Beemouse Laboratories

My but I am in a foul mood this afternoon. It’s a balmy 61 degrees, I just spent hours working in the yard, hanging out with my cats, and I am quitting cigarettes and realizing all the things they were doing for me, such as allowing me to enjoy being out in the sun without getting too anxious.

There’s something about a glorious spring day in Seattle that really makes me jittery– so in the past, I would coast through the beautiful days as un-centered as I could keep myself. Cigarettes helped with that. They allowed me to go take a break and chill out without having to be completely still.

I know that sunny days make me anxious because they remind me of my childhood. I didn’t understand this until many years ago I was inside my house and heard someone mowing the lawn outside, and my brain quickly paddled up the anxiety ladder thinking, “No! I’m inside and my dad’s outside mowing the lawn and any second Alison is going to come bang open my door and tell me to Get off your ass and go outside, It’s a sunny day for christssake– Jesus, go do something!” I can’t stress enough how much I hate the sound of lawnmowers because of this.

When we first moved into our house on Education Hill I was in grade school. I remember sitting on the front stoop in the sweltering sun, pulling the seeds off the dry, waist-high grass that grew everywhere, making little piles on the hot concrete steps in front of me. I was playing farmer. Soon a cadre of ants found the piles and began making off with the seeds one by one. I was delighted! Ants!!

Later that year, my dad hacked down the wild grass on the lawn, pulled up all the crappy sod, found the soil was full of rocks, and enlisted my help picking the rocks out of the dirt. I was paid a quarter for every gallon bucket I filled up and toted away. I don’t know why this is such a vivid memory, for surely every kid has been drafted to do some boring yard work, but this made me so mad. I was so humiliated. It was as if my parents were saying that this was the only thing I was good for. Of course neither of them sat down in the dirt with me and picked freaking rocks out of the ground. (Now that I am an adult, I am able to use my deductive skills to brainstorm a number of ways to remove rocks from soil, none of which involve manually picking them out. In addition, I realize that it’s perfectly possible to have a gorgeous putting-green-style lawn with rocks underneath it.)

I wonder if my dad and Alison ever realized that their daughter had a green thumb. When we lived near Grasslawn Park in Redmond, before we moved to Education Hill, I asked for a tiny part of the garden for myself, but was denied. I think it was decided that I was not responsible enough to oversee dirt.

I have a memory about that house that actually makes me smile. Once I decided I was going to make some soup. Outside. With carrots and a tiny metal bucket. (Is 4th or 5th grade a little late to be playing “Soup”?) I cut a carrot up with a rock, filled the bucket with water, and lit a tiny fire underneath it. My mischief was soon discovered, and my soup shop was shut down. From this experience I deduce a couple things:

• I had never played “let’s make soup” with real soup, in a real kitchen
• No one had ever had the “fire” discussion with me

No FIRE discussion? I had already realized it was really strange to never have been invited to prepare food with adults, since that’s a basic skill every human needs to know, but it never occurred to me until today that no one had actually told me I shouldn’t play with fire. However, it makes me glad, in that unhealthy “I’m gonna burn the place down” kind of way, because I surely never got away with that level of mischief again. It was my last stand, my last chance to do serious damage. I was such a good kid, and there are only so many ways that you can truly mess things up. Burning The Place Down is one of them.

I feel a tiny bit bad fantasizing about arson (and look, if my dad’s house ever gets burned down in the future I totally did not do it), but really– when you see in the news that a kid did something horrible like Burned The Place Down, you think to yourself, “Man, that kid is really messed up. I mean, someone should get that kid some help.” Sure, everyone around that kid hates them, but at least they got noticed! I am almost positive that I would have gotten more attention in juvie than I did at my dad’s house. As it was, I never managed to do anything bad enough to get noticed.

Wait, scratch that– I did hit my daycare teacher with my clarinet case in 5th grade, and got sent to the principal’s office. I remember my dad telling me that if I acted out in daycare any more, the administrators were going to kick me out, and he just didn’t know what him and Alison would do. That was the first time I remember him telling me that he was really disappointed in me, and it stuck. Wow, yeah, what could they have done? I mean, his hands were so tied and everything. Good thing they had a kid to work things out for them.

I hear kids come in handy when you need to offload some responsibility, but you need to do it all sneaky-like. If you do it right, you can even get the kids to feel bad about it! Suckers! I would like to coin a neologism: “responsibility laundering”.

Here’s a photograph in case you hate words:

Morning glories at farmer’s market in West Palm Beach, 2009