Anthony made lunch for us today. He seemed to be seething with grumpy after Jesse refused to come to the table. Nick and I were enjoying our delicious repast. I leaned in to whisper secrets with Nick.

“Nick, daddy seems grumpy. What can we do to cheer him up?”

Nick got a sly smile on his face. He hissed loudly at me in a conspiratorial stage whisper. “Yell at him!”

“Okay. Let’s do that.”

We did. Daddy did not smile.

“It didn’t work, Nick. What else could we do?”

“Poop on him?” This made Nick and me snicker. Anthony glared.

“Nooo, I don’t think that’ll work either, little buddy.”

“Give him hugs and kisses?”

“Yes! That will definitely cheer him up.”

“Okay mommy,” Nick replied, suddenly bored. “You do that part then.”

Four-year-old boy love.

Daddy still grumpy. Maybe he’ll feel better if the Tigers win today.

It’s Anthony’s birthday! Hurrah! A bird gave him a very special birthday gift during his bike ride with Jesse this afternoon, by pooping on his leg. Anthony says, “fortunately, it missed my head. It was a close call.”

This is why I love Anthony. He always sees the up side.

Jesse was super tired yesterday after summer camp, where they made crystals using a powder that contained egg whites. It’s rare for her to have a slump day; she and Nick are energy titans. But we have been keeping it busy for summer vacation so far, and it didn’t surprise me that she just wanted to lie around watching Ninjago on her iPad and playing with sticker books. The teacher had assured me that she didn’t touch the powder, and she displayed no visible allergy symptoms, so I didn’t rush to connect any dots.

She told me her throat was extra itchy, and she was coughing a little more than usual, but that’s within the scope of normal. A lifetime of reflux and frequent puking (reflux, allergies, anxiety), and also all the screaming, have left her throat perpetually raw.

She said her stomach was hurting. She didn’t eat well. Also normal. I took it all in stride because that’s what I try to do with my little train wreck.

At bed time, she was still a bit out of it, and her perennial butt rash was worse than it’s been for a week or so. Normal. It fluctuates.

It wasn’t until later at night that I had the big DUH about all these little things and thought again about the egg whites in the camp’s crystal-making powder. I went in to check on Jesse, touched her cheek and felt her tummy, gave her a kiss. She was sleeping peacefully so I didn’t do anything. I still had doubts.

I woke up this morning to Jesse announcing she just had a nasty bout of diarrhea. It was the last warning sign. I gave her Zyrtec, to the tune of this conversation:

J: Why do I need Zyrtec?
me: You’re acting off. I think you might be having an allergic reaction to something.
J: Oh.
me: But I’m not sure. Remember the crystal powder with egg whites in it?  Since you didn’t touch it, I’m not sure what’s going on.
J: Yes I did.
me: You touched it? The teacher said you didn’t.
J:  Yes. I did.
me: Did you wash your hands after you learned there was egg in it?
J: No.

I’m grateful I’m on blood pressure meds. I swallowed my dismay. Jesse took her Zyrtec a little reluctantly. An hour and a half later, when I dropped her off at camp, she told me she was feeling a lot better. When I picked her up 3 hours after that, she ate lunch like she had been starved for 3 days and told me she was feeling a LOT better. She only coughed a little, much more like normal. She commented dryly, almost muttering under her breath, as she stuffed food in her mouth, “I think I was having an allergic reaction.”

I spent yesterday soiling myself with self-pity over Jesse’s egg allergy instead of actually doing something sensible about it, like giving her prophylactic Zyrtec just in case she sustained more of an exposure than she was letting on. Then she wouldn’t have been miserable for a day, her body struggling to fight off the effects of this tiny, tiny exposure. What a moron. Me, not Jesse.

In moments like these, when I’m beating up on myself for being so senseless, it’s my father’s ghost who speaks to me from the corners of my mind. If he was alive, the next time I called him I would have told him about how I screwed up. I would have shared with him how awful I feel, how the failure is just eating at me, dropping the ball on the one significant responsibility in my life – keeping my kids safe. My grumpy, grumpy dad would have  just grumbled at me. “Aigoo, Carla,” he would have groaned, a little angry. (Aigoo is a catch-all Korean exclamation, pronounced by Dad as “eye-goo,” which loosely translates to something like “jeez” or “golly”.) He would have chewed me out a little, grumpy with me for being too hard on myself. He would have reminded me it’s okay to screw up, to be human. I’m still a great mom, he would have reminded me, doing the best I can.

Thanks, Dad. I do feel better, except for missing you.

I’m so tired of Jesse’s egg allergy.

I’m tired of all the little practical stuff. Filling out medical authorization forms and passing her epi-pen around. Drawing blood every year for testing, in the hopeless hope that her allergy will abate (at age 9, statistics suggest she’s got maybe a 5% chance of growing out of it by her late teens). Bringing Jesse’s own treats to birthday parties and explaining to hosts that she can’t have what they’re offering, and then walking away just hoping and hoping they’ll remember. Reading labels and interrogating people about food ingredients. Asking friends and family to accommodate Jesse’s allergy in the safest way by clearing eggs out of their diet when she’s around. Writing letters to parents of Jesse’s classmates begging them to leave eggs out of the classroom, and knowing it won’t happen. Hassling teachers. Finding food when we travel. Calling restaurants to figure out if Jesse can eat safely. Cleaning surfaces in public places before we eat on them. Washing hands, washing hands, washing hands.

I’m just as tired of the emotional shit. Seeing that look on Jesse’s face — a mix of alienation and fear — when she has to be around other kids enjoying delicious-looking food that has eggs in it. Watching her eye the treats in a bakery, the way Charlie eyed Willy Wonka’s goods in the candy shop, wistful and wishful and hopeless. Trying to soothe her bitter disappointment when we can’t find anything good to eat that’s also safe, as we walk through an airport concourse’s food court. Dealing with her explosions of anxiety and anger when it overwhelms her. Dealing with my own anxiety and anger, and hiding it from her best I can.

I still cry every time I think about the day in preschool when Jesse’s class made a batter with raw eggs, without my knowledge. I knew something was wrong the second I saw Jesse at pick-up. I knelt down and looked in her face, grossly swollen, splotchy, covered in hives. I looked over at the teacher, incredulous that no one had noticed her condition. “Something’s wrong with Jesse. Were there eggs in the class today??” Ooooh… They explained that she hadn’t touched or ingested the eggs, as if that solved things. I stripped Jesse’s clothes off and washed her hands and face. I fed her antihistamines. I held her and tried to keep my cool, be all business, not panic, as we waited and watched to see if her condition would worsen or improve. It improved enough that she didn’t have to go to the ER. When she wasn’t with me later that day, I finally wept and wept and wept. I kept weeping for the next month while we dosed her with antihistamines, dealt with her follow-on eye, ear and sinus infections, gave her antibiotics, wiped her diarrhetic ass, waited for her to step out of the malaise.

Some days it feels like the world is smeared in eggs, dripping in poison waiting to fall on Jesse. Chicken egg is everywhere. I can’t avoid it. Today I took Jesse into her summer camp class at the Audubon nature center. They’re studying crystals this week. The teacher took me aside and showed me that the grow-crystal-kit powder they had used yesterday contained egg whites. She hadn’t noticed until it was too late. I wouldn’t have either. Why would I? Who would ever imagine that a kid’s inedible crystal-growing science project would contain egg whites?

The teacher told Jesse yesterday about the eggs in the powder. No one had actually touched it with their fingers, and it ended up enclosed in jars of water, on sticks. Jesse apparently stayed calm, and they just cleaned up carefully. I didn’t hear about it until today. Jesse didn’t tell me. Not a hint, and no displays of inchoate anxiety. It was weird. She seems fine.

But it was one of those things. I came home after dropping her off and wept, again. I’m tired of being afraid of eggs, and I’m only nine years into her life. Bah. I get even more grumpy when I’m in this mood, because I feel ungrateful.

I could have it so much worse. It doesn’t seem to be a life-threatening allergy, and most allergy deaths are related to nuts or dairy. So that’s good news. Jesse probably won’t die from it. I could have a child with far more serious medical conditions. The main problem Jesse contends with, severe anxiety, is actually very helpful because it renders her hyper-vigilant. Her crazies may keep her safe.

We could have friends and family who are indifferent or uncaring. Instead I’m surrounded by people who have bent like grass in the wind to accommodate Jesse.  My own family has been amazing, going totally egg-free whenever we visit California and never once doing or saying a single thing to make me feel guilty. Our good friends here in the Milwaukee area always try to keep it safe for Jesse. I’m blessed. This summer we’re going to a beach house on the Outer Banks with a collection of college mates, 10 families, 30 people in all. We’ve never been able to participate in these sorts of get-togethers because it was impossible to imagine how to keep Jesse safe. This year I mentioned our situation as a sort of wishful sigh, and with hardly a ripple in the waters, the entire crew agreed to make the beach house egg-safe. Incredible. Everyone refuses to let me feel that I’m imposing. It made me weep again, but for all the right reasons.

Well shit. Maybe I just tend to go weepy. So lame. I just made myself grumpy again.

Jesse: Stop correcting me.
Me: I’m not.
Jesse: You just corrected me. You’re always correcting me.
Me: That’s not true.
Jesse: you just corrected me.
Me: No I didn’t.
Jesse: you corrected me again.
Me: That’s not fair. I’m not correcting you. I’m defending myself.
Jesse: You just corrected me again.

Silence. The match goes to Jesse.

What a smart ass. Where did she learn to cop that attitude. Not from me. Nobody has ever called me a smart ass. At least, not without me correcting them.

If you sit on the toilet in the half bath on the first floor of our house, your face is one foot away from a window looking out on the road. So if you’re careful in adjusting the shutters, you can watch the world go by while you do your doodie in privacy. If you’re, say, a guy peeing and you forget about the shutters, then the world passing by might have to see your sweet cheeks, for better or worse.

Right. I’ve already completely lost my train of thought, and I’ve only been typing for 45 seconds. Give me a second.

Oh. Here’s where I was going. I ran in for a quick pee and what did I see out the window but two teenagers fighting. I couldn’t hear them, but it was clearly a lovers’ spat, old school. She was moping and gloomy, staring at the ground and very emotional, but silent. He was angry, gesticulating and nattering. They were just standing there in my front yard, fighting. I didn’t like that. Nick came over, because I was peeing so he had a sudden inchoate need for me. I told him to look out the kitchen screen door, which is five feet away from the toilet. He pressed his face on the screen and stared at the young couple, but they took no notice. I told Nick, “say hi.” He complied. He put on his biggest smile, started waving wildly, and screamed repeatedly. “HI! HIIIIII!! HIIIIIIII!” The teens looked over in anger and shock. They scurried off down the street, just exactly like I remember peeps doing in the ’90’s when I would happen to interrupt their crack-ho deals on Logan Circle in DC. Good riddance.

Little kids are good for something after all.

I know this is a bit of a cheat, but I really don’t want to spin on actual poop today. It was just an ordinary but shitty – and very long – day in the life of a middle aged, financially stable, jobless mom in America.

12:00 am. Get up to pee. Blame the BP meds.

1:00 am. Get up to pee. Blame the sparkling lemonade and gin.

3:00 am. Get up to pee. By now I’m shuffling like Jack Nicholson at the end of Cuckoo’s Nest. Blame everything.

5:30 am. Respond to Nick’s plea to snuggle by letting him nestle his little sweet head in my right armpit and throw the rest of his body across me.

5:45 am. Remove my now-asleep arm from under Nick and try to put the rest of me back to sleep.

6:30 am. Respond to Jesse’s plea to snuggle. She takes the left armpit, Nick takes the right again. I’m now in a crucifixion posture. They each throw arms and legs across me, and then the dog lies down on my crotch. I stare at the ceiling.

7:15 am. Wake from a light doze and roll out of bed, while Nick relentlessly goes about the business of trying to get Jesse and me to play with him. Get dressed and try to stop drooling so I can deal with morning time.

8:00 am. Jesse’s out the door with Anthony for her twice-a-month chiropractor visit. I have to holler goodbye from upstairs because Nick is pooping, and he’ll only do that if ma or pa is reading him a book. Wipe his ass, get him dressed.

8:15. Nick and I head to Whole Foods for dinner party shopping. Friends are coming over Saturday night. At W.F. Nick has a tantrum about which type of yogurt tube he wants. I won’t get him the box with the cow picture because the other brand, which tastes exactly the same to Nick’s delicate palate, is on sale. Bad, cheap mommy. I make it up to him by letting him eat half a chocolate bar, or at least that’s what he manages to put down before I notice and take it away. The sugar buzz hits him in seconds, like a needle in a vein. Eventually I give him my iPhone to shut him up but he locks the phone somehow. Never mind. Nick keeps talking and yelling.

10:15. Home. Put away groceries, clean up the living room, pack Nick’s swim bag, check my calendar, make lists.

10:40. Play time with Nick. We have 30 minutes, and this is his time. If there is any mercy in the universe it will smite his dragon collection and turn it into a pile of ashes. Nope. No mercy. Instead I have to watch 3-headed fire dragon, aka secret night dragon, digi-volve into spinosaurus and back over and over again, and ladybug goes on rides on ice dragon’s back, and we have battles with poison darts, ice daggers, sun rays, and tornado winds. Nick is upset by my mountain dragon’s innovative and dramatic diarrhea-rock storm attack; he walks away shaking his head and groaning.

11:15. Run out to Dominos. I’m picking up 36 pizzas for Jesse’s second grade picnic. I have to do this with Nick, which adds unique challenges. I save him from impaling himself on the exposed long piece of re-bar in the parking lot and remember to say thank you to the pizza guys. The pizzas barely fit in the back of my VW Passat wagon, because it’s so full of all of my re-usable insulated bags.

11:45. 100 second graders see me arriving at the park with a cascade of pizzas. I’m a rock star. For the next hour, I help serve out food to kids seated at trough-like picnic tables. All the food has been carefully selected for Jesse’s class (mostly by me) to avoid eggs and nuts, so that her little friends don’t accidentally taint her or another little girl in her class. The other classes are supposed to have their own thing going. 15 minutes in, I catch a teacher’s aide from another class squirting ranch dressing onto plates in Jesse’s class. Come on! Obscenities swarm but I swallow them and bark, “WHOA! Is that ranch? Did you read its label for eggs? GIVE ME THE BOTTLE.”

When it comes to my Jesse’s egg allergy, I don’t have room for diplomacy, good manners, or anyone’s feelings. I have a job to do. I’m bitchy enough that the lady hands the bottle over snappy quick, like a plebe. Sure enough, eggs. Hearty heart-felt apologies ensue. Whatever. There’s a new person on my shit list.

12:45. Drive home to quickly feed Nick lunch before swim lessons. I have exactly 1 hour from park departure to pool-side. We get home and I find something for Nick to eat. I scratch the back of my head and notice it feels like it’s been rubbed with gooping handfuls of bacon fat. How long since my last shower…? Huh. 15 minutes until we have to leave. I rush upstairs and take a 3-minute shower. I remember to brush my hair before dressing.

1:45. I’ve arrived at Nick’s swim lesson on time, barely. Lucky for me, his semi-private lesson friend is a bit late. Yay! I feel downright competent. Then swim teacher Sarah approaches. “So I guess you forgot about Jesse’s lesson yesterday?” Shit shit shit. Embarrassing, but water under the bridge now. I get to spend the next half hour having Nick show me his best swim moves — stationary forward kick, spin-in-place-like-Eeyore backstroke, quiver-in-terror jump into pool, and put-my-face-in-the-water-like-it’s-boiling-oil. After the lesson and cleaning up, there’s time for 15 minutes at the indoor playspace at the gym.

3:00. Leave the gym. Nick accompanies me to Ace Hardware and Pik & Save groceries for sundries and booze. We’re moving fast now, because I have a lot to do and there’s no margin.

3:30. Pick up Jesse. Deal with all that crazy and head home. Walk in the kitchen door and make my own crazy noises. I realize I haven’t had a chance to wash any dishes, not even breakfast. Do the dishes – by hand, because the dishwasher is permanently broken and replacing it is a long story. Make chimmichurri sauce for Saturday party. It takes a surprisingly long time to take 2 cups of cilantro leaves off the stems, but it tastes so much better without the stems. Worth every minute.  Clean up the mess from that. Find snacks for the kids. Yell at them a couple times for fighting.

4:45. Anthony made it home, so I get to take Jesse to her shrink alone. Tiny woot woot. It turns out to be a good session, very positive and constructive. Dr. Abrams reminds me how wonderfully Jesse is doing, how far she’s come, how amazing she is. He’s always so up-beat and positive. I’m not really good with that sort of attitude. It’s amazing that he doesn’t annoy me.

6:00. Leave Dr. Abrams’s office and head to dinner. Anthony’s got Nick. Jesse wants Qdoba. Done. I remembered her iPad, so she eats and plays, hassling me intermittently to complete difficult levels for her in Thomas Was Alone.  Then she wants ice cream. She’s been awesome, so we hit Baskin Robbins and chill out.

7:30. We get home finally. I run upstairs to find my boys. Anthony is sitting on the footstool next to the toilet doing his book-reading duty while Nick does his doodie. It’s a rare double-poop day. Anthony’s in a mood, because he just keeps reading as I stand at the bathroom door and say hello. Nick takes a break from bearing down; his eyebrows rise and he points to me. “Uh, Daddy. Look.” Yeah. Hi guys. Good to see you too. I run straight back outside to mow the lawn. Anthony’s in the throes of spring allergies and I have to get it done, because it’s going to seed.

8:15. Done mowing. The kids are watching Willy Wonka and dad has gotten everyone ready for bed. Get cleaned up myself. Type this post while Nick intermittently asks me to snuggle.

9:00. Done. I am completely cooked. But scrolling up through this list, I’m thinking… Maybe it wasn’t that shitty a day. Just busy and long. It could have been worse. I could have been constipated.

Going on 3 or 4 months now, every time I think Nick can’t make me any more bat-shit crazy, he evolves to a whole new level of annoying. Right now he’s clingy, needy, whiny. He’s prone to tantrums. He’s got terrible separation anxiety. He’s incredibly picky about food. He won’t sit still for anything. He wants to caress me with his feet and hands all day long; it’s creepy. He hates sharing my attention. The second Jesse comes out of school, he intercedes before I can even manage a hello hug, running off like a rabbit or grabbing my hand and dragging me around while he screams.

A few days ago as we waited at Jesse’s school pick-up, Nick was better than normal. I hadn’t done or said anything to him that I would regret later. Jesse came out and we had about 3 seconds of peace as I gave her a hug. Next I turned to a fellow mom to say something. Suddenly Nick ran up to me and (oh my gawd) pulled my shirt up, all the way up past my bra. I blurted an obscenity, I remonstrated, I pulled my shirt back down in terror. The usual. Jesse hustled Nick a few paces away to safety as I nattered. I suspect most of the 30 other parents standing around didn’t notice, either because they were dealing with their own kids or because they’re used to Nick and me.

I told Anthony about it during breakfast the next day. I was irritated about something Nick was doing at the table and I started whining about his developing GBD. (I just made that up, generalized behavior disorder. Is that a thing?) Nick sat there fidgeting, listening intently and looking like he felt cornered. I got to the part where he pulled up my shirt, and I described my horror at my bra being exposed. Just then Jesse called out from the living room, in a dismissive tone that said it was no big deal: “It was only an inch of your bra. That’s all I saw.” Anthony burst out laughing while I gesticulated behind Nick’s back to get Anthony to stay serious. I failed. Nick was relieved to be off the guillotine.

A few minutes later Jesse wandered nonchalantly into the kitchen and over to my chair, leaning in on me for a light hug. She finished her thought, looking at me all sweet and innocent-like. “A four year old is an annoying age, an irritating age. You just have to tolerate it.”

Mmmm. I’m not sure I agree with Jesse, but I have to give her proper respect for coming to her brother’s aid on an issue where she can anticipate a lot of angry push-back from me. Siblings should stick together.

My brother Mark tells an apocryphal tale about being lined up with Ted and Eric for spankings when they were little, after Dad discovered one of them had done something really naughty. Dad couldn’t figure out which kid was guilty, so he told my brothers that they’d each get a spank, one after another, until one of them told (I would have been too little to make the line up). Dad had huge, scary spanking hands. Mark remembers it with fresh pride as if it happened yesterday: the brothers never broke. No one tattled, and Dad finally gave up.

It remains an unspoken and (I believe) unbroken code among the four of us. No matter what else goes wrong, even between us, we’re banded together in loyalty, against our parents and the world. We may not have always believed it of each other, but I do think it’s true.

If I knew my dad at all, I know that he would have been impressed and entertained by his loyal boys, but also very grumpy about his total lack of authority. He would have been even more grumpy about spanking them, because it couldn’t have been something he wanted to do. He wasn’t a hitter; he was a grumbler and yeller.

Listening to Jesse as she leaned on me, I thought of Mark’s story and felt the same as Dad must have – a mix of respect and pride, plus a healthy dose of grumpy. All I could do was stare at her and shake my head. She gets outraged at Nick herself. He drives her crazy. So what’s she doing defending him? When did my kids get old enough to gang up on me?

Parenthood fills me with hubris sometimes. I float up on a cloud of ego, buoyant from the lightweight moral advice I blather at my kids. All of that is just empty noise. In the end, they’re apparently learning one of the most important family-value lessons on their own: you have to defend your siblings from your parents, even when you’re defending behavior that really pisses you off. I guess that’s because it’s between you and your brother (or sister), not between him and your mom or dad.

I’m incredibly proud of my kids for starting down this journey of loyalty to each other at such a young age. But I still yelled at Nick and gave him a time out before the morning was done. Thanks to Jesse, I didn’t feel as bad about it as usual. He had her to help him through it.

Jesse’s second grade class gets these little pamphlets called “book talk,” in which they practice composition by responding to questions about a book they’ve read in class. I don’t know who comes up with this crap. “Fox thought the sky was falling. Would you ever believe the sky is falling? Why or why not?” That just slayed me. Jesse was flummoxed too. She could only answer the first question, thus: “No.” Accompanied by a helpless shoulder shrug untranslatable to paper. The second question stumped her completely.  She became overwhelmed by anxiety, because she was supposed to write FIVE sentences about this absurd subject. Also she couldn’t answer technically because she doesn’t yet have any real concept of what the sky IS, let alone why it can’t “fall” in the thumpy sense of a rock. So Jesse was falling apart, in tears. Anthony and I had to intervene. Anthony gave it a go, dictating the following extended response to the question: “No. Because that is stupid.”

Notably, this didn’t help Jesse’s mood. We ended up having a long talk, full of all kinds of useful and profound advice. Sometimes schoolwork is stupid, but you have to do it anyway. When it’s lame, just write something stupid and don’t worry about it. Mommy and daddy won’t judge. Second graders should think in short sentences, not long sentences, and say obvious things. Then you will be able to write five sentences about anything. Stuff like that. There are a lot of good reasons why Anthony and I never considered home schooling.

Today Jesse pulled a book talk thingy out of her backpack and, among other things, showed me this question:

My interest was piqued. This is what she wrote:

Five sentences, reducing Anthony and me down to our parental essences. Anthony gets creepy thoughts out of Jesse. That is amazing. If I were Anthony, I’d be walking around on cloud nine right now, thinking to myself, my daughter just told me I rescue her from the monsters in her head. Awesome.

As for me, I helped Jesse make short sentences. Now I’m walking around thinking to myself, my daughter just told me I advised her to dumb it down. Put me on the list for mother of the year again.

We spent most of the Memorial Day weekend gardening. I don’t go in much for token remembrance days, and I don’t feel like spending just one day out of the year glumly remembering fallen soldiers. I feel that we should remember their ultimate sacrifice every day, rubbing our noses in it repeatedly and thinking hard about whether the wars we wage — justified or based on lies — are really worth the lives of the boys and girls we send to kill and die in them.

Instead of focusing on truisms, I prefer to honor the dead by simply embracing life, even as I struggle to grasp the horrible reality of soldiers dying in battle. Hence gardening. At this time of year, it’s a life-affirming labor. Anthony and I dug and split plants, thereby re-enacting the fish-and-bread miracle (gardeners’ edition). We effected a different kind of miracle by relocating a couple dozen volunteer hellebore seedlings from under the parents, our beloved plants spreading around the yard like a mushroom cloud. As we weeded here and there, we spied out rare trilliums, less-rare jack-in-the-pulpits, dainty lilies-of-the-valley, and many other untended treasures. Jesse and Anthony filled our pots with a lively array of annuals. We discovered baby chickadees nested in a deep dark hole on an old stump. We could barely make them out, so we used a flashlight to give the kids a better view of new life finding shelter in a dead thing. The wee babies stared up at us in frightened and curious silence, while the parents squawked their helpless ire from high in nearby trees.

The kids came outside Monday just as a long breeze blew a cloud of white petals off our apple tree. The petals flew thick through the air like snowfall. Nick burst into laughter as he ran to the tree with his arms raised, yelling in noisy wonder about “all the flowers in the air!!” Jesse joined the chase with more peals of laughter. It was very beautiful. I took a break from the hopeless task of getting creeping charlie out of our lawn by hand, watching quietly as my kids reveled in this simple and extraordinary moment. I was surprised to find that my mind was filled with one word, a mantra. “LIFE.” My heart tied up in achy knots. I don’t have a fully realized word for the feeling, but I think I was happy.

Anthony also found the dead chipmunk in the attic that was making our garage stink. He brought it out but it was really stuck to the big garbage bag it died on, so he left it in the open air next to the garage. Maybe a coyote or raccoon will come by and get some sustenance from it. We found a dead goldfinch under the bird feeder, with no obvious signs of why it died. Before I tossed it into the woods, Jesse wanted to see if its head was missing, because for some reason this spring she’s seen several headless (dead) ducks along Lake Michigan. I saw a tiny dead field mouse next to the road on a dog walk this weekend, no signs of trauma. The wild animals are struggling this spring, after a bitter arctic winter. Life and death are all tangled up together, as usual.