Category: Family & Home

Big storm coming tonight, Amy and I decided to do some last-minute gutter repair in the sunset before the storm. I’m up on the roof testing a new endcap with a garden hose, Amy on the ground watching the effluvium. She ducks in the house to check on Miles, he’s busy working on a puzzle. She comes back out, we wrap up in three minutes. Toss the hose down, and I walk back over the roof, returning to the rear of the house where I had propped up the ladder.

As I crest the peak of the roof, what do I see illuminated in the purple and orange light of a stormy sunset… but 2-year-old Miles standing on the next-to-top rung of the ladder, high above the roofline, 10-12 feet above the ground. Just standing confidently on that almost-top rung, smiling at me.

My heart froze. Walked up to him slowly, plucked him from the ladder, and sat down on the roof, squeezing him to my chest.

It was the most terrifying moment we’ve had with Miles so far. How long had he been up there? How did he get out of the house? How did it happen so quickly? Since when can he open the sliding doors by himself? The possible outcomes seemed horrific.

He’s always been physical and fearless, but we were totally broadsided by this one. It’s hard to describe what it felt like to see him up there – beautiful and brave and illuminated so gorgeously, but everything about it at the same time so totally wrong.

Update: Turns out he didn’t open the sliding glass door after all, but slipped through the cat door – the same cat door in which he got stuck when he was just a babe.

A couple weeks late here… Miles turned two on September 23. So many changes in two years, so much compressed evolution. Watching his mind, body, and personality develop has been an ongoing source of fascination and enjoyment for us – we’re as stoked to have him with us today as the day he was born. Amy and I just put together Miles’ two-year photo gallery: A little bit of Jamaica, the daily yogurt festival, his recent art installations, steam trains, into the woods, rock climbing, Mega-Blocks, friends, animals, climbing and sliding, 2nd birthday… 40 images in two albums.

Sure, our lawn looks easy to mow — that’s why I bought a manual push-mower last year. But truth be known, the yard is full of hidden dips and divets, soft patches, and not-so-hidden hills that mean I always have to run full-tilt boogie to prevent the mower from bogging down every few feet. Raising the blades a notch means missing too much grass. Today finally got fed up and called baald in a sweat: “Can I borrow your lawn mower, man?” baald has a nuclear-powered Lawn Hawg.

Felt like waking up from a bad dream. Despite protestant work ethic which demands I exert undue effort to derive satisfaction from any given job, I’m never going back. It’s like vacuuming the grass. Clean lines, little hesitation through the rough spots, and shoulders that don’t ache at the end of the day. Got to find a used electric mower.

Last year, automatic transmission, this year, no-sweat mowing. What am I becoming? Old and reasonable?

I’m in full-tilt work mode when the call comes in. It’s Amy. “Hon (I always brace myself when sentences start this way), I just got a nervous call from [another friend]. They said they had taken an offer for a pile of free mulch, but ended up with umm… way too much. I said we needed some, so they brought over the leftovers in a big truck. It’s in our driveway.” “Nice work!” I responded. We did need a bunch of mulch for some upcoming projects. “Yeah, but it’s, um, a really BIG pile of mulch.” “That’s OK, we’ll use it, don’t worry, gotta run.”

Roll in on the bike as the sun is starting to go orange. Car’s not in the driveway. Because the driveway is full of mulch. As in, FULL of mulch. Shredded redwood fibers, smelled delicous. Miles happy to see daddy. And, being a boy myself, I of course knew he’d be dying to play on the pile.

Guess this means our weekend is booked.

A couple of days with Dad at his place in Pioneer, last hurrah before the students return. So much woodland you’d expect to find mostly hippies and Grizzly Adams types, but there are flags flying over every unpaved driveway. Deer and dogs dart in and out of yards. Neighbors stop to visit in the middle of dinner, make themselves comfy. Neighbor nails a sign to a tree: “Parking reserved for world’s best grandpa.” Another neighbor “invents” a mechanized, driveable rake from spare Jeep parts for scooping up pine needles. A rough-hewn, hand-carved bear holding a freshly caught fish… with a flag sticking out of its head. Smell of propane wafts from motor homes. Dad at 70 cutting down trees from his own proppity for firewood, splitting massive slices with a hydraulic log splitter (impressive power!). He had forced air installed but after a few weeks decided it was making him a nancy boy, and returned to the pot-belly stove for warmth. Bees are having a field day this summer, worse than flies. Sirloin injected with teriyaki sauce, hot summer corn, perfect watermelon. Miles collecting pine cones, thrilled to spy deer in the trees. Pictured: Jeep rake and Saddest. Yard ornament. Ever.

Overheard from the dining room, wife to baby, after seeing a particularly dense and complex scribble he had done on the Etch-A-Sketch:

“I love you, Miles. I think you’re intense, provocative, and fascinating.”

The fact that Miles is not yet two is immaterial.

Never dreamed having a lawn would be so much work. We apply great amounts of energy, water, nutrients and still it goes brown, dry, splotchy. Research: Lawn mites? Enough water? Thatch? Aeration? Soil penetrant? Dude at American Soil Products suggests it’s just too old — lawns apparently have lifespans. Said it’s probably time to rip it out and start from seed (he’s not a sod fan). Not ready to go there yet (the back yard is new sod six months old, it has its own set of problems).

Decided to resuscitate the decrepit, corroded, half-working original sprinkler system — manual watering is just too much labor for our schedules. Timer works fine, but the heads are whack. Took a vacation day and dug out 12 old Champion heads, installed new Rain Birds. Better, but needs tuning. 90% of the job is locating and digging out the old heads through rocks, under sidewalk underhangs, creeping roots…

Three trips for teflon pipe tape: Once when I ran out, again when Miles absconded with a roll, and the third when a roll vanished into thin air. Looked everywhere, time running out, gave up, got in the car again. As soon as I pulled into the street, saw it in the middle of the road — it had rolled into traffic and been run over. A bit crunched, but still teflon-y enough to work.

Amazed to study the water bill for May and June — we averaged 190 gallons per day, most of that going into the lawn I’m sure. And here we are concerned about low-flush toilets and the Water Miser setting on the dishwasher. With the century’s impending global water crisis, we’ll all have desert-themed yards soon anyway. Now I see why so many retirees decided to do the yard in a quaint gravel theme — throw on a few dead pine cones for good measure and call it a day.