car troubles

I wrote this about two or three years ago. Still no heat, plus the tires are soft...

THE TROUBLE WITH BELLS AND WHISTLES

I paid off my van last week, and received the title in the mail. Just after I bought it, I brought it back because it left a big oil stain on my garage floor. I later found out that it tops the Consumer Report's list of used cars to avoid. I didn't care. It had eight seats and it was all we could afford. It had lots of bells and whistles to which I was not accustomed, and was cushy by my standards. Apart from the fact that we had to replace the transmission and a few other minor quirks, it has been a pretty good vehicle.

The trouble with bells and whistles on a vehicle is that they tend to wear out (or break off) long before the car is paid off. I am used to making do, but it is starting to dawn on me that safety should be more of a concern to me and my family. I was driving down the interstate today with my kids to visit my friend Julie. As I mentioned earlier, I have no passenger side mirror. That doesn't pose much of a problem if the rear window is clear, but today it was muddy and I could not see behind me, and the wiper broke two years ago. My solution to this problem was to stay in the left lane and go 80 mph so that I wasn't holding anyone up and I didn't have to merge back into the right lane. I decided I should keep a good eye on the driver's side mirror, but I found that I had to contort myself slightly to see in it. I tried the electronic mirror adjuster. Broken. Has been for months. I remembered that one has to roll down the window to adjust it. I stopped myself just in time, because while the window has no trouble going down, it does not go back up. Going 80 down the highway in March with open windows wouldn't be quite so bad if the heater worked. Well it does work, slightly sometimes. I took it to be fixed in November, but it was going to cost $200 in labor to fix a $17.00 thermostat. I just didn't think that was cost -effective. Humor aside, the experience was somewhat terrifying. I finally was able to pull over and pour a bottle of water over the back window so I could see.

There was one thing that did seem to be in our favor on this trip. The “check engine” light which has been lighting up my dash for a month or two was mysteriously dark. I have had it checked twice, and nothing seemed to be wrong. I knew that if I ignored it long enough it would go away. Another silver lining: At one time I thought the window washer was broken, as the well was full and nothing was coming out. I finally realized that I had been pressing the broken cruise control button thinking it was the window washer. With all my creative musings, I was finding it very hard to come up with a hypothetical excuse if we were to be pulled over for speeding. I was also chiding myself for being a bad mother. I want a new Toyota. All the other preschool mothers have one.

Timeless

I helped my dad fix his barn today. It is a slow and steady process which takes time, cooperation and patience. Rotten beams need to be replaced amongst old horse harness and years and years of junk and memories. We're standing under a leaky roof on a rainy day.


As I am hammering, trying not to fall through the rotten floor, I look over at an old, rotten pile of hay. Suddenly I see myself at eleven or twelve, sitting on top of that very pile, with three fuzzy black kittens moving under my yellow sweater. Memories come rushing in... the hay loft is filled with bales of hay and I am staking it out, waiting for the momma cat to betray her nest of new kittens. I climb down the ladder and go through a doorway, where I imagine a cow or two, or the big black work horses that we used to keep for someone else. An old saddle brings me back to the rush of galloping our pony up the road, pretending I am starring in a western movie.

Then there is my dad. We have a time crunch. We need to fix the beams and studs for the roofer to come before the snow flies. I have only a few hours before I have to return home to meet the school bus. Yet dad stops to help Johnny put a piece of wood in a vice for him to saw. He later obliges a request to drill a hole in a piece of wood, even though it requires some effort to climb over lawnmowers to unplug the fencer and plug the drill into an extension cord. Johnny has been pawing through old scraps of metal and wants to put an old bolt through his newly sawn wood.

We stop for home-made soup and good conversation. We linger over our tea although the clock ticks. Back at the barn I almost fall through the floor, and lean on a rotten piece of wood which almost lands me in two feet of chicken poop below. I arrive home tired. But it is a good tired.

lazy Sunday mornings

I really do like going to Church. However, we haven't quite made it there much lately. We used to take turns getting up at six with the kids. Back then I had been up for hours before Church came into the picture. This a..m. I slept til seven! We had several waves of kids coming in for snuggles, elbows in the ribs, boys wrestling with each other til we threatened to kick them out... My daughter is now old enough to bring me coffee, and so there's another half hour of sipping and admonishing rambunctious boys who get too close to knocking it over. I may have even read a few pages of my book while the kids were downstairs spilling cereal on the kitchen table. You could say that we're lazy, especially since we do this on the weekdays, too, only because my husband is lucky enough to go to his office across the hall at 8:30. The house is a mess. I sent my youngest to pick something out of his hamper to wear today. I had the couch cushions back on the couch yesterday, but they were on the floor again before I could vacuum. We're surrounded by chaos, if you take a quick look at our house. But the heart of our home is our big bed, full of children and warm embraces. My four year old announces “if I am going to have hydrochloric acid in my lab... then I'm going to have to cut one of you up...” as he wiggles his fingers over my belly like a mad scientist. A sociopath? No, just someone who is fascinated by science and likes to talk about stomach acid as he chomps on a bagel. Often I wish I would spend more time attending to housework, but I like to think that I spend valuable time instead nurturing the hearts, minds and spirits of our children. We laugh, talk about the world and its wonders, answer some questions and pose others. I learn more than I teach, as the kids one-up each other with information about dinosaurs, volcanoes or black holes in space. I learn several reasons why the chicken crossed the road. Eventually we all get up and start the laundry, go for a walk and rush to public skating. The groceries get bought and dinner gets cooked. The rest of the day rushes by, but my favorite part is always waking up in anticipation of snuggles in the not-so-early morning. Maybe we'll make it to Church next week.