April showers

... bring May flowers. And Munchkin was yelping "It's MAY, it's MAY" when I picked her up from preschool on Friday. The flowers are out, all around us: hyachinths, grape hyacinths, tulips, daffodils, and forget-me-nots. The crocuses are already done, and even the tulip trees are sheeding some of their petals.

This year, we are tackling the yard. 55 feet by 50 feet of gone-to-scrub space that needs, first of all, to be cleared. Auntie Soo-see offered the services of her 13 year old son, who earned the nickname 'axe-terminator' at the cottage last year for his knack for completely uprooting treest. For 30 bucks, some root beer, and a cheeseburger pizza, he was mine for the day.

The 'axe-ecutioner' got to work while Munchkin slept:


Me, I used my pogo-stick-style weeding tool to uproot upwards of 300 dandelions. After a certain point, the yard starts to look less like it's being aerated, and more like it's being excavated. It feels good to work outside, to get my hands dirty, to feel like progress is being made. Neighbours ambled into the yard to chat, to marvel, to discuss plans. It was fun.

Munchkin was fantastically excited to see all the hustle and bustle when she woke up from her nap, and gladly took up her shovel, too, helping me dig up past-their-prime tulip bulbs, throwing tennis ball 'easter eggs' into the wild carrot patch, gleefully flinging dirt around.

Auntie Soo-see taught her the finer points of supervision, captured in this photo I like to call "union rules" (one to axe, two to watch):


A truly lovely family day, with fresh air and exercise. The yard looks only a very little bit better, but we had a great time. A great weekend.

And this: really? I'm dying from the cute .

Party like it's 1955

The school was built in 1954--I know this because the slide show, "A history of [Chichi District], our neighbourhood", showed a photo of the building we were sitting in, from 1955. The inside of the gym didn't betray any concessions to the changing fashions or realities of the past 50 years. The walls were painted cinderblock, the doors, dented steel with glass panels gridded with wire. The members of the neighbourhood assocation who came out on such a wet night were, absolutely without exception, white. Mostly middle-aged or older. If younger, expensively shod and smelling of righteousness. Of money.

The history slide show indicated that this, the neighbourhood immediately adjacent to my own, was Canada's first master planned, fully zoned and bylawed, subdivision. Right from 1933, there were hurdles to clear before new buildings or amenities could be added: setback from the street, architectural integrity, maximum height and minimum lot size, 'proper tone.' It was meant to be controlled, to be classy, to be exclusive. It was, and, actually, it still is. The association has its own historian to ascertain the area's pedigree, to etch its story into the hearts of its ratepayers.

Someone asked if the PowerPoint slide show would be available for downloading, and if so, from which web site? General assent and applause followed. Following this 30 minute interlude of self-congratulation and self-mythologizing, the business of the meeting began.

The Green Committee spokesperson reported on a worrying trend to felled and dying trees in the neighbourhood: all planted at the same time, and all of one breed, they had proven not very well-suited to the actual climate and in any case were reaching maturity and senescence all together just as their canopy really began to increase resale values in the homes they shaded.

The trees, she explained, were an unhealthy monoculture: the city's tree expert proposed that controlled culling occur and a more catholic replanting effort, encouraging a wider variety of trees, be undertaken.

An unhealthy monoculture.

I sorta zoned out when a particularly glossy and well-fed neighbourhood potentate--charter member of the neighbourhood golf club, and head of the Traffic Committee--expounded on the siren song of four-way stops and the evils of commuters taking shortcuts from one arterial road to another, breaching the master planned sanctity of the neighbourhood of overgrown and dying trees. Tradition must be maintained, the integrity of the original vision brought once again to the forefront of municipal bylaw enforcement. Studies and votes would need to be taken. White faces nodded, their cane-style umbrellas uniformly leaned against uniform stacking chairs. Their leather handbags on cotton laps, their sportcoats open over buttoned bellies.

An unhealthy monoculture.

As the 'other business' portion of the meeting opened, I said my piece on behalf of my own street's association, and it was with a glad heart that I hightailed it back to my Japanese subcompact in that parking lot full of German luxury sedans. I was glad to drive the seven or eight blocks back to my own, older, resolutely unplanned neighbourhood, its tall houses packed a little more closely together, its funny gap-toothed smile of mis-shapen, idiosyncratically renovated houses and gardens and student rentals and prams on porches and beer bottles on front steps.

Monocultures succumb wholly to stresses to which they are vulnerable. A more chaotic or diverse culture is difficult to fatally wound, hydra-headed and many-strengthed as it is.

Maybe master plans, offering us these false hopes of perfect uniformity, perfect control, actually make us weaker. Maybe it's better to live cheek by jowl with the student house, the lawn-pesticide user, the PC voter, the sidewalk organic gardener, the families, and the investors. At the very least, I know our trees will live longer. I suspect our neighbourhood, too, might better weather the storms of the new century not in spite of, but because of its jumble of people, of land uses, of mindsets.

Hm. Sometimes, not planning might be the best plan of all. That's tough for an ENTJ to wrap her head around, but I'm trying.

WW: Hipsy-hopsy with Gramma

It's worth a click to see the big version: she's in mid-hop, gleeful and on her way to a tea party Way the Hell Up North with Gramma.

Perplexing Conversations

I held the door at the local brewery as the young whippersnapper clerk helped an elderly gentlemen out with his purchases.

"Thanks," called the whippersnapper, "Your party is in the back!"

Um, what?

I grabbed my six of Pynchon's favorite dark ale, and stood at the cash to wait for the whippersnapper to return.

"Oh, sorry," he said, "I thought you were here for the party."

"What party?"

"Um, all the real estate agents, they've got the bar today, I thought that's what you were here for."

"Do I look like a real estate agent to you?"

"Sorta." He shrugged and pushed the six pack over towards me with my credit card receipt. Conversation over.

WTF?

----------------

I've been researching the local zoning maps, because, as you all know, we live in the historic uptown district of our small city, and so it's a mash of commercial properties, residential neighbourhoods, and industry (eg, the aforementioned brewery).

I write to the city help desk because the codes are inscrutable, and the legend doesn't really help: "I-25, GR-2a, C4-12" says the map. The legend offers, "Industrial 25, General Residential 2a, and Commercial 4-12." I ask for clarification.

"Hi!" writes the hapless clerk, "I-25 means industrial 25, and GR means general residential."

I write back politely to note that I sorta got that information from the legend, and I'm confused about what the numbers mean. Can she explain?

"Sure thing," she writes. "The numbers reference the different kinds of use that are permitted."

BUT WHICH ONES????? I've just given up, because I'm embarrassed to point out to her that she is being remarkably obtuse.

WTF?

Binary

We idle at a red light this morning, Munchkin and I, driving to campus. She looks out her window and says, "Two trees, Mom, that house has two trees." She pauses for a microsecond before adding "A Mom tree, and a girl tree."

Munchkin's is a binary world, with bears and bunnies and puppies and cats and even trees and spoons and cat toys rigorously paired off into Mommys and girls. Her whole world is this: there are Mommys and there are girls, each pair twinned indissolubly and essentially. Everywhere she looks this is what she sees, this is the story she creates to account for everything.

Her passion for me is unbounded and her compulsion to pair all the elements of her universe this way is but an imperfect realization of her real desire, which is, actually, that Mommy and Munchkin fuse into one being. And so she squeezes between me and the counter, and then wraps her arms around my leg, and then stands on my feet, and then insinuates herself between my thighs. "I waaaaannnnt you, Mommy," she tells me as she's trying to figure out a yet more intimate attachment. My protests--but I'm right here, my love--are meaningless to her because the fact remains that I still sometimes walk away, sometimes talk to Daddy, sometimes disappear from view, disentangle myself from her caresses.

Last night, asleep for hours, she called my name, insistently, despondently, several times. I went into her room to find her fast asleep but still somehow tortured by my absence. Pynchon says she does this a lot late at night, when he's awake to hear her.

At the very moment that she begins to realize her own autonomy, her own separateness, her own self-hood, in these months that she develops self-consciousness--this is the moment she clings most tightly to me, works to absorb me into her, her into me. Her tantrums lately are evenly distributed into two camps that reflect this paradoxical developmental stage: she yells as loudly to DO IT MYSELF!!!!! as she does to insist that I WANT MOMMY TO COME HERE RIIIGGGGHHT NOOOOWWWWW!!!

It's hard to know when to hold her tighter, when to gently push her toward her own resources, when, sometimes, to leave her with Daddy and vacate the premises so everyone can catch their breath. I know that I have some separation anxiety lately too--when did she get so tall? when did she learn to put her own shoes on?--because she's my girl and I'm her Mommy and if she's afraid of the unknown future of autonomy, I'm afraid of losing the time of symbiosis that's already past.

Girl Blogger and Mom Blogger indulge a shared passion for 'orange noodles' and goofy smiles