"Geez," my sister said. "The only thing I remember from our summers was gardening, yard work and horseback riding. Hours and hours of it."
We were e-mailing, trying to arrange a time for her and her husband to come up to see us in Maryland from their home in Georgia, which is where I grew up. My sister doesn't have kids, so she was kind of amazed at all the scheduling it takes these days to get two kids through the summer. Frankly, I am, too. I went on a rant.
"When you and I were kids," I wrote back, "there was gardening to do--serious gardening, as in, raising enough food that we could actually use it in the winter to eat. This, today, is considered so radically 'green' that only lefty radical types like me even think about it. And anybody who has ever done it knows it's incredibly time consuming. In a world where every family is a two-income family (or where a one-income family has absolutely no time), gardening like this is a non-starter.
"This is not to mention that there's no DIRT in suburbia. Our lot, like a lot of suburban lots, was scraped of its nice topsoil, which was sold to somebody else, and infilled with crappy clay and leftover gravel. Every time I plant something I dig up huge chunks of crap and have to put in a load of expensive topsoil in order to raise so much as a tomato plant. After a whole lot of labor I have downscaled my ambitions to some lettuce, some carrots, a couple of cherry tomato plants and (new this year) some potatoes. Plus my herbs. And then flowers, enough to keep the bees and butterflies happy.
"I long--LONG--for the days when we'd go out and pick our own beans and then string them and put them up in our own Mason jars and eat them all winter long in vegetable soups. I'm sure this memory is covered with a heavy haze of nostalgia, but it sure as hell beats buying something shrink-wrapped and gassed within an inch of its life, and which tastes like cardboard.
"Every time I work in the yard, I get stares or comments or both. I am quite sure I am the Crazy White Lady in our cul de sac, if not the whole neighborhood. Once the boy next door came over as I was planting something and said, 'Why are you doing that? Is it Earth Day or something?' I said, 'Around here, every day is Earth Day.' He wandered off, looking even more perplexed. I would have asked him to help me out but I was afraid his mother would call the child abuse authorities, because I am considered just so freakin' ODD. The girls are, too. The kids at the bus stop let them know. The only reason I don't feel mad or hurt about it is that I see bafflement and curiosity in these other kids' eyes. They WANT to know what this is, and why our family seems so strange. I want to tell them that it's called 'making a home.' It does not involve nonstop cellphone conversations and racing around to this or that and keeping music and/or TV blasting all day. It involves this thing called 'hanging out together.'
"Another thing: you and I had kids to play with. Kids around here are either indoors watching videos or off at karate or being trucked off to Nana's for a visit or shopping or at the movies or in after-care....And it's not that their moms work. Hell, we all work. It's that their moms and dads keep these kids so scheduled that in comparison Lindsay Lohan looks like a couch potato. They seem to think that if their kids have free time, they are failing at parenthood. And God forbid their kids should run around outside 'unsupervised.' There are child rapists behind every rock in the park! We're talking utter paranoia here. Suzanne put her hands on the neck of a little girl on the bus a few weeks ago--in PLAY--and the other kid was LAUGHING at the time--and the next thing I know this kid's parents want Suzanne kicked off the bus permanently, because she poses a risk to other children. 'If she does that in play, what is she gonna do when she gets mad?' the other mother said to me. I couldn't think of a damn thing to say. What response is there to a person who sees a potential felony assault in two kids playing? Do children not play on her home planet? I told Suzanne, 'No more grabbing other kids by the neck.' 'Okay, mom,' she said. End of problem. Was that so hard? Evidently it must have been.
"I hate that I have to schedule camps and that I have to pay to get my kid in a softball game, when you and I would go round up Billy Pitt and Mike Polston and whoever else was hanging around and play just about whenever we wanted. But it's either do that or watch my kids wither physically and intellectually, taking in the 15th rerun of 'ICarly' and complaining of being bored. And even organized activities are a poor solution; Rebecca's softball coach last year was a jewel, committed to helping the girls improve their skills and just have fun, but this year's coach says 'I want to put a quality product on the field....we're here to win.' Win what? Whatever happened to fun? Fun, apparently, is a pastime for losers. I guess this is why I am not the CEO of a major corporation today: too much fun in childhood.
"Man, did you set me off on a rant. I love our house, it's in the right school district and all that, but I am living for the day when we can downsize and get something modest, on a lot big enough to grow something, and live among people who, I dunno, don't mind just sitting on a front porch and passing the time of day. If, that is, God rewards me and lets me live in a house that HAS a front porch."
Whew! Guess I've been storing this frustration up for a while.
