how to describe a redbud?

ethereal.
posed beside a white dogwood,
you become fairyland
if i stand still and watch long enough,
i’ll see you
lift satin-shod toes and dance
an airy bit of Swan Lake.
–but only in some obscure ratio of sunlight and shadow…
outside of that moment, waiting is useless.

independent.
blooming out in a Bohemian frenzy of color
putting to shame the pink dogwood
(unnatural, unfriendly pink. like someone
tried to transport Japan
but squished it into
English manor subservience.
…so mild-mannered.)
paired with a pale weeping willow,
you are the dress that my
little hippie self wants to wear
dancing through clover

subtle
(my favorite)
-and it’s kind of a ragamuffin look-
resting quietly beside a dark evergreen
your branches standing out black in the sunshine
and blacker in the rain
not quite blending in,
or begging for attention… merely
complementing

you are
one
of the reasons.
i never want to leave kentucky.

Idiot sheep.

Ask my husband the definition of a battering ram and he won’t say anything about a large piece of wood or breaking down the gates of a city. He’ll mention a creature named Billy who practically turned him into a cripple.

Idiot sheep.

He almost got sold yesterday. He would have, except that Roger didn’t have the time to take off to Lexington to the sheep auction. Instead, like a good shepherd, he went down to the field to check on his animals and give them a little grain before getting to work for the day. When some friends drove by and honked, he turned to wave, and in that instant the cowardly bully struck.

Idiot sheep.

He’s no threat to anyone except an adult male – and then only when the man’s back is turned to him. If you look him in the eye, he’s too afraid to do anything to you. He’s not even any good for breeding any more. Almost every sheep in that pasture is his child, grandchild or both. It’s time for a change.

Idiot sheep.

(Roger is more or less fine. Nothing is broken, but he’s walking around with a very stiff leg and much discomfort.)

misery and chocolate

Some days I honestly expect my computer to explode in my face. I think I ask too much of the poor decrepit baby. But shouldn’t a good machine (even a 7-year-old laptop) be able to rip a CD, open emails, navigate facebook and allow me to blog simultaneously? I’m a little worried tonight though. There are strange whirrings going on beneath my hands. If you never hear from me again, it’s probably because there are bits of Dell shrapnel imbedded in my face and chest, making it hard for me to focus on communication.

Actually, for the last two days, communication has been hard for me. After Marcus & Danielle’s wedding, I felt the beginning of a sore throat… which steadily progressed into misery. At least for me. I’m a baby when I get sick. I shut down, go to sleep, I don’t answer the phone or the door, and basically am no good for anyone or anything. And I get so self-centered. All I can think about is how sick I feel. About how I’m “at death’s door.” Blah, blah, blah. Wouldn’t it be nice if a person could spend those sick hours plotting good deeds and coming up with helpful kind things to do for other people? But no.
Usually I get left alone. If my girls are around, they’ll come in periodically to check on me and give me kisses and crackers. Monday, Roger worked all morning, then came in at noon for lunch. He sat on the bed and looked at me very sweetly and wished me a happy anniversary (plus one day.) Ha. Right. The miserable baby didn’t have such a happy anniversary this year. She was too busy feeling sorry for herself.

I asked him if he could call Tommy to let him know he wasn’t going to get his 70 whoopie pies today. My energetic, spontaneous husband thought for about two seconds then said, “Let’s just do it!”

He spent the next three hours making whoopie pies.

I love him for that. And I love him for cleaning up the mess afterwards. I really did mean to get out of that bed and try to clean it up for him while he was off delivering his baked goods, but I fell asleep and never got the chance.

I didn’t taste the whoopie pies, but they looked great. And now he’s all gung-ho about looking online for a gadget thingy that will make the process simpler for me. Funny. I should have gotten him to try his hand at whoopie pies sooner.

And now I wonder how many more #10 cans he needs to open with the hand can opener before he installs the industrial can opener like he threatened the other day…. (And he probably won’t read this, so that last sentence was totally wasted.)

Foibles

It’s funny. Wesley (the master of excess, the definition of unrestrained joy, the essence of life lived to the fullest) is of course the first Voth kid to come to mind when there’s a story about a broken tooth or rotten forgotten Easter eggs. Strangely enough, he’s (possibly) the least accident-prone child in our family.

Conscientious, sensible Judah is the child who has suffered the most injuries so far. At one, he whacked his head on the dining hall tile, at about 4 he got knocked  in the face with the handle of a hoe and ended up with a black eye, he fell off of a rope swing in PA and (once again) hit his head. (Now that I’m writing all this down, I’m wondering if I should worry about his poor brain.) He’s had at least 3 black eyes during his calm and sensible 10 years. And now he’s knocked out half of his front tooth.

The dentist did an amazing job of fixing it. Still, I hate the thought that he has to live the rest of his life with a tooth that isn’t completely real. It will break off again someday -  and when he’s older they’ll replace it with a cap. Anyway…. back to placing my children in their little catastrophic boxes…

Wesley is the kid most likely to come down with a mysterious rash or strange fungus. He’s the one who at 8 years old still wakes up with a croupy cough every so often – which causes him to get stressed out and worried that he won’t be able to breathe for the rest of the day. When he was five, he used to constantly yawn to pop his ears. And with every yawn came an audible “aaa-uuuhhh” sound.  That used to drive me crazy! Eventually he outgrew that…. and replaced it with a weird swallowing thing. Every time he took a drink, he would swallow and then do some weird thing with his throat – almost like a burp. I think it was worse than the ear-popping.

Why am I writing all this? I have no clue.

My kids crack me up.

Like this past Sunday…….  I love seeing Malin’s reading progress. She was eating her fish and studying the bottle of tartar sauce in front of her plate as she ate. Finally she looked up and said, “Is this stuff called torture sauce??”

Speaking of girls….. I have no little boxes of danger to put them in yet.

Malin is a little athlete and quite coordinated. Avery on the other hand, has a tendency to be clumsy. Since I put my rag rug in my living room floor, she’s tripped over it almost once a day. And almost every time something minor happens to her, she’s very quick to jump up and shout out, “I’m all right!” like some offstage movie character who no one really cares about.  (We do care about Avery, but that little phrase still makes us laugh.)

Well, I have too much to do to be sitting here writing. But I’ve missed this. See ya!

More Guessing Games

Which one of my children received 2 hardboiled Easter eggs at school, peeled them, stuck them snugly in 2 plastic eggs, then left them in his/her backpack for 4 days?

When the smell finally got bad enough, my child blamed it on “a dead rat in the basement.” And not only at home…. When a classmate complained about the smell, my child said it was because “our jackets and backpacks were by the basement door…” (or more probable: on the floor just above the supposed smell.) I admit, I was the first one to suggest a dead mouse. I had seen one in a trap downstairs, and the rotting eggs did have that smell.

Roger was worried that we had killed a mama mouse and there was a nest of babies in left in a wall somewhere. In comparison to that, we’re not complaining about the eggs.

At least, I’m not. Roger did the disposal. He even went so far as to wash out the putrid plastic eggs because he was asked so sweetly (and desperately) by the owner – who was supposed to be going to sleep when we discovered the eggs.

In which we discover that a broken tooth isn’t the end of the world.

So… You know my children.

Which one of them had an accident on the trampoline Saturday evening, broke a big chip out of a front tooth and bit completely through the lower lip?

Hmmmm. Can you guess?

PS – My baby is just fine. The cut is glued and healing, and the dentist took care of the tooth today so it looks as good as ever.