Monday

It is midmorning and the boys whine in disappointment as they watch the highschoolers slip quietly down and up again in the Sunnyvale skatepark bowls, their slaps, skids and rolls hushed behind the windows of the Golf. Why the kids weren’t in school, I couldn’t explain. Perhaps they were college students? Or homeschoolers? One thing was certain: I couldn’t place my younglings in the bowl’s bottom while a pack of adolescent men bombed around them at high speed, flipping boards here and there, sometimes missing catch, and pitching their whim against my maternal fear.

So we trudged homewards and took an unexpected left at the last intersection before our road, heading hopefully towards our neighborhood park, and when I was one block from the park I realized that my intuition rang true: It’s the perfect preschooler skatepark because of a fifteen foot landscaped berm inset with a spiral sidewalk leading up to a bench on top, perfect for idly skating down and safe by all measures.

Three hours later we lie in bed, and I’m exhausted from reading to them but they are nonetheless climbing like cubs over me, ready for more stimulus. Mentally drained as well as physically, I shuffle down from their lofted domain and idly brew an espresso, that I might match their might, but in a half hour’s time I’m merely irritable and tired, so we lived the late afternoon in a disharmonious rut; the boys, fighting not so much for the right of their individual wills but probably more for my undivided attention and I, weak from my own mental slump, puttering among household tasks and small ambitions. By five-thirty I have a glass of wine, amble into the garden with the boys, notice that the deer have mowed all but the basal eight inches off all the tomato plants and the entirely of the paprika achillea (they didn’t touch the yellow one in the ground beside it). I handed Ford the pepper spray and he sprayed with robust purpose while chas whacked the potted ferns with a black plastic bat. Seti lay on the grass gnawing on a panel of redwood from the rotting firewood stack.

By the sun’s setting I found myself serenely watching the quail out the studio window, nice benchmark that is for dusk, and detoxing on a second installment of bottled water while Damon and the boys skated at the elementary school across the road, by now empty of all children save mine. Peace found in the quietude of their silent grazing, I watch the quail weave their way darker into the thick of our hedgerow.