little vignettes

the week in snapshots

My tire pressure was low by the time I made it up the hill for chores yesterday. There is a pretty sweet air compressor in the garage just off the parlor, and I figured one of the guys might be happy to swap checking and filling all my tires in exchange for me showing up to milk even though I have been tettering on the edge of a pretty shitty cold for most of the week. Chris is in Washington for work at the start of each month so of course I feel like dirt. Right on time for doing it all on my own. Farming is a lot like mothering, I am learning. It waits for no one. Not showing up is never an option and activating “mom mode” is how we roll. Apply all of it to farming, too. The cows must be milked. That is simply a fact.

Anyway, Paul moseys into the parlor in the middle of my second set with a pretty somber look on his face to tell me that my tires all have air but that the car is otherwise, in no uncertain terms, utterly fucked. Front end is gonna snap. Tires off flying in all directions. Stop driving it immediately, he says. Or, drive it home but don’t go faster than 35. Don’t put any kids in there, he says. I don’t want anyone to die, and so on. I don’t want to die either, thank you very much. There’s no life insurance on me and if I go, this crew is well and truly fucked and I’m not even talking about the psycho-emotional implications.

I mostly knew this was the case, by the way. The car is a cast-off old loner of a friend. Can’t pass inspection (no surprise there) and just sits. But runs fine! Great, even if you don’t mind a super squirrelly front end. Just saying. And honestly, I have been so grateful for the extra set of wheels to get me back and forth to the barn when our two cars are otherwise occupied. Especially considering one is a 2WD EV that pretty much sucks in a Vermont winter. Which is half the year for anyone who doesn’t know.

We were just gonna sign the title over and make it official, but alas, that is not happening now. And we are back to square one in terms of tracking down a usable third vehicle. Our third in the three years since our kids started driving. Rural living in Northern Vermont necessitates transportation in equal measure, given how brutal it is on said transport. This place eats cars. Just search Facebook Marketplace for all of the unregisterable vehicles folks are trying to unload. It’s a thing. And hey, no shade from me about any of it cuz I’m gonna buy one of those hunks as soon as I find one that drives well enough and isn’t gonna kill me or my kid through no fault of our own.

I needed Eider’s help this morning to return the car back to its proper home. I needed it out of sight, out of mind, lest I be tempted to drive it again. Conveniently located directly adjacent to Freddy’s yurt school, we coordinated drop-off with dropping off. Ahem. Once we had that squared, I ran up to the schoolyard to check in with Freddy’s teachers. Having missed pick up yesterday, I needed to get myself back in the loop and make sure they knew that I knew about the sizemic meltdown Freddy had had.

He relayed it to me late last night. Once I had returned from chores, showered off all the manure, and shoved food into my face. I climbed into his little cozy closet bed and wrapped my arms around his big body and asked for a recap. He said that his teachers wanted him to do schoolwork and that made him furious. His words. He has big feelings just like the whole lot of us but his play so differently across the stage of his face and body and mind. They are intense, but they don’t unsettle me so much. I can sit with them. His story is that his anger is very big and I believe that is very true for him, even if I do not experience it as such. Anyhow, I empathized and consoled and also reminded him that school is also for the work of learning new things and practicing and refining those things until we know them. He grumbled. Cuz, it’s hard to agree to do something when you’d rather be doing something else, even when you know the thing you don’t want to do might end up being worth doing.

I’m not sure school work was really the thing, though. I think it was the backpack. Freddy has been toting around a cute-as-a-button green bear backpack since he was three. He used it all through Forest Preschool and has brought it on every trip he’s been on for over half his life. He loves it. It is full of meaning and identity for him. And it is way too small. For the past several months, we have been trying to talk him into using Eider’s old shark backpack. He’s not having it. We have even offered to undo or cover up his big bro’s embroidered name. Which is not a feel-good thing to do on my end as an off-the-deep-end sentimentalist. But I took him to school yesterday morning in the shark backpack anyway. Too bold a move as it turns out.

So, I think he was out of sorts to begin with about being in Eid’s old backpack and not his own, and that set him off on an anti-schoolwork trajectory. I processed it at relative length with some of my peers and came to the reluctant, however irrefutable, conclusion that the kid deserves his very own backpack even if I have a perfectly good hand-me-down one at the ready. So this morning, I did a sale section search of kids’ backpacks and found a pretty sweet one with planets and rockets all over it. Ideal for my astronomy-loving youngest. Problem potentially solved. At least for the time being. Would that they were all so basic.