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kids and a kitten
Saturday, May 12 2018
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Today had all the makings for a cool dreary day, with enough rain coming down to postpone the morning dog walk. Our guests would be arriving a little before noon, and it was important to warm the house. With the boiler off, this meant burning a fire in the woodstove. In terms of burnable wood, we're down to most of what's in the woodshed annex (an old truck camper sticking out its back). But we had plenty of cardboard, so I kept stoking the fire with that. One has to pay more attention when fueling a cardboard fire, as it will burnout to nothing in five or ten minutes. But it's a fast ride to a warm room.
Gretchen picked up Marissa (the blond one who lives on the Upper West Side) and her two kids from the bus station, and when they arrived, the entire day took on a different character. I don't know if I've forgotten what it's like to be around young kids (the girl was almost three and the boy more than five), but I hadn't expected to find myself so consistently irritated and distracted by their presence. It wasn't even that they were in a bad mood; indeed, they were mostly joyous all day long. It's just the constant burbling of their high-pitched laughter and talking (no indoor voices for them!) and the unsettling way they moved about. Most adults (or, as I recall, children) are able to move about in a house at a calm walk, and one cannot hear every footfall. Not so with these two! They never moved at anything less than a gallop, with every footfall pounded audibly into the floorboards. From anywhere in the house, all one heard was the bass beat of their unending stomps under the sickeningly sweet soda pop of their giggles.
Soon after our guests arrived, it was time for lunch. Marissa had brought six bagels (with vegan cream cheese) for the five of us to share. Usually when someone brings bagels, there are at least two bagels per person. But evidently when you're in kid-world (and their mother is WASPy), the expectation is that you'll only be eating one (or at most two) open-faced bagel "sandwiches."
The kids, the particularly the little boy, went nuts about Diane the Kitten from the start. All that little guy wanted to do was pet, carry, and dangle the wire toy in front of Diane. And, to her credit, she seemed as into him as he was into her. But after awhile I became concerned that perhaps he was pushing her beyond her kitten limits, ones she didn't have the sense to police. Kittens have to sleep most of every day, and she wasn't being given any opportunities for that. I was worried that the little boy might inadvertently kill her with love and attention, like Lennie and the bunnies in Of Mice And Men.
At some point the kids gave Diane a much-needed break and came down to hang out with the adults and the dogs in the living room. The kids kept handing the dogs toys from the toy basket, and the dogs (particularly Ramona) eagerly obliged, chewing on things they'd either never shown interest in before or had forgotten about years ago.
Most of my expectations (and dismay) for how parents in the helicopter age parent the next generation comes from having observed the raising of my niece and nephew. Those poor kids were never left for a moment by themselves, not even when as the older one approached the cusp of his teenage years. So it was refreshing today to see Marissa unconcerned as her kids played upstairs with Diane the Kitten, or even as they ran around outside playing with sticks they were ostensibly helping bring into the house to fuel the fire. Marissa did have a baby monitor for keeping track of her youngest, but even I have been known to use those (for Neville the Dog).
At some point Gretchen and the little boy went on a walk with the dogs down the Farm Road. The rain had stopped, but the red efts were out in force, and the little boy loves things like that (spiders, bugs, snakes, etc.). There are no such creatures in Manhattan, so seeing brightly colored newts creeping around everywhere blew his tiny brain. He carefully moved them out of the path until Gretchen pointed out that they too needed their own agency in this world.
I didn't feel like I was contributing much to the social scene, so I decided to take the dogs and go run some errands in West Hurley. I needed things like tea, booze, crackers and pickled jalapeños. While in the Hurley Ridge Hannaford, I heard Paul McCartney's "Let 'Em In" on the store sound system. I hadn't heard that song in years and was reminded of the fact that my father had actually liked that song, perhaps the only pop song (except "Fly Robin Fly") that I ever heard him express any positive feelings about. (He hated Paul McCartney's "Silly Love Songs" and frequently commented that Michæl Jackson sounded "like a fœtus," though he liked Leonard Cohen that time he saw him Austin City Limits.) While out, I naturally stopped in at the Tibetan Center thrift store, where the only thing worth getting was a $1 set of measuring spoons. (I needed a way to measure the tiny doses of kratom extract and I didn't want to tie up Gretchen's 1/8 teaspoon.)
On the way home on Dug Hill Road, I stopped to pick up two moderately-thick chunks of white oak left by the recent powerline corridor vegetation prune.
Back at the house, I was inspired to continue collecting such free-for-the-taking firewood along Dug Hill Road. So I dropped off the dogs and went down Dug Hill Road, to a little below the driveway of our downhill neighbor, where I knew some fat pieces of red oak were ready to grab. But all I could do was wrestle a few smaller pieces into the car; the big pieces were far too big for a single human to move. After taking what I could, I walked back to the site with my 80 volt battery-powered Kobalt-brand chainsaw and cut the fat boles into firewood-sized pieces. As an indication of how fat the pieces were, I was only able to make about four cuts before my fully-charged battery was exhausted. When I returned with the Subaru, I brought my small GreenWorks battery-powered chainsaw to finish one of the nearly-finished cuts. It was almost comic how much weaker it was than the Kobalt had been, but it eventually did the job.
This evening Gretchen made three different kinds of pasta and a bowl of mushrooms (that last one was intended mostly for the little girl, though I would've liked more of those). It turned out that the kids didn't really like pasta, and they ended up eating what little remained of the six bagels that formed the meager heart of our earlier lunch. By now, Gretchen was drinking sake (and trying, only somewhat successfully, to get Marissa to partake as well). I'd bought a six pack of something called Sierra Nevada "Tropical Torpedo" at the Hurley Ridge Hannaford. It wasn't quite as good as the original Torpedo.
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