Spellbound

Magical things can happen in your house when your kids are little. I personally feel the PRIME GULLIBLE ZONE lasts until they turn six. (Case in point: We took RE to Disneyland when she turned five and she believed parrots were singing in the Tiki Room and jungle cruise piranhas were about to eat us alive. We went to Disneyworld when she was 6 and she reported, "Everything here is fake. We need to go back to California.")

When RE was in kindergarten I accompanied her class on the pumpkin patch field trip. Each student was allowed to pick a free pumpkin. Ever the cheapskate I encouraged her to get the largest pumpkin on the field. A lover of miniatures she picked the teensiest mini-pumpkin Farmer Ben grew. It fit in her palm. Boy did she love that thing.

Grandpa Herb happened to be staying at our house for a few days and was a first-hand witness of her gourd affection. RE was reluctant to go to bed that night without her new treasure so we quickly devised a reason for pumpkin to stay downstairs: it needed to sleep on the windowsill so it could grow bigger in the night just like she grew bigger every night. She bought it and went to bed alone.

I went to bed, too. But Herb went to the store. That sneaky guy bought a pumpkin JUST bigger than her original pumpkin, swapped it on the sill, and went to bed himself.

When RE came downstairs for breakfast she could tell her pumpkin had grown because it didn’t quite fit in her palm the way it had at the patch. Her eyebrows were raised and she was thinking. She went to school and Herb swapped the pumpkin for another size up. She came home and ran to the sill...yep! It was growing even more! That night Grandpa swapped it again, the pumpkin now up to a 6” diameter. Mom! Come see how my pumpkin growed! This continued for three days until my sweet father-in-law had to drive home to Colorado. The final pumpkin was so big it had to sit on the floor, not the sill, and she couldn’t lift it. I could hardly lift it. It was a prize-winning size if you know what I mean. Little RE accepted the sun and bedtime with confidence from that point on and just knew that things grow when they rest and feel the sun. Period.

I’ll never forget those few days. Those were days she wore a Cinderella dress-up over her real clothes, pink suede boots, and a metallic blue headband 24-7. I can still see her racing to the window to check on pumpkin with a dropped-open mouth, gasp, and wide eyes. Every check-up was the same. Oh, to be a child. They accept magic at face-value instead of looking for an explanation. They are excited every three hours because the sun is still shining and working its miracles all over the place.

Photo of 18-month old RE sitting on the biggest pumpkin we ever grew in our garden. "Big Max" was almost 100 pounds! If you love pumpkin and want to make your own purée for pumpkin chocolate chip cupcakes, click here.

Friendly Forecast

Junior High. It may do me in twice. Three times if you count when I read Wonder.

Isn’t it enough that I survived my growth spurt of home perms, lunch room politics, and locker combinations? I wore my armor of college-ruled loose leaf. I saw the bad words on the bathroom walls and heard worse ones walking down the halls. I even sold myself a case of fundraiser candy bars in hopes that I would “Dash for Cash.” I served my sentence. Still I hear a whomp-whomp-whomp and it’s getting louder. The unstable boomerang of puberty is coming back to hit me; this time as the mother of an 8th grader.

Maybe I’ll check her out daily for lunch. We can eat sandwiches cut in triangles while I hide her fragile self-esteem in my car. Maybe I can stuff her backpack-not-a-messenger-bag full of enough love notes to insulate her from the chilly hours. Maybe she’ll surprise me with her gumption while I’m drafting battle plans to storm the quad and topple the totem pole of popularity.

I forgot how everything matters. These days the cool kids wear Nike Elite socks with Hawaiian sandals (gag me) and our local Hallmark has 200 pair on backorder (the reason she isn't wearing them). I tell her tales of Umbros, Swatches, Guess? jeans and extinct Esprit bags proving trends are just that. I keep handing her the drumsticks to her own drum. MARCH GIRL MARCH

High school was an equally intense social rite of passage I barely squeaked though. I turned in my emerald cap and gown, pointed west to Utah and told myself I’d never look back.

I blossomed in the shadow of Y mountain. Equal parts independence and desert air proved to be the perfect recipe for growing a backbone. Once I formed inner strength I panned for gold and found glimmers and nuggets within. Decades passed. Life’s most extreme weather could not oxidize pure gold. My sound eternal structure remains uncrushable. If standing this tall is effortless why did I crumple so easily back then?

Age and air and infinite equations must have changed us all because I had a baby the week of my 20-year reunion and was somehow surrounded by all those people I intended on forgetting.

I wore Kimmy’s maternity clothes the last trimester and keep the ‘YOU’VE GOT THIS’ note she scribbled in my nursery. Baby Boy wore Mia’s son’s blue elephant gown home from the hospital and recently wore the frog outfit that Linzi gave Mia gave Me. (That’s called a Rock Bridge Triple Tadpole.) I lay him on his lambskin rug that Jeanne sent and file his nails with John’s electric file. Long before he was born there was Adam’s empathy about miscarriage, Haru’s prayers, and snail mail from Holly and Zarsamora Langendoerfer (best name ever). How can I forget Sophie’s pearl sugar and brioche, an afternoon on the Santa Barbara beach with Shelly, Kirk’s email to lift me up after Max died, and Amy’s medical tips for improving our chances at pregnancy. Melissa has been my Missouri cheerleader passing messages to my mom at church and Josh continues to visit my dad and discuss all things military when he’s in town. I wrote now-I’m-a-grown-up-and-I-appreciate-you-even-more letters to Bancroft and Pickett to thank them for teaching me more than John Donne and osmosis. They wrote me back. Heck, my former classmate is the new principal of our high school. If that’s not full circle nothing is.

Time is indeed the great equalizer. It dulls the painfully sharp corners of adolescent labels and dumps us smooth side up into a melting pot of commonality. Now we all worry about health, wealth, and family. Now we wish we had been better in our youth. We wish we had been braver and nicer, too.

Grant Fairley said, “One of the greatest titles we can have is OLD FRIEND. We never appreciate how important old friends are until we are older. The problem is we need to start our old friendships when we are young. Today is the day to invest in those people we hope will call us OLD FRIEND in the years to come.”

I’m happy to have realized the frustrating fields of high school yielded a fairly colorful bouquet of old friends. I am thankful for my old friends. I’m also thankful I don’t use a graphing calculator in real life. I’m sad Rallyburger fries are not part of real life lunches anymore.

I’m doing my best for RE. After lots of [perhaps unwanted] advice and snuggling and prayers I gave this Shel Silverstein poem to her:

Listen to the musnt’s, child. Listen to the don’ts.

Listen to the shouldn’ts, the impossibles, the won’ts.

Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me…

Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.

Leave the future's forecast open, 8th grader. You'll pass five more grades and land on your feet amidst good company. Time will surprise you.

*photo of a quilt I saw at a quilt show in downtown SLC a few years ago. The woman that made it had a son staying at Primary Children's Hospital so she started this quilt to keep her sanity and help the time pass. The word got out that she needed labels and nurses, families of patients, and strangers started bringing them to her. The whole quilt was HUGE. Literally thousands of unique labels. Hard to find these days now that the labels are silkscreened inside!