The Tomten's house

Once upon a time someone came to this place, deep in the middle of the forest, and built a home and a garden.

The Tomten lives in the middle of an old piñion tree in the woods. He only comes out at night when the humans are asleep. Sometimes they see his prints in the dirt, but no one has ever seen the Tomten.

He is an old, old Tomten, and no one knows when he came to the woods. Although no one has ever seen him, they know he is there.

On small silent feet, the Tomten moves about in the moonlight, making little tracks in the dirt. He talks to sleeping forest animals in Tomten language, a silent little language animals can understand.

"Droughts come and droughts go,

Thunderstorms come and thunderstorms go,

Soon the grass will grow green and tall again."

The house where the humans live is silent. The grown-ups sleep through the hours of cricket song, not knowing that the Tomten is there.

The Tomten tiptoes to the children's room, and stands silently wishing they would wake up so that he could speak to them in Tomten language, a silent little language that children can understand.

Night is brief here in the middle of summer. The Tomten leaves milk for the cat before returning to the pinion tree.

The grown-ups rise with the sun and go about their business, but the children see his tracks.

Every night here in the wood, everyone will be fast asleep. Everyone but one...

Year follows year, but as long as humans live near the old woods, the Tomten will traipse between the old piñion tree and their houses on his little silent feet.

- Credit for this Tomten flight of fancy goes firstly to Astrid Lindgren, secondly to the Randall Davey Audubon Center in Santa Fe for a wonderful summer camp week of bug-chasing, and thirdly to one three-year old's profoundly overactive imagination left to run wild in the woods, speaking only a language that Tomten's can understand. Although no one saw exactly where the imaginagion went, in the morning there were little tracks everywhere. 

Little tent in the big woods

I make a rubbish pioneer woman. If I lived in a little house on the prairie 100+ years ago, my children would've surely been eaten by locusts and blizzards by now.

Chasing rain fairies. 

Since fortune has returned me to the land of carving one's destiny from Earth using only bare hands and duct tape, and I am doing my best to wade back out into the physical world without injury. Last weekend for instance, I returned to the mountains for the first time in many years.

And I am pleased to report that it all went wonderfully. As I discovered, the trick to happiness in the wild is this: go with contemporary pioneers. These are people who can tie knots in their sleep, assemble tents blindfolded, build campfires in hurricanes, and send even the most rabid of imaginary bears whimpering back into the woods with a mere nod.

I had forgotten how rain sounds on a tent flap, and the shape the mist takes when it munches up pine trees from top to bottom. I'd forgotten the smell of rich, black mountain dirt, strangely simlar to that of a new baby. Meadow flowers are taller than I had recalled, and brighter. Mountain streams are colder.

Ana tells me she wants to move to the mountains where the rain fairies live, and she never wants to return home. I seem to remember having this same thought years ago too, long before a fear of bears and tent-failure set in. 

The tortoise and the haircut

When in the course of human events:

1. The scissors go missing
2. Your kid decides to hide out in the bathroom for twenty minutes.

Call the SWAT team.

Do not - I repeat DO NOT - react like a lethargic turtle. Trust me.

Weapon of hair destruction. 

I blame our deforestation incident on Haircut Compulsion Disorder (HCD), which runs in my family.

In addition to HCD, babysitting karma has a long memory.

Years ago BC, I was entrusted with the care and feeding of someone else's kids for a mere hour. A haircut incident occurred about five minutes into my supervisory tenure, the result of which was about what Fozzie Bear would look like if he tried to give himself a modern art mohawk after drinking three bottles of gin.

Their unfortunate mother had to view the haircut without the help of gin, and was understandably not amused. In the silver linings department, after my experience this morning, I finally feel that have finally repaid my debt to society for that episode.

Of course, babysitting karma and me are not through with each other yet.

There was that other time I was on watch and the kids found a sharp implement with which to mow down all the plants in the backyard, the result of which was about what Fozzie Bear's yard would look like if he tried to give it a modern art mohawk after drinking three bottles of gin...

The past is another country

Unlike other Royal Parks, the gates of Primrose Hill remain open long after dusk. Faux gaslights line the paths, enticing lovers and other nighttime eccentrics to come have a wander inside.

From the top, lights spill out into the distance, making London look less like a human financial services treadmill, and more like a magical fairy civilization in the region of Alpha Centauri.

Conversing with the memory moon. 

If you used to live here, this is the place to trace out the streets that correspond to the memories. This is the perfect spot to remember only the fond bits. 

Visiting one homeland from another is a strange feeling. On both sides, someone greets me with a smile and says: "Welcome home." And both greeters are correct. 

I hit the third trimester for the third time somewhere over the Atlantic, which means I won't be visiting Primrose Hill again for a spell. It also means that I will mostly be napping through the scorching hellfire summer I have returned to.  

But be it two or twenty years when I return, I know London will be precisely as I left it. This is because of the somewhat distressing reality that no person can ever change the fabric of such a humongous, crazy, fairyland.

Primrose Hill is covered in rain 98.9% of the time. But from the very top, William Blake speaks from the stonework: "I have conversed with the spiritual sun. I saw him on Primrose Hill."

Professionalism

Like any over-reaching parent, I discuss career options with my offspring. And like true professionals, my children never limit their ambitions to tangible reality.

Ana wants to be a veterinarian when she grows up. She wants to work with guard toads and battle toads, who sustain many injuries in their line of work. She would rather switch careers than work with bookworms (they are abominable).

Battle toad. 

Much of her current veterinary training takes the form of sketching unicorns and hundred-tailed cats with a purposefulness that any scatterbrained grown-up can admire (she formerly wanted to be an artist).

Ali wants to be Papa when she grows up. Upon graduation into life, she will promptly grow a beard and become a guitar ninja.

While this was Ali's standard answer for yonks, but it abruptly changed the other day:

Mama: 'So kid, what do you want to be when you grow up?'
Ali: 'I don't know.'

Aside from a lack of grey hair and a profound disinterest in the Financial Times, this new answer may mean that she has already grown up. I reckon the typical age cycle of the question goes about like this:

Q: 'So, what do you want to be when you grow up?'

Toddler: 'Astronaut!'
Adolescent: 'Rockstar!'
Grown-up: 'No clue. Better-rested?'

The plunge less taken

Bloomin' miracle. 

The girls successfully completed their first joint flower girl gig over the weekend.

I don't mean 'successful' in a stage mom way, but rather that no lasting injuries were sustained and nothing was accidentally ignited. Petals were scattered in roughly the correct direction rather than being scoffed like potato chips.

Pre-ceremony, there were objections to footwear and walking. Both baskets were misplaced. But when the big moment came, they knew exactly what to do and they did it beautifully, making my kid-herding role entirely obsolete.* 

The carb tipping point.

Weddings conjure up talk of miracles: the faith to walk on water for another, man living on cake alone, water becoming wine (or in this case tequila), etc.

It was a grand weekend bordering on miraculous, and as such there were some awesome leftovers. I was sent home with a bathtub of flowers, and a literal bucket of pasta salad. Such a quantity of pasta salad in fact, that a warning label on the side proclaims it to be a toddler drowning hazard.

Pasta salad asphyxiation is surely a fate that only a miracle can save you from. As if - with childhood's many other potential sources of lasting injury and accidental ignition - I need another thing to worry about.

*There is an important parenting lesson to be learned in this, and I will ponder it further when I finish my pasta salad. 

Having kittens

Faced with impending kittens, the girls and I built Catwings a birthing house (straw-filled box).

Nesting. 

The girls painted it with ornate murals of cats playing with mice, cats playing with dogs, cats playing with hedgehogs, etc. All depictions of play wound up being very peaceful and collaborative, which probably means that any brood raised in there will be vegetarian (an unusual condition for a cat).

Apparently Catwings had reservations about the utopian vibe. Two days after birthing house completion, she promptly started having kittens next to a dog, in the middle of the lawn, under a werewolf moon, with a blinking neon sign around her neck saying: "Hey there owls!"

Catwings clearly hadn't done this before and found it all a bit surprising. But let those amongst us who are super-awesome at first attempts cast the first stone.

Your adorable new pet, yes?

Luckily, it wasn't just the owls and the dog and werewolves who noticed, but also my obstetrician sister-in-law. She scooped the situation up into the birthing box, and sent the rest of us running for towels, hot water, and Nitronox. Catwings and the brood have been happily napping in the box ever since.

There are two stripey ones and two white ones. They are impeccably tiny and ever so cute.

Catwings takes her name from an Ursula Leguin story, in which a mama cat's brood is born with wings and flaps away into the great yonder. They alarm some finches, truly piss off an owl, and ultimately find a new home with kind hands and plates of food.

In spite of the lofty namesake and my girls' high hopes, these kittens show no sings of hatching wings yet, and appear to be completely inept at flight (not that we've pushed them from the nest or anything).

So, wouldn't you like one?

Because you see, I may otherwise become a cat lady. Last week I had three cats in the yard, and this week I have seven. By next week, it might be seven thousand unless we get some volunteers soon...

An allotment of futility

There was once a woman in rural New Mexico called - rather strangely - Sisyphus.

One day Sisyphus did a trivial that really ticked off the Gods. No one remembers exactly what it was. It may have been a dumb joke about sandals.

Mighty Zeus, having no day job, took it upon himself to invent the harshest punishment imaginable. After much cogitation, the most horrendous thing the king of lightening bolts could imagine was...gardening.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. 

Zeus gave his hellish curse to Sisyphus in the form of a wheel barrow, a mountain of manure, and a patch of desert.

From sunrise to sunset, Sisyphus pushed the manure-laden wheelbarrow towards her patch of desert like some kind of crazed idiot.

In spite of her efforts, each night found the manure pile and the patch of desert magically unchanged. This left poor Sisyphus to start from scratch again the next morning.

Some evenings, due to clinical optimism and dehydration, Sisyphus claimed she was progressing. She threatened to grow Eden on her desert patch. Or at least tomatoes.

The moral of the story is this: NEVER insult the gods. They may get super-peeved and turn you into a gardener. And there is no escape from a patch of desert and a wheel barrow.

Happy returns

The life I love is making music with my friends. 

I am a lax parent in ten ways, but I do try to teach my children important values. For instance: say yes to cake, don't kick puppies, and always support musicians.

My two favorite guitar slingers turn a little older this month: Papa and Willie Nelson.

With the exception of Papa, I don't see buskers in rural New Mexico with the same frequency as I used to in London. But even here, I do come across an unexpected one from time to time, and it always makes my day.

Musicians make grumpy people tap their toes. They are even more effective than powder milk biscuits at giving shy persons the strength to get up and do what needs to be done.

Musicians are the bringers of joy, which means you should give them your smiles and your pocket change. After all, joy is usually less remunerative than hedge fund management.

The crockery will go on

Yesterday at a Titanic exhibition, I was confronted by a set of nautical au graten dishes. Like more than fifteen-hundred souls, these dishes met with an unfortunate iceberg in 1912 and plummeted into the abyss.

Lifeless everlasting. 

The dishes did not break on descent, although the wooden cabinet that cushioned their fall quickly rotted away.

Time passed. Books were written and documentaries produced. The dishes formed no opinion whatsoever on the whopping blockbuster they had in small part inspired.

Then one day a robot reached into the deep and returned the au graten dishes to the light. They became very small artifacts in a very famous story, which of course didn't matter to them.

Yesterday, it wasn't the thought of cold water that resurrected goose-flesh on my arms. Rather, it was a pattern of burn marks on the bottoms of these dishes: the ghosts of where long-dead hands once warmed food in long-cold ovens.

Pointless material crap has such a cheeky habit of outliving humans. It does make you wonder why humans in all their brilliance and beauty are mostly obsessed with pointless material crap. In the future, perhaps only cockroaches, twinkies, and au graten dishes will remain.