimeter it travelled, until it reached the grass. The slowly slowly it started to burrow, pushing its way into the dirt. I thought of so many things as I watched the little earthworm’s journey. Where did it come from? How did it know where it was going? What wonderful things was it doing for our earth? What persistence it must have!

And finally we walk the last stretch of the block and arrive home.

I look at my watch and we had been gone for almost an hour.

Sometimes the short walk takes just as long as the long walk.

Anatomy of a Fall Walk

Most mornings I will put the baby in her stroller, and the three year old and I will go for a walk. He has learned to put his own shoes and socks on, grab his mask and helmet to meet me outside by the shed where he will grab his Skut bike. Off we will go- him pushing along on his bike and me following with the baby. The baby will only nap for me in her stroller, so the incentive for these daily walks is great, even aside from the lure of fresh air and physical activity.

These days, we are well into fall. The weather has been cooler.

Because we go for a walk almost every day, I am noticing how gradual and varied the changing of the leaves is. Usually I am deep into production this time of year and I look up one day and the trees are ablaze with colour, and when I next look up the trees are bare. The current daily excursions have forced me to see how incrementally things change, and how each tree moves at its own pace. There are trees that have dropped almost all of their golden and red leaves and there are trees that are still green with maybe the faintest hint of red on a few leaf tips.

The going is slow. There are many stops along the way to look at this patch or dirt or that bunch of sticks. To gaze at the light filtering through the leaves. To periodically pull the mask down and breathe. Also the three year old has this endearing routine where he stops at a driveway, turns his skut bike, and backs into the drive while going, “beep, beep, beep.” Sometimes he does this with every drive way on our walk.

The other day a heavy mist had settled over everything, giving the morning a strangely cozy air, despite the damp that hung in the air. We pass by one tree that has deposited a magnificent thick carpet of gold and orange on the ground. I’ve always loved the sound of walking through fallen leaves. I even purposely scuff my feet through them to make that crisp crunch and rustle sound.

Halloween decorations are out full force. The neighborhood tends towards macabre decorations. Graveyards and skeletons abound. Spiders too. The eight year old has always wanted to decorate for Halloween, and this year the Halloween discounts were pretty steep even at the beginning of the month so I picked up some candy corn lights and black cheese cloth while at the craft store. It doesn’t make for all out Halloween extravaganza, but it will be a little something.

The park down the road is under construction. Earlier this year, we had come to the park only to find the playground fenced in and the play structures gone. They are putting in new equipment, and we’ve enjoyed watching everything being built from the ground up. I am particularly excited about this strange swing that looks like two people can use at once- a bucket swing and a standing swing linked together.

At the park, we usually stop for a while. The baby is usually asleep by now. I sit on a bench and read my book, and the three year old scoots around- watching the construction vehicles building the playground (“Look, Mama! Diggers!), chasing squirrels on his bike, riding lazy circles up and down the small hills.

Eventually he rolls back to where I am sitting.

“Can you set your alarm for ten minutes?” he says.

Sometimes I cheat and set it for more so I can squeeze in a little more reading. Or sometimes, truth be told, scrolling.

When the alarm goes off, we start heading home.

We pass houses with Biden/Harris signs standing amid cobwebs and ghostly tatters of fabric draped from trees.

We collect some leaves and later in the afternoon make some leaf rubbings.

Finally we arrive back home. All told we usually walk for an hour and a half. The three year old puts his Skuut bike back into the shed, backing it in while going “Beep, beep, beep.”