Inspired by Mary Oliver’s poem, “After Reading Lucretius, I Go To The Pond.”
The key to a good pumpkin spice anything is to actually omit the canned pumpkin, and use the spices – cinnamon, nutmeg, clove, etc. Canned pumpkin is for soups and pies.
You use real pumpkin is your soups and pies? That’s precious. Please put extra brown sugar and/or butter in your recipes.
Trader Joe’s has all their pumpkin products out and my rule is to wait until October for this kind of treat. The same is true for turtlenecks. No turtlenecks until October 1. These are some my rules. The problem is Trader Joe’s will run out of all the pumpkin deliciousness and I’ll be out of luck, except for a pumpkin spice latte that I absolutely refuse to try on account of it’s disgusting.
So last week I bought pumpkin chocolate chip cookie mix (too much chocolate, not enough pumpkin spice), pumpkin spice granola, pumpkin spice yogurt (I don’t eat yogurt – gross – but maybe this was different), pumpkin spice body butter, and pumpkin spice cinnamon rolls.
I usually save the fun breakfasts for the weekends when we can linger but lately the weekends have been packed and the school mornings have been more peaceful, so I popped the rolls in the oven when it was still dark in the morning, and I was the only one up. It’s selfish, but I love being the only up. It’s not so much to have the house to myself, but I have this nasty habit of measuring who I am and how I am next to everyone else. I don’t have to do that when it’s just me and the cinnamon and sugar and clove and the buttery dough.
Hadley steps into the kitchen, and then the dining room where I am slicing a grapefruit a few minutes after the rolls have been put in the oven. She is wearing a skirt, a tank top, and her Air Force Ones. She has a cross-country meet today, and so she decided to dress up.
“Why aren’t you wearing the dress you asked me to iron for you?” is how I greet her.
“Because I decided on this” she says and stands above me with a hand on her hip while I saw at my grapefruit.
“If you’re mad, just say something,” Hadley says, and I say nothing because I’m not mad. I don’t think I’m mad. I don’t know what I am. I am thinking of the electric blue Prom dress I wore that was so different from the white dress that cinched at the waste and twirled slightly the year before, and I am thinking of the pale yellow t-shirt I bought at Old Navy and a boy asking me if I was a mother and I said, “No,” and he said, “Then why are you wearing little kids’ clothes?” (Which makes no sense, but still, it stung.)
“I made cinnamon rolls,” is what I say to Hadley, then finish my grapefruit.
Later, the three of us walk to the bus, and Corby comes, too. She must be in the front. She has no idea where she’s going, but that doesn’t matter. She’s going SOMEWHERE and she must get there first.
“I won’t be able to march today,” Hadley says.
“March where?” I ask.
“For band,” Hadley tells me. “I can’t march in a skirt.”
She then proceeds to show me how one marches in a marching band, proving that she probably shouldn’t march today.
“You can’t be doing that,” Harper tells Hadley. “You’ll flash everybody.”
“Gotta keep them legs at 90 degrees,” Hadley says back.
It’s not a long walk, and mostly the three of us walk in silence, all of us considering the day ahead I suppose.
The girls’ buses arrive across the street from each other, and when they part, Corby walks perfectly equidistant to where the buses will stop, and sits down. She will not walk until Hadley and Harper get on their bus.
It is strange and also difficult to love their banter, to love that I get to walk with them to the bus stop, and then home, where I’ll read and write, while at the same time question if I’m doing all I’m supposed to do for them. It is equally strange to love this quiet career I built while at the same time worry if I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing.
It is humid out. The air still holds the scent of chlorine and ice-cream and just cut grass, and not of apple cider or cloves, or of leaves that have turned the color of fire, and maybe this too, is an indulgence, this writing life.
Harper started swimming competitively this year and her first day, I had to come get her early. “I don’t think it’s for me,” she told me on the way home. “I feel like I walked into the wrong classroom.”
That was weeks ago, and she’s back, and I don’t know if she’s good, or if she’ll get good, but I know she loves it and she’s willing to keep trying. I wonder what I’m telling my girls about endurance and perseverance. I hope I’m telling them something good.
The buses are not here, but Corby sees a dog she knows across the street. He belongs to family friends whose girls are the same age as Hadley and Harper, and Corby means no harm but she lives her life with the same exuberance of Mt. St. Helens when it’s erupting. She has the energy of Niagra Falls; the strength of an avalanche. There is no stopping her, and she sees him and pulls on the leash, then belly crawls towards him. I try to plant my feet. I hold the leash with both hands but she takes me with her.
The dog is not super interested but Corby doesn’t know to play hard to get. She’s Helen in All’s Well That Ends Well.
My friend walks across the street toward us and this is Corby’s cue: She rolls onto her back, all four paws in the air while the other dog sniffs her. This is happening in front of all the middle and high school students waiting for their buses.
And then what happens is Corby rolls over because she believes that now that she’s exposed herself it is time to rough house, but this dog is having none of it.
“We are not in a relationship,” is what I’m thinking this dog means when he snaps at her, and same as Helen, Corby does not pick up on his gestures and pushes him more, thus making it so that her leash wraps around the waists of both my friend and I, proving to the adolescents of Georgetown, Ann Arbor that they might have prime real estate in Awkward Town, but we parents are still living in its ‘burbs.
I go home, make the coffee, light my fall scented candles, turn on John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Herbie Hancock, and open up Mary Oliver’s Devotions. Today, she goes to the pond after reading Lucretius. I don’t know who Lucretius is, but Mary watches a green frog get eaten by a heron with a pink throat and “white plume like a crown,” and she calls them both her brothers, and I picture her standing at the edge of the water watching all she’s connecting to whether she wants to or not.
Maybe the lesson here is to be willing to blunder endlessly, but to find and point out the grace in what it is we are blundering toward.
“My heart dresses in black/and dances,” she writes, and my house still smells like the pumpkin cinnamon rolls and now the candles and the coffee, too and the windows are open and summer slides in and I am unsure about everything I’m connected to, but I open my notebook and I think I’ll try to unzip this black dress and see what kind of dance my heart can beat out.
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