Can Phoebe be 30?

 

Ah, Phoebe. The milestones are coming too thick and fast for your poor old mother. I’m still trying to process the enormity that was your wedding, and here you are almost a year later turning 30, then moving to the PNW before fall. I mean, slow down a little! I can’t keep up! 

You’re playing on La Gomera at long, long last, with your sweet husband and your dear friend Carinna,

On the Not Watching Whales trip we took when we were there...

But I hear there were flocks of flying fish!

 I’m here in a frog-choking downpour on Indigo Hill, feeling lucky and graced beyond measure to be your mama. Even if it means I somehow have to bring up a blogpost to honor your birthday, like a fully-laden heron flapping home to the nest with a craw full of half-digested fish. 

It's a darn good thing I got a feeling I'd better harvest most of the garlic today. It's safely drying in the garage, waiting for you and Óscar to take some with you to your new home! Not bad for a first time garlic farmer. Next year: Even more manure, and much more water! Yes, I grew it mostly for you and Óscar, Liam and Ayla and my three fabulous cooking sisters. How much garlic does one person need? Not that much, it turns out. But giving it away, what a joy.

 Tato wants to help me write, so he just leapt onto my lap from a sitting start. And I’m sitting at my drawing table on a high drafting chair. That’s not trivial. Yes, this “tiny ball of sunshine” has grown into a rather large, long, lean, turbo-sweet Boston terrier who knows what he wants and always gets it. 23 pounds of pure genetically hand-selected GO. I thank you for the part you and Óscar have had in making him what he is today. Still very much a work in progress, but oh so much better for your firm hand. Counting on you to keep working with him whenever you come home. 

Do you know you are a glow in my heart? Nobody can light me up like you and Liam do. Nobody can make me laugh like you do. Nothing moves me like seeing you together, speaking your own language, walking out the meadow with your chairs and crossword puzzles to go have a chat with Daddy. What is sacred? Well, that. Your bond with your brother, and the way you honor both him and your dad.

You truly were born at the perfect time of year, Poobs, the time when all the flowers come out to play and all creation begins to buzz and sing. I’m going to walk through the prairie meadow so you can see what’s blooming now.

The Grandpa Ott morning glories you gave me that twined around your front porch railing in North Carolina are losing their minds with the manure I gave them. I said I wouldn't let them climb all over the garden fence, blocking sun from my garlic and tomatoes...well...I guess I underestimated their charm and how much I love them. Next year I'll let them grow only on the north side of the garden. No sun comes from that direction anyhoo. Right. 

 In my mind and heart, you are tightly interwoven with the special and ethereal beauty July brings in both the visual and auditory realms. Summer has found her voice in mid-July. She begins to sing quietly, then more confidently, until the katydid chorus swells each night. 

Do you see him? He'll be rasping tonight!

It was into such a time, and into a riot of flowers, that you decided to be born. What a wise and special infant you were, and you are my wise counsel to this day. You look like you're giving me advice, even here.

                                                 Are you sure you wanna post that, Mommy? 

 I can’t wait to see what kind of life you and Óscar make for yourselves going forward, and of course, I am excited about visiting! Olympic Peninsula, here we come! Happy birthday, my dearest little bird, as you embark on what I know will be your most exciting adventure yet. Excellence got you there, and excellence will carry you forward, and I’ll be watchin’ and creepin’ and visitin’!! Wondering if I can buy a seat for Tato on a plane. Is that done?

Gratuitous happy birthday hot off the presses Tato content now. For you and Carinna!

I tried to get a picture of him with chicory this morning, but he wouldn't smile.

I told him to smile and not eating the chicory

He just eating more.

He's a terrible dog and you have a lot of work to do when you get home. 

All too soon, it'll be Bon Voyage. Please, will somebody slow this all down? 

Happy birthday, sweet Phoebe!!! I am so very proud of you! 

One last gift from your sweet Auntie Barb, holding you here. There's Ida, loving you too. If I've seen this Polaroid (likely taken by your daddy), I don't remember it.

Phoebe is 28!

This heirloom tiger lily from our dear friend Tanya opened today. How many years ago did I plant the tiny black bulbules Tanya gave me? Six? The chipmunks got all but three of the wee plants. I put them in the back of my raised patio bed for safekeeping.  They got a tiny bit bigger every year. And the first one opened this morning, on Phoebe's birthday. How fitting, for a graceful, flame-orange flower to make her debut on July 11!

 

It was a morning something like this, but a lot hotter, more humid. I could tell by the white sky over the softball fields as I labored.  From my delivery room window, I saw men running around practicing, hitting and throwing, in the oppressive heat and thought about how very different their lives were from mine at that moment. I was in a life and death struggle to get this baby out into the world, and they were throwing balls around. 11:39 AM, 6 lb. 14.5 oz, 20" long. She was finally here, and I'll never forget looking into her cloudy blue eyes and getting the sense that there was Someone very ancient, Someone very new, looking back into mine. 

 I contemplate waking her at 11:33 AM in this long but too-short lazy summer, when she is resting from all that she does the other 10 months of the year, cheering and coaching and teaching and buoying her students higher, helping them reach for their stars, but she wakes up on her own. We share a banana with whipped cream on it at the moment of her birthday.

 She's a top-drawer human being, and the students and their parents at the academy where she works all know it. She's been running this summer, so she can train alongside her cross-country runners as assistant coach. I watch her lithe form run steady 9-minute miles and can only dream. I've never run a nine-minute mile in my life! There's a certain peace in knowing I never will, either. I'll reach for different stars. 

Watermelon sunset glow

Watermelon sunset, in progress

How lucky can you get, to be able to spend a couple of summer months with your grown daughter and her delightful husband, at home, deep in the country? 

We've been sealed off from the insanity all around, just grooving on the flowers and birds and the fresh vegetables that are coming from the garden, that hard-won garden that I turned over by hand, weeded of its waist-high hay, and planted, that Phoebe might have peas. Honestly, the picture I kept in my head over the nine days it took to weed it was Phoebe picking peas. And we had a smashing crop! Beans are in now!

Today is her birthday. There will be cake she makes herself for the first time in 28 years.  I think she's finally grown out of Betty Crocker Fun-Fetti mix. She knows that's my once and future cake repertoire and she's upping the game. I'll make the entree: chicken posole from our dear friend Anne's recipe. We'll gather on the patio with the swamp cicadas going, and we'll stay there until the katydids kick in, two weeks early; still beautiful. The whip-poor-will will sing and flutter and cluck, Curtis will try to look like a puppy while he waits for scraps, and he will get said scraps.

A rare connection in Columbus! We've seen far, far too little of busy Liam this summer! We miss him like mad!

Ducklips in a pub

Sibling love in Columbus

                         

             Jeni's is required

If I know anything, I know these days with Phoebe and Oscar are precious and rare. To have a girl who wants to come home for the summer, and can, and does? It's too good to be true. We walk in the butterfly meadow and identify each flittering thing, moving from bloom to bloom like a couple of giant, earthbound hummingbirds.  

             

A fresh zebra swallowtail is turquoise-blue. Speaking of butterflies...

There have been some glammy moments for the pair this summer--a black-tie wedding in Philadelphia caused them to get all dolled up.

Professional makeup? Another thing I'm sure will never happen to me...

We're going to the mountains to see my family soon, and from there Phoebe and Oscar will continue on to the coast, so poor Piscean Oscie doesn't dry up and blow away in this drought. He's got to soak his merman fins in the ocean before another school year in Indiana begins. He's a silkie, for sure.He'll start work then, and be glad of it, and we will think back on these lazy summer days when nobody had to go anywhere, and smile.

throwing baked eggshells on the roof for our barn swallows

                     tying her shoe while balancing on one foot. I remember doing this, before the ballast...

                                         Happy birthday, my beautiful woodland elf. 

                              You light up the world for anyone lucky enough to be around you. 

Phoebe is 27!

It's 3 AM in La Gomera, so I'm going to post this at 10 pm Ohio time, so you'll have it when you wake up. 

It’s a time of reflection, Phoebe, as I watch you  beating your wings so hard, taking off. You’re strong enough to fly over the ocean to the Canary Islands, all by yourself. 

 One minute, it seems, I’m watching you clomping your way down the back stairs in pink heels, Mardi Gras beads, and nothing else, announcing, “I yam a pancess!” and the next you and I are talking in a nervous, excited yet tentative way about what actually constitutes a wedding ceremony. Pomp and circumstance, ceremony and ritual. It’s your birthday, my sweet beautiful girl; you’re an ocean away, and I’m feeling verklempt.

The other day  I found a box full of old photos that never made it to the digital realm. Some real doozies in there. Here, when you were still small enough to fit in a backpack, and I was half the woman I am now, and we’d go adventuring through the woods.

 The autumn of this year, we were coming down into the Chute when we put up a ruffed grouse practically from underfoot. GROUSE! I exclaimed, then turned around to see your one-tooth grin, your wet chin, and I heard one of your very first words: “Gowse!

 More adventures, this one at The Wilds, an endangered species breeding facility near Caldwell, Ohio. It was a cold but sunny winter day when Daddy trained the old Kowa scope on a tall metal pole barn far, far away, and a reticulated giraffe stuck its head out of the door. We put you on the eyepiece without saying a word and asked you what you could see. “Gaff!!” you exclaimed. Here's the moment you saw your first live Gaff.

Yep, mai, I saw it. It was a gaff. Now Daddy lookin at it.

  Summer in Granny’s backyard, playing with a sprinkler. 

 Studio fun time, painting your belly bread when Mai wasn't looking.

 And now look at you, and look at sweet Oscar; you’re like staring at twin suns. One hardly knows where to focus, you’re both so beautiful and alive and in love.

 He, barely able to hold the food he’s grown on the small patch of earth high on a terrace above his Canarian home; that boy’s got mangoes and passionfruit, potatoes, tomatoes, squash, eggs and papayas by the armload. There’s nothing he can’t grow, nothing he can’t do. And I'm still trying to figure out what that feather is he's wearing. Sparrowhawk?

 He’s bought a car and learned to drive it; he’s learned English; he’s ready for the big leap, and still we all wait for the US Embassy to catch up and grant him permission to come over. It will happen. And you both have been more than patient, as they took a year to even touch your application. You've made the best of it, seeing each other whenever you can, filling those too-short times with memories for the ages. Oscar is your rock.

And now we're talking weddings. Sometimes I'm grateful for the slowdown. It's all happening so fast, at least for this one who lives like a box turtle, tucked away in an Ohio meadow.

 

I walk among the wildflowers, thinking about which week in the summer would be best for a wedding of two people I love so much. This one. No, this one. Wait. Mid-August is so special. But mid-July...I just don't know. Could we bottle this July, please, and uncork it in a couple of years?

 

I walk toward home and tears begin to fall, thinking about it, the enormity and the beauty of it, the big

 and the very, very small of it.

I think about how we got here and all that has happened, all that will happen and then the tears come again. And the rosinweed blossoms nod, knowing. 

                   Happy birthday, my beautiful bird.  The endless waiting to begin your real, true life is almost over. It's flying toward us even now.