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Spring Sprang

Spring covered up what stood bare months before. Under a moonlit sky, dark circles drape the lawn and driveway like velvet blankets, shadows under the unfurled crepe myrtle and ornamental plum. I whack my head in the night’s shade on a low branch that is heavy with young foliage, and walk out, cursing, to my car.

Layer upon layer, Spring spackles up the landscape where Winter fails to slough. Years pass. The prickly pear cactus has budded and bloomed into an agglomeration of ovals, a colony. Little green pup ears stand atop careworn gray sections, each pup is topped with a flaming yellow flower.

There is some serious primping going on.

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Night sounds have multiplied. The mockingbird’s soliloquy rambles like a long ribbon across the tapestry of night music, over the tiny drone of crickets and the clicking of bats. Sometimes the Chuck Will’s Widows interrupt the peace with their harrowing calls, hammering from cavernous throats. White Wing dove keep cooing after hours, still love-drunk.

Day sounds too, they have bustled out of bounds. It’s a denser panorama, a flourishing of things everywhere: the chortling of swallows and Purple Martins, hissing wrens, bossy jays. After a rain, the Cardinal leads the symphony with its intense love song. Focused, the calls are sculpted, intricate and metered like gingerbread on a Victorian cottage. And while most female birds silently acknowledge their mate’s serendades, the female cardinal responds clearly, without upstaging her man.

While she broods, I watch the male gently stuff her mouth with little morsels. I wonder if it’s appealing to her, what he’s brought to the table. Does she even care? Before Chas was born, I requested sushi and beer to be delivered bedside after his arrival. Instead, we shared a bag of cold Egg McMuffins. I guess we get whatever’s available in the wild, or at 5am in the hospital.

…You know, he still could have filled that order later that evening, or the next day, damnit. But I never got the damned dinner I asked for. And that’s where I differ from the cardinal…
….I totally forgot where I was going with this.

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I Have Cabin Fever and I Need to Vent

It’s a crapshoot, this pediatrician’s office business; in my experience, one visit to the doctor’s office has the power to precipitate subsequent visits in the following weeks. Still, I had two kids with a high fever on Tuesday morning and I was forced to take them in to the pediatrician; Chas boiled in the bed at 105.4 F the night before. Still, take one immunocompromized child to an infirmary and he’s bound to pick up another bug. Which is why this visit to the doctor’s office on Monday was not the first visit but our third in the past week.

The previous Monday, I brought a happy, robust Chas into the office for a well-child visit. We walked around the huge lobby aquarium while we waited, patted the glass, scrambled over magazines, dumped jars of otolaryngoscope tips, pocketed tongue depressors for our garden (they make good labels) and dug through the children’s books before receiving a clean bill of health among those agonizing tears of hurt and betrayal that accompany immunizations.

Three days later, Chas was drowning in phlegm, trying to cough it all upwards yet forced to swallow it back down . After dropping Ford off at a playdate, Chas and I kept driving down the road towards the doctor’s office. Presenting with nothing but a happy disposition and a chunky cough, we returned to our car after our quick visit with a prescription for an antibiotic and meds to treat acute bronchitis.

My brother John’s wedding and Easter Sunday came and went, and so busy we were with all the drinking, barbeque-feasting, egg-dying, visiting and mayhem that it was hard to notice both kids getting progressively sicker. On Monday, we were all slumped over. I tripped three times while jogging, and nearly fell over in yoga while trying to find a focal point on a bleak, gray wall. Atticus spun in circles around Ford at the lake, as my poor kid sat on the diving platform, it seemed the entire neighborhood had converged at the lake to revel around him and his blah expression. By Monday night at midnight, Chas had developed the high fever to push us near the edge, on splinters, until morning came and we could take him to the doctor.

Dragging Ford along was difficult, more so than usual. But we made it through the door of the lobby, and Ford found the nearest bench on which to lie. I suggested the nurse to pull both kid’s charts.

This technique works well with siblings: I told Ford to demonstrate for Chas how to cooperate with the doctor’s exam, even though we were at the doctor’s office “only to treat Chas.” And do you know who had the fever? Who tested positive for influenza? Ford. Chas’ results were difficult to read, but we were intructed to treat both kids for the same thing, the flu.

I think I was wiser when I used to take Ford to the Texas Department of Health & Human Services for his routine immunizations. For one, it’s cheaper. The wait is usually less than twenty minutes. The nurses are always efficient, soulful black women with impeccable technique. And the best part? No sick kids to bump into. As for the “well child” portion: who can’t measure their own child’s dimensions and follow a developmental checklist?

It makes sense: $15 for immunizations at a clinic, with a 15 minute wait
vs.
$20 copay + ($100 abx & esoteric meds+ $20 copay) + ($40 copay + $40 addition meds) and HOURS lost. Am I right?

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Illustration Friday: Spotted

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On the granite coast, I kneel down to see layers of round shapes in a tidal pool: the glistening curve of blue beach glass, ground shell, bits of marl, littoral litter. It is the texture of a cold and unhemmed coastline, a study in extremes.

Here, you have to hold on to your life. You have to blend in to avoid being hunted, unbruised by the pounding waves, while managing to stay wet in the face of sun and wind, maintaining your heritage by staying pretty in order to attract the opposite sex. Your existence is hinged on the passage of time, good genes and pure luck: will you survive until high tide?

This little intertidal oasis, paradoxically gorgeous, has a rainbow of life crawling within it: red, brown and green tranlsucences, bumpy lumberers, glittering gems, but it is growing stagnant by the minute. At noon, the water is warming up under the intense sun; in fact, it’s so sensuous to lie in the small ripples at the rim of the pool that you can hardly tell, with eyes closed, where the water ends and the balmy air begins. Then a breeze reminds you, as a shadow sheds some cool on your skin.

The estuary beyond the dunes, nursery for marine life, reminds me less of motherhood than these beautifully unprotected cavities. Here, time is compressed. Weeks become seconds. With little time to think, intuition develops. I slowly begin to trust my intuition as it gains conviction, but the experience that feeds it is time that’s lost: will I still be here by high tide?