One of these days around Christmas, two dogs show up on our porch, panting at the window and wagging their tails every time anyone shows signs of food. My sister has found her calling taking care of the neighbors’ animals while they are away for Christmas, and after a few days of keeping an eye on things the dogs get lonely and decide to come hang out with us. We tend to be indoor-dwellers, though, so I can’t imagine it would be very interesting for them to sleep outside our door all day waiting for someone to pop a head out and tell them to go home.
Whether or not the dogs are amused, Grandma’s cat, Missy, is most definitely not. She prowls the windows all day, occasionally sticking her head out the cat door to sniff for any sign of Abby and Max. Grandpa suggests we just open the door and throwing her outside, but none of us dares betray her so. Instead, Grandma finally coaxes her outside by holding the kitty door open until she is safely crouching just outside the window. She works her way out from there, tentatively scouring the grounds to find out exactly the extent to which the intruders have encroached upon her territory.
We can see her sitting among the bushes, getting comfortable and watching out for signs of the dogs. Next thing I know, my mom is out front yelling, “MAX! LEAVE OUR KITTY ALONE! SHE BELONGS HERE!” (unlike certain dogs we know of) and there is a great commotion at the cat door as Missy tumbles through it, terrorized, and Max pulls up short right outside, panting excitedly.
She leaves muddy footprints on the kitchen counter. Her tail is the size of a toilet brush and each of us takes turns trying to soothe her, hoping she got a chance to pee before the big black dog discovered her courageous jailbreak.
***
After lunch Grandpa recruits a team to go fix the roads. I jump at the opportunity to get out of the house, although for a split second I think, “Pouring tar? Ambitious…” Then I remember that it takes at least 45 minutes to walk to the nearest paved road, and that what we’ll really be doing is pouring gravel.
This must what I’ve been lifting weights for. (And yes, I am a little sheepish to admit that I have, in fact, been lifting weights.) I join the boys, secretly excited to claim the title of “Girl Who Isn’t Afraid To Get Dirty And Play With The Boys.” I have the flat shovel, which means that on top of shoveling three loads of dirt in and out of the wheelbarrow, I have to rake the dirt flat once it’s filled the potholes so Grandpa can tamp it down.
This is a very important task, you know.
***
While we’re fixing the road, Grandpa’s discussing the pros and cons of solar power versus wind power, and complaining that the guys at the fair are going to charge him $15,000 for solar paneling and installment. “I don’t want them to sell me installation of solar panels,” he says, “I want them to sell me solar panels! Today I’ll buy a few, and I’ll make the frames, and then I’ll come back and buy a few more, and before you know it, I’ll have a whole farm!” The windmill costs $7,000 without the stand or controls. “What’s the point?!”
Next on the list is cattle guard versus a gate, and what the neighbors have to say about these projects. Grandpa is the ultimate DIY-er, and most of us are certain that he will die falling off a ladder on a Habitat for Humanity building site. Once he broke his hip doing just that, and instead of staying in bed for six weeks and staying away from ladders and unfinished houses for a few months like he was supposed to, he got out of bed after two weeks and drove cross-country to build a retaining wall behind our house with recycled slate and rocks. He was just too restless to stay in bed any longer than that.
But by the time we use up all the gravel and get back to the house, he says, “OK, now we’ve done all this hard work, I guess we’d better go do something FUN!”
This is a legacy I am proud to carry.
***
“You got balance from your mom,” my uncle Juan Miguel told me once. “I think that’s good. Because your dad’s side of the family tends to get caught up in things.”
We are well aware of this fact. My mom says that what I got from them is “making things special,” and while this is definitely true you could easily substitute the word complicated for special and hardly notice the difference.
Thus the ten-foot-long scale model of the solar system that I built in fifth grade out of wood, wire, and papier-mâché. In order to make this even fit inside of a building, I used one scale for the planets, to make them all proportionate to each other, and a different scale to measure the distances between them. The planet scale started from the width of the wire I was using to mount the planets on the wood, the tip of which was the smallest any of my model planets could possibly be. I made the sun out of newspaper, and I think it ended up being at least 8 feet in diameter. I was devastated when somebody mistook it for trash and it disappeared before the presentation, but that was the least of my worries. To fit it in the car, we had to make the base into two five-foot puzzle pieces that linked together in the middle, with half of the solar system on either side.
Most of my classmates stuck foam balls from solar system kits inside of shoeboxes they’d painted to vaguely resemble the universe. I’m not judging them for this, especially because I’m sure they didn’t spend the ride to school splattering the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter with an old toothbrush, trying not to get gray paint on their cute little Aeropostale jeans.
I bet you can guess who helped me with this project.
That’s right. My dad.
A few years later I decided, for another class project, to quilt a resources map of the United States out of cloth. This one was my mom’s idea, but instead of suggesting more three-dimensional ways to mark resource mother lodes, she was urging me to go to bed at 2am when I was crying over tangled bobbin thread. “Why don’t you get up early in the morning and do that? Go to bed now,” she coaxed. “You’ll do a better job of it.”
I’m still not sure whether I am a night person or a morning person, which is a problem since I have deduced that the key to a successful marriage is marrying a person who is the type opposite of what you are. I think my dad said something along those lines once, probably in jest, and I took it as the ultimate truth. There is no going back. I’m sure my type will suddenly become apparent to me someday, just as I suddenly realized that I am, in fact, an extrovert. (I’m not sure if extroverts and introverts are also complementary, but I’m sure that information will be useful someday.)
The student teacher almost certainly gave me “100%” on the Quilted Map of American Resources. It practically made me into the next Betsy Ross.
(I wonder if she came from the same Scottish clan as my ancestors? Grandma found a Ross-clan tartan necktie in the trunk of heirlooms and gave it to my brother for Christmas, and I’m a little jealous. All I got from that side of the family are the Ross hips. And a pair of Iron Man briefs to cover them.)
Grandma also feels the same way about knickknacks as I do: just another thing to clean. Not that I don’t appreciate pretty things, because I do—another Swanson Family Legacy… But I got balance from the Buckners. We’re historically not wildly materialistic, so the best Things in life are both pretty AND useful.
…Just like me ;-)
…Just like me ;-)
