#i love to turn my faves into pathetic ground meat

[gojoest]

sae acts all dignified, cold, and uninterested around you. but when he’s all alone in his room, and his eyes fall closed, a deep sigh escapes his throat as his thoughts turn to you. and all that attitude suddenly shrinks and perishes. your voice is playing in his ears and he likes to imagine how you’re telling him things, whispering what you like. what you want. and he’s perfectly aware that he's never been this low, this pathetic, in his entire life before. yet he keeps shrinking, going lower and lower. grabbing a fistful of the pillow next to him, picturing in his frantic mind it’s part of your flesh, while stroking himself painfully slow, with endless edging. as if he’s atoning for a sin

[momtemplative]

Dog Days.

The “dog days of summer” refer to the weeks between July 3 and August 11 and are named after the Dog Star (Sirius) in the Canis Major constellation. The ancient Greeks blamed Sirius for the hot temperatures, drought, discomfort, and sickness that occurred during the summer.

Temperatures have been in the 90′s for over a week now, and they anticipate another solid two weeks of the same.

In our home, we’ve concluded that the most successful way to overcome this heat is to be soaking wet, as often and for as long as possible. We bought a cheap, blow-up, 6 x 8 feet pool in May and it has saved us nearly every day since it’s inception on our back deck. We fill it with hose water from the deepest frozen bowels of another world and erect two umbrellas so we need not wear sunblock. We can create an outdoor environment where we are shivering on a 100 degree day! That feels like power, like we’ve outsmarted yet another restriction that has been placed upon us during the pandemic. Go team!

(And yes, in spite of pools and parks now being open, we consider COVID to still be very much happening and prefer to err on the side of no crowds.)

Our sanctuaries are shrinking, but I raise my hands in praise that we still have sanctuaries at all. The vast out-of-doors (as Governor Polis likes to refer to it) is so much a hotpot of swelter by mid-morning that the kids and the dog are instantly miserable. Opal (sensibly) refuses to voluntarily subject herself to the heat. 

Nope, she says, No-can-do. I’ll get a headache.

Ruth will excitedly agree to a walk, then start complaining by three houses down, and plop down on the sidewalk, refusing to go home, petrified with indecision and frustrated with all hot things. (A few days ago, she sat on an ant colony between the sidewalk cracks—that got her up and moving right-quick!) So, I’ve stopped offering walks by the time the sun has slurped up the dew from the grass.

Step into our backyard during the meat of the day and you risk a face full of brightness like a sledgehammer. Our benevolent, Great Eastern Sun turns aggressive during these summer months, dis-regulated like a mommy bird force-feeding her young. By this point in July, only the most hardy of our plants survive. The many backyard quadrants we curated early on during quarantine—the sandbox, the ninja-course in the Russian Olive tree, the swingset and slides—are all simply too burny right now to enjoy during the thick of the day. We lack mature trees in the back, so it is a sea of steamy heat while the sun is a glaring bulb overhead.

When Ruth drops something over the railing, we all silent-scream NOOOO as if that item will be lost to the ground-is-lava recesses of the backyard until the sun sets and we can retrieve it without being bombed from above. There goes Barbie until after dinner, honey.

The shade and the sun take on a Marvel Comic strip nemesis quality. There can be only one. When a cloud moves in overhead, we comment on it until it passes, as exciting as the Goodyear Blimp.

Oooh, what a difference! Amazing! We going to get rain? I felt a breeze!

Ruth says, Is it nighttime?

No honey, just a cloud.

The gaping canvas of a hot summer day can feel stretched and pulled in all directions—more proof that time is not linear. And each of these lengthy days that we organize to the best of our ability, and with the resources we’ve got du-jour (how we slept, how the body feels, the emotional barometer of the house between young-ones...) eventually slip by as another box, then a row, on the calendar. Some are chunky with challenge and discord, others silky-smooth with ease, most are a combination of it all. 

We whittle new routines into the wood that is daytime, footholds to keep us from having to start from scratch every single morning. Right now, we are on COVID schedule 24b (roughly): the Dog Days Edition. 

Opal has her own things, especially in the morning. Ruth needs a block of full-engagement playtime early on, otherwise she is left in a state of wanting for the rest of the day, like a dolly with a talk-mechanism malfunction—PLAY WITH ME PLAY WITH ME PLAY WITH ME!!! 

Granted, she will do this anyway, (especially now, having no playdates with friends) but it’s much easier for me to draw a clear boundary once we’ve had our special together-moments. We may be on the deck early in the day for playtime, this and that, and Ruth may dabble in the pool, but we’ve gotten into the rhythm of having our official coming-together-pool-time be right after lunch and before afternoon chill time. (Shout out to Jesse who gets to join on weekends.)

As we chew our food, we all start to itch for the frigid water, our date with the polar melt that awaits just passed the sliding glass doors. 

Tiny cheap Walmart pool? No. It’s a world of wonder.

Opal loves to do running jumps into the pool, ending with a combination of grace and fumbling chaos (and, pray-god, NOT a trip to the ER). She warns Ruth, but every time, Ruth clutches her dolls as they are hit with the swells and yells Oh-PAL!!! 

We just found an old boogie board in the garage which Ruth adopted with hilarious seriousness, using the wristband and adopting a surfer’s stance as if she’s gazing into the distance at the waves. She essentially just sits on it, climbs on it, yells at it, repeats. It works as a fantastic lifeguard boat for dolls that have fallen in the water, which then turns to a pontoon-type boat that gets scooted from one end of the pool to the other. 

There is crawling and dancing (always, music) and running in circles. There is a game called Leg Swing, which is clumsy and never successful, but one of Ruth’s faves. Many of Ruth’s indoor toys have made it into the pool and are now filled with an ominous sloshing sound of water. Our patios table is a collection dismembered doll parts, an attempt to dry out the innards. 

There is the Bug Rescue Society. Last week, Ruth rescued a wee, harmless flying thing from certain death in the water, then it befriended her and refused to leave. This is a kid who screams at the sight of an ant, but this bug was special. She named him Pascal and played with him for over a half-hour, no exaggeration. She took him on tiny boat rides and let him crawl on her hands and eventually settled to rest on a towel in the sun with Pascal next to her. I was sure he was dead, but upon closer inquiry, no, he was choosing to be there. 

And lately, Opal and I (and Jesse, when he can join) have taken to doing a full-in-plunge upon entry, which is more than a pleasant shock to the system. I had a strange stomach thing last week—woozy and nauseous—and it was hijacking my mood. (And, when I’m with the kids all day, every moment, I am like a mommy mirror to two smaller mirrors and—like it or not—my mood SETS THE TONE.) I did a full plunge into the icy shallows of the pool, which consists of me sitting down then lying back in one fell swoop since the water is just deep enough for me to put my entire head under. I was utterly healed—body and mood, cleansed and hungry.

I have started taking my woes to the dipping pool—the neck-tightness, the overwhelm, the stressors and emotions of the moment, whatever is there—and the instant my body is covered in that alarmingly frigid water, all the negativities dissipate and we are all kid-screams and raucous silliness. 

Our tiny pool is a poetic reminder of what happens when you appreciate what you have right now. Last year, it may have felt pittly, pathetic. Now, it shines forth like a beacon of reprieve. 

And no matter where we were earlier that day— regardless of morning meltdowns or grudges—or where the rest of the day has to take us, for that instant as we emerge onto the blessed deck in our suits and with our drinks and towels, we are all in complete, joyous alignment.

Then, we are cold. Ruth is blue-lipped, shivering and chattering. Physical sensations, I repeat, that feel victorious in the face of these high-caliber pandemic Dog Days. 

The party moves indoors to a warm bath—an even smaller body of water!—where Opal and Ruth warm up and play, amiably or not. Either way, we are on the smooth, familiar trajectory into the rest of the afternoon. 

July 14, 2020