~:: Amazing Things ::~

Nothing to do with personal angst.  YAYAYAY!!!!  Instead, I’m writing about yesterday.  And I meant to start with something I was deeply pleased with, but have – after a night of interesting dreams – totally forgotten about.  So I will, instead, begin thus:

My dear Geneva is about to be flooded out of pasture.  It is certain now that the lake is going to start seeping over the dike, and her grass is the first thing it will find when it does.  That is not the only kind of flood she is facing, but it’s the kind we can try to keep from rotting the hay she has left and ruining all of her tack – and when you teach eight students at a time, that’s a lot of dang tack.  The city brought her (to her surprise and gratitude) a mess of sand and bags (which is good because her husband is stuck in London thanks to the Icelandic Volcano eruption, and her truck won’t start).

That’s where the first of the amazing things comes in.  When life is as it should be, we all rally around and pitch in.  A million barns were built at the beginning of this country by crews of neighbors, helping each other.  And we figured, a bit of tack might be saved the same way.

Remember Rachel who can hardly get off the couch with West Nile?  Yeah, she’s around the corner of the building there, lugging fifty pound filled bags and lining them up just so, a foot from the building.  That’s what she does with her good days.   Here you see two of her sons, with some friends of Rambo (the oldest son – in the green hat) and one of Geneva’s students, already at work.  Geneva had not even gotten there yet (the truck -).

The Great Mr. C, one of Rachel’s middle kids – slightly built and poetic, and he works like a – yeah – a horse.

Once Geneva got there, bringing her crew of ten yrs. old and under, they built this fake cow out of huge safety cones and two by fours.  Clever, eh?  This is the creative part of this post.

But  the bags underneath needed to be manned – they wouldn’t stay open and upright.  And the cow had to be continually milked, as the sand tended to hang up in the – ummm – cones.  So the youngest ones became milkers.

Here you see the crew.  And they also worked like horses, except horses don’t milk cows.  We were moving fast with this work, the shovels of sand coming and coming – and these three young folks three were managing all of us:  “NUMBER ONE: READY!!  Opps.  Number Two isn’t ready yet.  Oh – now it is!  Number THREE IS FULL.  Wait!!  I SAID it’s FULL!”

Mr. s C and T – Rachel’s 2nd and 3rd boys – had gotten to the pasture at about one fifteen.  While their older brother and his friends had to keep leaving and coming back (high school graduation day – much to do), and the rest of us did, too, those two boys worked continually till eight o’clock that night.  SEVEN HOURS OF SHOVELING. And I never heard one word of complaint, and neither did Rachel when she ran the afternoon to evening shift.

They were MONSTERS.  They were HEROES.  And don’t you let anybody ever tell you that kids will be kids.  Because they won’t.  Kids will be people some day – and this was one of those days.  But the small red-haired girl on the left up there?  She’s the one who blew me away completely.  She’s four.  Four years old.  Five minutes into this thing, she had her own system for opening the bags (it wasn’t easy), shaking them out, positioning them under the nozzles, and keeping them upright.

She busily tended the bag, stopping us while she milked down the nozzle.  She yelled for a bag carrier when she was full enough, then without a soul saying a word to her, grabbed a new bag, installed it and yelled for sand.

She knew her business.

I would have sworn she was twelve.  Or maybe twenty four.

I’d hire her ANY day.

I didn’t get to photograph the second crew because G and I were babysitting our kids kids’ kids.  That, in itself, is an amazing thing – not that G was babysitting, but that I was (me – the grandmother who gets short of breath at the thought of babysitting). The second crew was Rachel, who came with the rest of her very young crew – Ms. K,  The Great M, and wee J – including Levi, who picked up the work quickly, and never tired.  If there were others, you know – how would I know?

When Rachel called me at eight o’clock that night, Geneva’s friends had finished over 450 bags of sand.  A wall, four bags high.  And a great deal of that work had been done by that crew of twelve and under (plus Mr. T, who is 15, and Mr. C, who is thirteen – mensches, both).  If that doesn’t amaze you, then you have my pity.  Or maybe you just already knew kids could work like this.  And do it cheerfully.

The second thing I am writing about happened after G and I cleaned up grand-kid dinner, after we had danced and sang and messed around with the small ones—then changed diapers and clothes-for-jammies and put two good, tiny little people to bed.

Cam and L use baby monitors.  G and I never had one.  Cam and L, being the media people they are, use video surveillance.  I know I just wrote about this somewhere – but where?  Hmmm.  Back when we were parents, we just stuck kids in bed and assumed they were sleeping.  Silly us.  A good hour and a half later, these two were both still awake.  Scooter had never left his bed – he’d just used every square inch of it, flopping around silently in the dark.  Andy, in her room, was doing jungle gym stuff in her crib.  We wouldn’t have known any of it if we hadn’t seen it happen on screen.

Finally, in a fit of mercy, I went in to the very silent, well-behaved Scoots and whispered another good-night.  “Is there anything I can do for you?” I asked him.  “Yes,” he whispered.  “Tell me,” I said.  This was still in the dark.  “Blow my nose,” he said, very softly.  So I did.  I went out for tissue and blew it.  Then I asked, “But why did you need you nose blown?” And he said, softest of all, “I had been crying.”

Such a tiny, fragile little body – and so much thought crammed into his head.  His words are always very well chosen, formally phrased – except when he’s pitching a fit. And Andy sings.  Sometimes in church, during the prayer.  They are my grandchildren. Thus, I brag about things I’ve had very little to do with cultivating.

Here is Chaz, who has once again changed the color of her hair.  Now, it’s gray.  This is not amazing.  It would have been amazing if she had NOT changed the color of her hair.

This morning, M sent me this amazing link.

Have you seen it?  It’s hardly new.  But I hadn’t seen it before.  The thing about the lion?  I sat there watching it, leaning toward the screen, tears running down my face.  It was the same reaction I’d had to that “Merry Christmas” French film when all the Germans and Scotts and British came out of their trenches, meaning one another no harm in the middle of a terrible (and it was terrible) war.  My heart ached with longing – for things to be right.  For evil to pass like the skies clearing after a tornado.  For relief.  For joy.  For amazement.

Here is a picture of Tucker.  Not amazing.  But it’s for free.

Tomorrow I will start worrying about stuff again –