Tools dictate behavior

My husband has been sick for awhile so I'm making him a restorative beef soup. I started it this morning on the theory that if it simmered all day, the meat would become soft and digestible and delicious and the broth full of vitamins. (I firmly believe in food as medicine.) But in the last little while the wind has kicked up. It creates just enough of a breeze within the house that on simmer, my gas burner sputters and sputters. I could hear it sputtering even upstairs, at my desk. So I ran downstairs and turned the heat up higher and let the soup boil while I went back up to work; then, worried it had all evaporated, I ran downstairs and turned it off and let it cool awhile as I went back to working; and then, worried it might go bad, I ran downstairs again to turn the heat on again and let it boil again; and so on: every half hour running up and down the stairs to attend to my now imperious restorative soup.

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For Alejna -- a list:

If you google "tools dictate behavior," you get pages with the following titles:

• Orangutans' culture dictates their behavior
• Do neurons dictate behavior?
• Do genes dictate behavior?
• Do you let your type dictate your behavior?
• Does your birth date dictate your behavior?
• How sporting rules dictate behavior

And the grand prize winner:

• Actually, rudeness is dictating people's behavior

Wait

After my 2nd child was born, I lost a lot of weight. I'm not exactly sure why. I think partly my daughter was premature; partly I was nursing exclusively*; and partly I had a toddler + infant and refused to accept help**, so I was always running around and never eating... I had a 4-month-old and wore a size 0. Anyway, that year that I was so crazy thin, women were always giving me breathtakingly rude, backhanded compliments. One woman said to me, "Your friends must hate you." I could've slapped her. But also, I've always wondered about the subtext to that comment. Did she believe that my thinness made other women look bad? Made them look -- what? Lazy? Did she believe that I had an obligation to look a certain way post-childbirth?

As soon as I went back to my standard weight (when Sasha finally weaned) all the criticism stopped. It was a very weird experience.


* For the longest time she refused to drink from a bottle. Re-fu-sed.  If she was hungry and her dad tried to feed her, she'd scream bloody murder. No joke. We used to call her Decibella.

** The following summer I was sick for a month -- I had a stomach virus for a month -- and that cured me forever of my independent streak!

Prompted by jo(e).

Take 4

A synonym of "repair" is resort.

Sled

After exiting the chairlift, snowboarders skate to an out-of-the-way space to sit in the snow and clip their back foot into its binding. Skiers have to wait for them.

Skiers whose wives find it amusing to develop a portfolio of shots of the NWX snowmobile against a gray sky – those skiers must wait a little longer.

Make your mark

They call it boot-packing. It means that one slings one's skis over one's shoulder – or holds a snowboard across one's back – and climbs the hill in boots, stomping firmly into the snow to create a foothold.

The first person up the hill is blazing trail. Everyone following tries to step in the tracks he's made: to use his foothold. Sometimes a follower will slip and have to stomp a new hold, and in this way (if it's not storming) a path will form, set a foot or two feet or even three feet lower than the surface of the rest of the snow, and snaking all the way up the hill.

Lines

After a long dry spell we finally had several inches of new snow, so the entire town of Bend went into the mountains to play -- or near enough to the entire town as matters: at 8:15 yesterday morning, traffic was backed up to the Safeway on 14th Street. I've never seen it like that before. It took us over an hour to get to Mt. Bachelor, where the lift lines were all long, especially because one of the best chairs was not operational.

So. My husband and I joined this throng of people hiking up the cinder cone. The snow was waist-deep and light and wheee-hooo!

I'm not a powder hound (as evidenced by the fact I'm not there today, with the Summit chair newly-opened) but I really do like a good storm. It knocks the thoughts out of my head.

Déjà vu all over again

The snow on the mountain is compacted and crusty and skiing is, people quietly confess, not very much fun. We refer to it as exercise. On the chairlift locals remind each other that this happens every year; we have just such a long dry spell every year – but the March Miracle happens every year, too! The skiing is always amazing in spring! Just hold on.

If you need to write a letter to a dragon

Sparkles

After ten consecutive weekends, snowboarding was feeling more like a job than a gift. I was dead tired of the whole thing: the early, busy mornings and the recalcitrant children and the cold and the pain and the – the have to on a weekend.

So Sasha and I took a wee break this weekend. We played hooky. All day Saturday we did whatever the heck we wanted, so long as it didn't involve snow; and then on Sunday she and I snowshoed while the boys skied.

It was so cool. It was surprising. We saw critter tracks everywhere. We stood in the forest, in view of the chairlift, with the buzz of snowmobiles around us, and we saw critter tracks everywhere. We followed them all 'round – between trees and over hillocks and down – trying to find the critters themselves, but we never did. It was very mysterious. I'm not sure what they were. Pine martens, do you think?

Sparkly snow with possible pine marten tracks near the trees.

Title borrowed from jo(e)

Once upon a time

My daughter slept on the floor of her brother's room the whole year that she was seven. She said that when she'd turned seven, she became afraid of shadows and darkness and needed her brother's presence; but when her eighth birthday arrived, she assured us, she wouldn't be afraid anymore. She could go back to her own room. And she did.

Sometimes she slept in a sleeping bag and sometimes between blankets but most often she made herself a nest: a round pile of every stray pillow, blanket and stuffed animal in the house. She liked to build two nests, actually, to entice Blake to sleep on the floor with her – and me, too.*

So: many nights during the year that Sasha was seven, she and Blake and I snuggled together in the nests Sasha had made, and I would tell them stories about their alter egos. The stories always began like this: "Once upon a time, a long time ago, there were two children named Slake and Basha. They lived in Bend, Oregon, with their mother and father and two guinea pigs.** One night the children were woken by the sound of..."

My written stories always start with place and character, and I like the places and the characters so much that I never can get them into trouble, which means it's not really a story – nothing happens; the story never goes anywhere. The tales I told my children, though, were set right here with people who are known (like a coyote story) and so they had to be all action. And improvised. And modified on-the-fly when the children lost attention – or got too involved: the stories were, after all, intended to settle them to sleep.

One night the children were woken by the sound of footsteps on the roof. They ran out the back door, into the yard, and looked up. It was a female dragon building a nest!

One night the children were woken by a terrible rushing grinding sound. They ran to the front window to see what it could be. It was a rocketship landing in the street!

It was a baby dragon and they were worried that all the grown-ups would be afraid of it so they hid it in their closet and Slake used his slingshot to kill squirrels for its dinner.

It was a pterodactyl that took them for a ride; it was a rocket full of aliens who took them to other planets; it was a baby snow leopard and they taught it to hunt and then took it up to Broken Top, where it lives even now, eating deer just like the cougars do...

Sasha's nearly nine now. She sleeps in her own bed. She can read novels herself, and more often than not she wants to read herself to sleep. She seems still to have affection for Slake and Basha, though. Maybe she'll continue their adventures in stories she tells her own children. Maybe I will!

And then the children came back home. They settled into the nest that Sasha had made. Their mother began to tell them a story, and they continued the story in their dreams.


* Once her teacher told me that she had asked the students if they liked to build forts and Sasha said oh no, I build nests; my brother would wreck a fort. Retelling this, the teacher could barely contain her laughter – but Sasha's response seemed to me perfectly reasonable. Isn't it?

** At that time we had two guinea pigs. Now we have only one. She's five. I think she must be the longest-lived guinea pig in Bend.

Red

My son read this post and declared me a great writer and authorized me to write more about him, if I liked. My daughter asked for more, too, although she requested that I write about Slake and Basha, my kids' alter-egos. (Basha has a pet dragon and Slake flies to other planets.) So I'm hoping to dredge up the time to write more often on this here blog. We shall see, eh?

More photos from Mt. B

This is from last weekend, I think. From the top of Mt. Bachelor, clouds made an ocean and the mountains were islands.

In a ski hut in the moonlight

The evening before Christmas Eve some friends hosted an almost-annual party at the Swampy Lakes ski hut. The hut is a small, three-sided log cabin with a dirt floor and, this year, four feet of snow on its roof. Snow fell so deep so early this year that our friends had to cut snow-steps down to the floor of the cabin, and people took turns standing by the entrance, chiding, "Watch your head!" as the rest of us ducked in and out -- drawn by the roaring fire in the barrel stove and three camp tables laden with food.

I first attended this party in 2005, when my son was barely four. At that time I was the connection to all those people. We women worked part-time then, and on our days off we'd haul the kids to this or that playground, or each other's houses, to drink coffee and complain of sleeplessness and laugh and worry over our sweet, silly babies. Now I work full-time. The children are tall, lean tent-poles and they're all in school -- nearly middle school, some of them. The husbands keep us connected now, ensuring that during the long, long ski season we meet on the mountain whenever we can.

Back in 2005, I was unnerved by this party. At the winter solstice the sun sets around 4:30; the party was held almost entirely in darkness, in the forest 16 miles from town, in bitter cold and deep snow. This year, however, the moon was nearly full on the solstice, and you know what? Moonlight on snow is very bright. It's so bright the trees cast shadows. In the cold, voices carry. Also the children are so much older now, I worry about them less -- even though now they're old enough to climb onto the roof of the little cabin and leap, squealing, to land poof! in that deep snow.

At one point I walked out alone, admiring that forest turned to shades of blue in the moonlight; I walked along the trail people had made, and then further, cutting my own path through waist-deep snow. I didn't go far; it was too exhausting; so I turned: looking back at the dark forms of my friends talking around the bonfire and the children romping in the snow, clearly visible in that moonlight, and loud, very loud, the way that free people will be.

Leaping from the roof of the shelter. Near sunset.

I'll shimmer and I'll shimmer and I'll blow your house up

I have to work today but because I work from home and my children are now 11 and 8 1/2, I don't have to make provisions for them. They do their own thing. Every little while I assemble a snack for them and remind them to eat, eat like a good mother -- then run back upstairs to sit at my desk and think and type like a good employee.

My son is singing. He's playing Minecraft and watching YouTube videos of other people playing Minecraft and he also must be watching the Minecraft parody for the song DJ Got Us Falling in Love Again, or else he's watched it often enough that he can belt out the song without a prompt: Baby tonight the creeper's going to steal our stuff again...

The YouTube parodies are funny. My son didn't know they were parodies until he asked me to watch the videos with him and I noticed the flag in the title and then we went around listening to the originals, both of us declaring the parodies much better. The other night he (with assistance from his little sister) invented his own parody, not of a song but of a certain well-known fairy tale, which begins, "Once upon a time there were three little Steves. The first little Steve made a house of mud. The second little Steve made a house of wood. The third little Steve made a house of bedrock. One day the creeper came along and said, 'I'll shimmer and I'll shimmer and I'll...'"

My daughter is making bracelets. She made one for her best friend and one for me and now she's down by the TV, listening to the Kratt Brothers with half an ear as she makes another. The bracelet kit was a gift from my mother, and it includes enough parts that Sasha believes she can make a bracelet for every female she knows. She's generous that way: always making things for other people. Two days after Christmas we had some friends over for dinner, and while Blake played with their three boys, Sasha -- who found the boys too rowdy for her taste, I think -- made their mother a little purse from felt and yarn. 

Well, well. I am supposed to be working, not blogging. I need to validate a fix that one of the programmers made this morning. So, ok! Off I go!