Planes, Trains, and Lawnmowers
I have two articles due within a week of each other, am waiting for edits for my first book, trying to decipher all the plots in book two, and hoping to start book three in the near future, but instead of working my day is built around watching planes and chasing trains and lawnmowers. This is what my almost two-year-old wants.
Recently, I got the local train schedule so I could coordinate my coffee trips with the trains' arrivals and departures. I figure I have to go into town anyway, what difference do five minutes make, especially since my kid's smile and excited bounce at the sound of the train coming are so worth it. He's at a funny age. He always wants to be on the go, to play, to climb, but will stop whatever he is doing if he hears a lawn mower and then stand for more than 20 minutes watching landscapers cut grass. Sometimes, this is a good break for me because I don't have to chase him. I can sit on the grass beside him and watch, allowing myself to be hypnotized by the moving machinery. Other times, I feel like one of those tornado chasers, trying to determine where the lawn mower sound is coming from, running from one street to another only to discover the mowing is in someone's back yard and we can't go there.
Back in my boy-chasing college days, when my friends and I would wander from one party to another, hoping the next place we went would have a better view, I would never have believed frat boys would one day be replaced with trains and lawnmowers, an occasional low-flying plane thrown in. That you could get a high from rolling on the grass or a little person looking at you in amazement when you showed off your hitting “skills” (read: hitting a ball a foot into the air), that turning cartwheels would impress little boys as much as big ones.
All this stuff surprises me because I have never been, nor am I now, a relaxed person. I'm not the girl who can chill on a bench for half-an-hour and just zone out. I'm the girl who sits on the bench and watches people and thinks about how they'll fit into her next book, who wonders how this activity can result in some pitches for magazines, who even as she is typing this is getting all jumpy because she should be working on a novel or her articles. But with N, I focus on him, live in his world for a while, slow down and breathe. It feels good to breathe.
And then productivity happens, like an extra reward. There is a park we like to go, and when N gets bored with the slides, tunnels, and climbing structures, we head to one of five homes whose backyard opens into the park. The house he loves has at least seven bird houses and the yard is flooded with flowers, birds, and squirrels. He stands on the path just outside the trellis and points out all the birds to me, tells me how they are flying, how he wants to touch them (he says this last thing with a sly but hopeful smile because he knows I won't let him touch them). They're almost as good as the lawnmowers and trains. Almost. I never rush him because, other than his nap, we have no other plans and recently I saw the birds and grass and flowers as he did. Let myself fully relax and watch. And that's when this picture came into my head for a subplot I have been struggling with. A boy who loves birds, who is calmed by them. That's what I will write about this weekend when I have the time to write.
In the meantime, N and I have lots to do: there are men drilling outside, lawnmowers on my neighbor's front lawn, a train coming in an hour, and birds so close you can touch them. If I let him.