BOOK TWO (15) schoolyard rhyme, gummy bearskin rug

There are obvious objections to hearing your child recite the schoolyard rhyme (including appropriate body gestures):

Milk, Milk, Lemonade.
Round the corner, fudge is made!

But the value of the rhyme is equally obvious, if we admit to the fun of detecting double entendres and lighten the eff up.

Gummy Bearskin Rug by Brock Davis

BOOK TWO (14) socks, sundrunk berries, Betty White

If you have three thousand freshly-washed socks to pair together over the course of a lifetime, or even 10 times that, remember: you can have neither more than the one life you live at the moment (calloused heels and all), nor slide into a different (barefoot on the beach?) life than you currently inhabit, and which is constantly sifting away.

If you plant (and tend) a rambling garden full of perennials and fruit trees or if you gulp your mojito in a single throw--it amounts to the same thing--a passing moment, which is every housewife's equal possession. We can no more hold onto the past than berries can hang onto their branches once they've drunk their fill of sunlight.

Our loss therefore, is actually a series of fleeting instants: nuzzling baby chub, coupling socks, listening to piano practice... No housewife can lose what's already past-nor what's yet to come. Neither are in our possession.

So, two things should be kept in mind (besides your son's dental appointment today at 3pm). First, that the big cycle of creation, operating since way before...

Betty White

...has always been the same, and always will be. You can watch it for a hundred years or indefinitely; it will recur in the same pattern...(though if you go this route, you may need to 'order in' dinner).

Secondly: That when both the most ancient among housewives and the most youthful permanently hang up their rubber gloves, their loss is precisely equal. For the only thing any housewife can be deprived of is the present. This is all she owns.

BOOK TWO (13) stars, Cinderella, googly eyes

Nothing is more depressing than to peer curiously though a telescope into space--and consider a distant planet's wee blinking light "negligible"...only to discover, upon coming back inside, a sink full of dishes, which reflect back nothing at all.

Saving the coral reefs, or having a beehive or chickens in our back yards, (as we love our ecobuddies for promoting), or chatting with the elderly bikeriders who tuck their pants into their socks, are all fine, as long as your first commitment is to understand (and hold fast to) the divinity within you, and serve it like you would your mother in-law. (For whom your love, fear and respect are knit together with especially tiny needles--kind of like a fine washable).

Such care involves not tossing out the citrus plant you've been nursing along all winter just because it's now shedding leaves; nor wandering through Winners contemplating bad klunky jewelry which is only almost cool. Nor should you suffer from the tooth gnashing that comes from attending the school musical, thinking you should have volunteered more, because then it would have been better and your child (the Prince!) would have had a better role than "Footman" in Cinderella's court. For the divine night sky (vast beyond imagining) deserves our awe because it's not a sink full of dishes. And for your housewifely divinity --not to mention baking cinnamon buns at some ungodly hour--you deserve every wonky kid-made craft involving paper doilies, styrofoam balls, and googly eyes you've ever been the recipient of, along with a large dose of compassion. For we are also wonky, frequently unable to tell good from bad; as terrible a blindness as if we were looking through googly eyes, ourselves.