Well, hello there 2015; I'm finally getting around to acknowledging your arrival.
We greeted you in the company of my parents with a champagne toast,
fresh off the plane from a wonderful visit in the Caribbean with my brother’s
family, where seven cousins, two extra aunties, as well as dogs, cats (both
young and old and ailing*), guinea pigs, iguanas, geckos, and mosquitoes shared
a house with a view of the sea. We swam,
ate, hiked, cooked, played football and baseball, talked, snuggled, and mostly
just enjoyed being related and being together.
Tootsie soaked up love and attention twelve-fold.
2015 opened with Middle Sis’s 3rd grade teacher’s
resolution that There Shall Be No More Lice in her classroom (even she
contracted the critters, poor lady). I’ll be
discreet and share that we were intimately involved in a lice intervention the day before
school resumed, and it was only a week later that we received the teacher’s
email of surrender: “Lice Is Back.” If one can conjure humor while managing the
specter or reality of lice, there’s a certain comedy to be recognized in its
effects on otherwise sane-appearing and level-headed mothers. Creatures so tiny with such magnitude of
power to bring successful, confident, resourceful women to their knees! We join a sisterhood around the trauma of
lice, a sorority of horror and sharing of remedies, with crying and raw-scalped
children who are victims of and audience to the drama of slathering, combing,
shampooing, laundering, drying, spending, rinsing and repeating.
Lice is prehistoric.
Lice doesn’t discriminate. Lice
will never be vanquished. It’s kind of
awesome, and I mean that literally, how the little buggers maintain their
hegemony over us, no matter how rich, educated, clean, willful, and powerful we
think we are. It’s only our Type-A
vigilance, our determination, that keeps the villains from rising up in whole
new civilizations, complete with hierarchies and alphabets.
[And here's where Big Sis points out with disdain that I've devoted more of this blog post on lice than I have on our trip to the USVI--Ed.]
Big Sis wants No Part of Lice, so while I was out of the
house for a few hours one day, she helpfully stripped our couches, beds, and
pillows and generated a mountain of (quite possibly) unnecessary laundry. It wasn’t long after I recovered from my own
grousing and folding of sheets and towels that our elderly dog’s bladder
control surrendered. Into the washer and
dryer went multiple loads of dog bedding and towels. And it wasn’t long after I committed myself
to the cycle of dog clean-ups that our washing machine surrendered. And it wasn’t long before the washing machine
broke that Husband conveniently left town.
Right after that I recognized that Tootsie had Hand, Foot, and Mouth
Disease. Right after that our babysitter
fell ill with a horrible flu. Right
after that Tootsie spent some time in my office at school. Right after that I had my own cry right there
in my office. And my mother’s help and
proximity became valuable AGAIN. Not to
mention her washing machine.
Meanwhile, Husband and Middle Sis were in Arlington, where
his father was interred at the National Cemetery. The special ceremony was on Husband’s
birthday, and he was surrounded by a crowd of family members. He and Middle Sis visited sites in Washington
D.C., and bonded with cousins Middle Sis had never met. The three of us who remained at home sent our
hearts, and Big Sis worked through her disappointment over not attending and
experiencing all the family bonding back East.
And Middle Sis returned home last night with an eye infection* and
was excluded from school today. SIGH.
Onward!
