Housing around

(Note - this is the second installment of the story. To read the first, go to the post immediately below titled "a vitch, ghost and a mumma."



Her days started at 6 a.m. when she forced herself out of bed to take the dogs out for a walk along the beach. It was as much for her own sanity as to get him exercise. Those were a few precious moments to churn over the frustrations, demands and disappointments of her life. Back at home it was a massive rush to get everyone dressed, fed, packed up and out the door. This year it was worse than it had ever been – every kid went to a different place. Thomas was at the middle school, Jack went to the new elementary school, Julie was at the old elementary school and Amanda went to nursery school on Tuesdays, Thursdays and every other Wednesday. The start times were staggered, but not enough to accommodate the mad dash across town and the long rows of traffic backed up along poorly designed drop-off area of the new school, which started after the Middle School and but before the old Elementary School.
Either someone hadn’t taken the time to think through the number of cars that would need to be in the same spot within the 15 minutes of the school building opening and school starting, or they did and didn’t care. Negligence or outright abuse? Regardless, the perplexing problem kept busy three separate school committees, a subcommittee of the PTA and a panel of the Board of Selectmen.
Emma was sure her children would be grown before the problem was solved.
For now, she and 328 other parents had to cope with a pick up that was worse than the drop off. At least in the morning, the kids could get out of the car as soon as it stopped and then off it went. At the end of the day, the cars sat and waited and waited and waited for children who came out in random order. It was complete pandemonium on rainy days when umbrellas and rain boots were added to the mix.
After school was a flurry of bouncing about from one activity to another. The growing list included football practice, soccer practice, dance lessons, figure skating lessons, basketball, Cub Scouts, Karate, gymnastics and play dates. It required a very detailed calendar and an extensive network of like-minded parents.
Emma was one of those rare people who would take people up on their offers to help. She warned them not to offer if they didn’t really mean it. Still, someone were taken by surprise.
It was an extraordinarily ordinary life. It was the sort of life a foreign correspondent living alone on the war zone in Kazikstan would have longed for. Emma’s husband, John Thomas, thought she was awesome. He had rearranged his schedule so he could come home by 5 p.m. three nights of week to cook and he organized “Adventures with Dad” Saturdays to give her a break at least once a month.
Things were busy bordering on insanely hectic so it made no sense to even entertain the thought about that big Victorian on the corner with the incredible water views. No sense at all.
They had a house. A nice house. Admittedly a little crammed with four kids, two dogs and four gold fish, but still a nice house. The chimney needed work. The front porch was sagging, but the roof was practically new.
John Thomas broached the topic carefully.
“You’re not interested in that old Victorian down the street, right?” he said from bed as Emma brushed her teeth in the bathroom off the bedroom.
“That one where the old crazy guy has been holed up for a couple of decades? The one with the broken windows on the third floor?” she said.
Emma glanced around at the towels on the floor, the children’s socks in the corner, the crud that had collected behind the toilet seat, the q-tips stuffed under the radiator. She had intended to clean it all early but got distracted with a phone call from her sister, three trips back and forth from the school, cooking two meals, running to the market for a gallon of milk and a stop at the library to return seven over due books. “Don’t you think that would take a lot of work?”
“Aren’t you the won who always says the more you try to do, the more you do?” he said. “Besides, it would have enough rooms for everyone to have their own place and you could have a real studio.”
A real studio. A quiet place to work. A place filled with backdrops and permanent lighting. A waiting area for clients. No children’s toys, no children. Very tempting.

A Vitch a Ghost and a Mummy

Emma Lowell conditioned her hair with shampoo for three days before she realized that she had bought two bottles of shampoo instead of one each. She had a system: shampoo on the left, conditioner on the right.
For three days she picked up the bottle on the right, saw that it was shampoo and fumed about the kids carelessly, or worse, purposefully, switching them. It would have been funny if it wasn’t going to take another three days or more before she would both go to the store and remember when she was there that she needed conditioner.
This is exactly the life she was determined starting around age 14 to avoid. She assiduously planned to become a foreign correspondent dashing off to exotic lands to report on crucial stories. No husband, no children, no boring PTA meetings. And yet, here she was living in a small town in New England organizing a car pool and teaching Sunday School to four-year-olds.
It tedious. It was demanding. It was filled with challenges that she never imagined. Managing the budding career of a six-year-old soccer playing ballerina. Navigating the grocery store with a sneaky two-year-old randomly tossing into the cart Hohos, toilet paper and cans of beans. Ensuring that the middle school’s only quarterback arrived at god awfully early morning games in the wilds of suburban Massachusetts guided only by directions that are completely wrong. Convincing a pre-pre adolescent that reading really is more fun than video games.
Maybe late night parties and lunch with dignitaries and getting shot at by rebel forces would have been more fun, but Emma had a dishwasher, microwave and washing machine. And at the end of the day, she was showered with sweet hugs and kisses.
When she had time, Emma ran a small business taking photographs of prized pets, but she didn’t have much time. Most of her energy went into maintaining some semblance of organization in her house while feeding, nursing, ferrying, entertaining and generally loving her four children. There weren’t supposed to be so many, it just sort of happened. Once they got started, it seemed more natural to have babies around than not.
Thomas was the first. Now 11, he was athletic and intense. He was the captain of team and yet he had an underlying sense of silliness. He was often dragging his brother into playing practical jokes on the family and unsuspecting friends. Not that nine-year-old Jack needed much dragging. He had a solid sense of humor himself and hoped one day to be comedian/magician like the one who came to his friend’s birthday party and blew rubber doughnuts out of his nose.
Julia, about to turn seven, seemed to have inherited all the seriousness that skipped over her two older brothers. In second grade, she was reading on a fourth grade level and very proud of it. She was sure she would be a doctor when she grew up, or a figure skater.
Just barely three-year-old Amanda was full of surprises, starting with the fact that she was here at all. Her parents were all set with three rambunctious children, but apparently Amanda didn’t want to be left out of the fun. Somebody miscounted something or lost count of something and the very day Emma finally decided to send the crib off to charity, she found out she still needed it.
They were individually and collectively more fun, insightful, thought provoking and delightful than Emma had ever expected.

High Hopes for Halloween

It was Halloween in New England. The houses were decorated with fake spider webs and giant spiders. Pumpkins, some painted, some carved, adorned stair steps throughout the small town of Winthrop.
The Lowells hadn’t kept up with the Jones. Living in a nearly identical house next door, the Jones had a giant ghost pirate floating across the front of their house. Bats hung in one upstairs window and a headless lady peered headlessly out of another. A witch cackled from around the corner. Frightening shrieks and shrilling howls sounded whenever someone stepped on the welcome doormat.

It was, in short, a Halloween extravaganza. The Lowells, on the other hand, had just two tiny pumpkins the children had decorated at the local art fair. The paint, washable so that parents wouldn’t be upset with stained clothing, was flaking off, making the faces unrecognizable.

It’s not that the Lowell mother didn’t enjoy Halloween. She did. Emma would have liked to have had a house decorated from ground to roof with spooky paraphernalia, but she couldn’t see trying to compete with neighbors who were so over the top. How does one compete with perfect pumpkin tea lights strung all around the porch and ghosts flying off the corners?

Instead, Emma decided to put her efforts into dressing up her four little goblins. Should the be princes and princesses? Pirates? How about a family of robots? She had dreams for elaborate, creative, home made costumes; brooms serving as horses, tinfoil wrapped around boxes, plastic fish bowls for space helmets.

But Disney has taken over. Emma’s hopes for strong-willed, individualistic children who led the pack had been dashed by commercialism. While she dreamed of cutting and sewing and gluing or even stapling in a pinch, her four little television addicts wanted to buy, buy, buy.

“I want to be Ariel,” announced six-year-old Jewel.
“But so does every other girl in your class,” her mother argued.
“So, I want to be like everyone else,” Jewel said.

Four-year-old Amanda was determined to be Cinderella: The one who went to the ball in a hoop skirt pink dress, not the dirty one who sat in rags by the fireplace.

Seven-year-old Jack, about to turn 8, wanted more than anything to be Spiderman. The web-slinging wonder that swung from building to building. He flat out rejected his mother’s suggestion that he go as the guy who turns into Spiderman, even if it meant getting to carry a cool camera.

Thomas, 10, was going to be the Scream. He saw the costume at the CVS for 20 percent off and threatened to buy it with his allowance if his mom wouldn’t get it for him.

“Mom, it only costs $30, for crying out loud,” he said.

Try though she might, Emma couldn’t convince her children to swim like salmon against the current. Reluctantly, she drove them to the Halloween Shop on Route 1 and plunged into the crowded store.

Every year, she swore she was going to go in early October to beat the rush and yet every year, she found herself at the jam packed store waiting in line to get a costume hoping there was a size left that was at least somewhat close to that of the child requesting it.

There were grown up Ariels and baby Ariel’s but every single one in Jewelry’s size had been snapped up by the other children in her class. Amanda couldn’t find Cinderella, but she was satisfied to wear a yellow dress with a hoop like Belle from Beauty in the Beast. Jack found his Spiderman costume, but was upset that it wouldn’t actually spit out working webs.

Emma very nearly let Thomas make good on his threat to buy his own costume, but in the end broke down and bought it for him.

“Wouldn’t it be great, momma, if we could actually become what we picked for Halloween?” asked young Jewel, as they headed out to yet another store in search of Ariel

Emma thought back to her own costumes. One year, she was a measle. That was when she was 3 and didn’t have a choice in the matter. Creative though it was, if she’d known, she probably would have rejected it. Another year, she was a hobo. She found some pajamas she wanted and figured she could convince her mother to buy them if they were for a costume. Another year, probably the last of her tick-or-treating career, she was a pink bunny. That was another pajama-related costume. She was pretty glad that costumes didn’t become real. It wouldn’t have been fun to go through life as a giant Pepto-Bismol colored rabbit.

Although Emma had lost the battle over the costume and given up the battle on the house, she was determined that this would be the best Halloween ever for her brood.

She arranged for a house sitter to give out candy so she could walk with her children. She made sure there were batteries in the camera so the entire day could be recorded for posterity. She was fairly sure that if it weren’t recorded properly, it would be as if it never happened at all. She passed on dressing up the dog. He suffered enough indignities being dressed up and harassed by the children every day.

They loved to put hats on him and skirts to have him sit at tea parties. Ever faithful and just wanting the attention, he put up with it knowing there would be a cookie at the end of it all.
Emma also passed on putting on a costume herself. Other mothers did. They’d dress up as witches or princesses or even be the horse for their children’s Cowboy outfits. But Emma was way over the costume stage and just as happy to focus on the children.

Her last costume was “Buffy, the Vampire.” It was intended to be a parody of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.,” But rather than being impressed, everyone just thought she was confused.
The neighbors brought out the big guns for Halloween Night. The entire family dressed up as ghouls and grim reapers complete with plastic scythes. They hooked up speakers in every window to blast eerie sounds and set up lanterns along the sidewalk. There was no doubt whose house the children would be looking forward to visit.

Trick-or-treaters to the Lowell’s house would have to be content with a distracted teenager handing out M&Ms as quickly as she could so she could get back to watching the latest Disney Halloween date night scary house movie.

Emma intended to leave at exactly 6 p.m. That way, they would be back in time to sort the candy, eat just a little bit, and put the rest in the freezer for later as a teeth-saving measure. But, as often happened in the Lowell household, very little went smoothly.
Jewelry had trouble with her tail. Thomas wanted to chuck his mask and be a werewolf instead. Amanda was screeching because she didn’t want to wear a coat over her pretty dress even though it was just 40 degrees outside and Jack was running around trying to get webbing to attach to his costume.

They didn’t leave the house until 6:45 p.m. The children had the route mapped out. Bate Street first, then Bowden, a few houses on Willow, up Thornton Park and finally, the best for last, The Joneses.

It was that last stop that made all the difference. Their bags were brimming full and Emma was fully prepared to skip the last stop. She knew that the Jones were as meticulous about giving away a tidy bag of treats as they were with decorating their house. The kids already had enough goodies to more than double the weight of the family.

The front of the house was just the tip of the decorating iceberg. There was an entire haunted mansion to wander through. Amanda wanted to go home, but everyone else wanted to plunge in. Amanda agreed to go if she could get a piggy back ride.

The family passed through the eerie gates of the Jones' doorway. A monster sat on the couch watching a vampire movie in the darkened living room. In the bedroom, a black cat played with a bat flying around the room. In the kitchen, a witch was mixing a potion.

“What’s cookin?” Thomas said, beginning to think he was a little old for all this nonsense.

“It’s a magic potion that can make your Halloween costume become real,” the witch cackled.

“Yeah right,” said the worldly Thomas. “As if.”

“I’ll try it,” piped up Jewel. “Me, too” chimed in Jack.

“Hee, hee ,hee, hee” the witch said in a screechy voice. “Come to me, little ones.”

Before Emma could stop them, the children had grabbed cups of steaming bubbly liquid and chugged them down.

For a second time stood still. Emma felt dizzy wondering what her children had swallowed so quickly. She watched to see if they would gag or turn purple or faint.

Nothing happened.

The witch cackled again.

Jack threw out his arm in hopes that a web would fly out, but it didn’t.

“Awwww man,” said a disappointed Jack. “That's stupid.”

“It tasted like cinnamon,” said Jewel, checking to see if her fabric tail was growing scales. It wasn’t.

“Can we go home now?” implored a very sleepy Amanda.

On the way up their front steps, past the peeling pumpkins, Jewel tugged on her mom’s hand.
“What would have happened, momma?” Jewel said.

“What if what would have happened?” Emma said.

“What if I really became a mermaid?” Jewel replied.

“We would have to keep you in the bathtub, I suppose,” Emma said.

“Well, I guess then I’m glad it didn’t work,” Jewel said. “Although maybe I would have become the Ariel who had two legs but couldn’t talk. I guess I’m glad I’m that didn’t happen either. Although I sure would have liked to have been the Ariel who gets to wear the nice dress and marries the prince, but only after she’s done fighting off the sea witch. I don’t want to have to fight the sea witch. I just want to wear the dress.”

Emma sighed. Try though she did to raise a strong, tough, independent minded child, she had on her hands a girly-girl extraordinaire. Oh well, at least she wasn’t asking to dress up as a punk rocker.