May 2021 – Page 2 – In Such Times

A couple weeks back I found a mysterious device while cleaning out the basement: A black pistol grip with a red plastic barrel fused to a full-hand trigger.

I found it on Rich’s workbench, amid a pile of electric drills, flashlights, and hammers. It immediately jogged my memory, but I couldn’t quite remember why. Being there in a mess of tools, my mind went to grease gun… low temperature hot glue gun… maybe a broken soldering gun?

I set it aside and forgot about it.

Until yesterday morning, when I went down into the basement to get a screwdriver and saw the mysterious tool again. It sat alone on the workbench, which Barb and Alli had cleared to make room for the plumbers to work… and this time it clicked.

It is a potato gun.

I haven’t thought of potato guns in at least twenty years. I had one when I was Walker’s age and remember blasting through dozens of potatoes as I ran through the Maine woods with my dog.

When I finished laughing at myself for being struck so suddenly by memories, I went to find a potato… it was time to tell everyone in the house what I had found. Or rather, it was time to show them. It didn’t take long for Barb to start laughing as I shot Alli in the chest and she responded by putting a bit of potato between my eyes.

Eventually, Walker got his hands on the potato gun and spent a good while blasting potato bits into the bay… until he heard that his Daddy was coming to visit. Then Walker found a spot behind a bush and proceeded to sit more still than I have ever seen him, waiting patiently to shoot a wad of potato at his father’s knees.

It’s been a helluva month.

We’ve spent the last few weeks closing up business in Virginia. Packing, cleaning, doing what we could to see friends and family, within reason given the ongoing pandemic and a few spats which emerged when I announced that I was heading north. The whole process was complicated by my car accident, which has left the truck sitting in a repair lot for a month

We’re trying hard to help the kids feel settled, even as we try to find our pace with the new normal. They’re registered for Scouts and have already gone camping once. They have a lair in the basement where they can play video games and watch TV without drawing agro from adults for giggling with their friends on voice chat or watching the same talking dog movies again and again and again and again. We’re currently debating whether Girlchild gets to live in the basement, a fate which literally gives her grandmother shivers at the thought of waking up with a spider cricket on her head, or has to share space with her brother. If Boychild could choose, he would sleep on the daybed in his grandmother’s room, but we aren’t giving him the choice.

I’m settling in, slowly.

Moving has been on my wishlist for years. I love my friends in Tidewater, but the utterly flat suburban sprawl drained a little bit more of my soul with each indistinct Virginia Beach Norfolk Chesapeake Portsmouth intersection. My favorite place in all of Tidewater was Pipsico Scout Reservation, a Scout camp perched on the southern cliffs of the James River. With paths that meandered from the heights of the cliffs down to the tangled cypress swamps, it was a dynamic landscape filled with good memories.

Now I’m in a new landscape, one that is a good bit more varied. We are still living in a swamp, but it’s one which is stable enough for houses to have basements and where we can reach rolling, rocky foothills within twenty minutes.

Girlchild has already declared that she wants to volunteer at the local nature center. Boychild is beginning to make friends at Scouts. We’re still finding our footing up here, and likely will be until James finishes his latest round of business travel and we settle into a rhythm of visiting one another, but things are finally beginning to look up and slow down after nearly two years of life moving too fast.

I’m looking forward to watching the ospreys hatch their eggs off the dock, repairing the roof of The Mothership, and taking the family for weekend camping trips in the mountains.

It’s time to breathe again.