chronicles, farm life
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Yesterday my mother had an in-person board meeting for the nonprofit she
volunteers for. It was exactly overlapping with dinnertime.
I volunteered to take all four grandkids, and supervise them at the farm
for the afternoon, and then bring them back to Mom’s house in the late
afternoon, and then Middle-Little Sister could pick up takeout dinner from
the city (where she lives) and bring it up to us, and we’d all have dinner
together, and then she’d stay there until Mom came home, and I would leave
with Farmkid to get her home to bed at her normal time.
Mom tried to tell me she didn’t need me to do anything until evening, but I
managed to convince her to go home, decompress alone in her house, take a
few minutes, and maybe even lie down for a bit. So she did that.
It worked out fine; the children made insane amounts of noise, but were
very agreeable about things like “please don’t slam that door backwards
into the painting on the wall and break it” because I didn’t say “quit
tear-assin’ around the house” because honestly if they have that much
energy they should work through that.
All of them, even the youngest, are by now to the point where you can have
measured discussions on stuff, and maybe they’ll absorb it and maybe they
won’t, but I feel like now is my time to really shine as the Weird Aunt. As
we were driving, one kid moved seats, and thus had his seatbelt off, and I
told him that if the cops saw him without a seatbelt they would immediately
arrest me and I would die from the mortification and become a host
expressly to haunt that child. (He’s eleven, this isn’t going to scar him.)
I promised that I’d follow him to college and hide behind the headboard of
his bed and whenever he managed to find a special friend he wanted to bring
back to his room to get to know better I would take that moment to manifest
and terrify them, so he would never ever get to know anybody as well as he
wanted to. (I’m fairly certain he’s old enough to know what I meant, but if
he isn’t, well then, he’ll figure it out later and this will be funnier.
His older brother sure got my meaning.)
We then had another debate, sparked by a confusing advertising slogan on a
sign we passed, about whether houses could get married, and if that was a
possible way to make new houses, and I posed to them the dilemma of whether
a house would lay eggs or give live birth, and if so to either, *how, * and
we posited that houses give birth via the garage, but that gets confusing
in the case of houses with detached garages.
Anyway, these kids are leaving soon to go back to Maryland, but I’ll see
them again in August, so in the meantime I gotta think about more weird
shit I can do to really cement myself into position as The Weird Aunt. I’m
already shitty at buying people birthday presents, so I gotta make up for
it somehow by giving them the gift of effortless eccentricity.
Today Farmkid is absolutely obsessed with the thought of getting Minecraft
on her tablet, like her cousins have, and I pointed out to her that hours
of screen time in a day are bad for you; maybe in the summer it’s okay but
when there’s school and homework and things, you wind up not having any
time to think with your own mind. So she came up with a whole idea of
having alternating Minecraft and TV time, and her mother pointed out that
since money for chores hasn’t motivated her at all, maybe additional
minutes of screentime as payment for chores would, so that’s a thought.
She was under my nominal supervision at the time, and had begun following
her parents around to chatter excitedly about this idea, and I decided to
distract her by giving her a metal pail and I got a drywall bucket and we
went down to the creek and picked up cool rocks to throw in the mud puddles
outside the barn door, to try and slow down how much dang mud gets tracked
in. It worked a lot better than I thought it would, and we (mostly I)
hauled close to 150 pounds of gravel and rocks to dump into that mud
puddle. Not bad; the main purpose was to let Farmkid get some of her
chatters out, and she spent the whole time lecturing me on dragon-heart
rocks and how they make the earth ten times stronger. We placed them very
carefully in the permanent mud puddle next to the barn’s heavily-used side
door, and she pronounced this the cure to the mud problem.
Well, it won’t hurt. Anything’s better than that perma-puddle.
Yeah I don’t have a punchline. I’m super far behind on writing but that’s
fine, those deadlines don’t mean anything anyway. I have so much material
it’s just not put together. We’ll see what happens.
(Yes, I’m sitting here nominally supervising Farmkid; she’s now “setting
things up” in the side yard– a kindly friend came to haul all the kids’
toys out of the basement and clean them off after the flood, and now
they’re all out there bright and shiny and dry, and mostly too young for
Farmkid, but of course she’s happy to play with them since they’re novel.
It’s sort of cute to see several far-too-large children sitting at a
toddler picnic table.
I can’t see her but I can hear the satisfied little clicky noises she’s
making with her tongue as she plays. It’s not hard to keep tabs on that
kid.)
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