Maternal Dementia

It was a workhorse, working so hard – harder than it should have. European appliances are known for their interminable cycles, but even after the very dry setting, lasting much more than an hour, I’d have to add another 20 minutes. And sometimes more. The fatigue was apparent.

I should have cleaned the filter more often. Not the regular lint filter in the door, but the one in the tray underneath, the über-filter. It’s not that this didn’t occur to me. Along with the all other should do things that come to mind over the course of a day, it was on that list I never quite get to.

Last week it just gave up. It turns and turns and turns, but it doesn’t dry. The handy guy who always helps us out with these questions said the repair would be difficult and costly. And he’s a scrapper. If he wouldn’t fix it, then it probably isn’t fixable.

The dryer is dead. Long live the dryer.

Except there won’t be an accession. We’ve decided not to replace it. We’re leaning green, going line-dry.

We all say we care. We do care. But are we willing to change our habits – really change them – to help the environment? It’s easy to justify our choices in the name of convenience, or make excuses about how such a little energy-saving gesture saves nothing compared to the amount of energy wasted by entities far larger than our household. The same goes for recycling. What difference will one family really make, given the amount of garbage that is disposed of so carelessly? Is it even worth the time and effort it takes to wash those bottles and containers and separate plastic from paper from glass? Half the time I wonder if it all doesn’t just end up in the same landfill anyway. Do we really know what happens to the contents of our recycling bins?

In the scope of things, it is a small gesture. One tiny green decision not to replace an appliance. But I am reminded that small changes add up. Maybe the kilowatt hours of electricity we save won’t make a difference, but at least I can mean it when I tell Short-pants and Buddy-roo that I’m concerned and conserving. Walk the green talk, at least a little.

There is another reason that De-facto’s so pleased with this decision: it’s cheaper. Except for the touchy issue of the crunchy towels. Fortunately (or maybe not) there is a laundromat across the street from our building. So when I’m not dutifully hanging small garments across the wires of the drying rack that creates such an elegant aesthetic in our living room, I’ll be collecting coins and running up and down four flights of stairs with a laundry basket, just to give those towels a softer touch.

How long do you think this will last?

Every Monday (and Thursday) the same familiar faces gather, parental brows furrowed with the end-of-the-day rush; a crowd of tall, coated strangers stand uncomfortably in a room with too few chairs. At 6:15, precisely, the torrent of children pours into the lobby of the conservatory, a parade of little people laden with black instrument cases and swollen school backpacks. I always crane my neck to look for Short-pants; vigilant for that precious moment, the very first instant when her searching eyes find me in the pack of parents. Her expression shifts in a nanosecond, from awkward to assured, leaving the realm of the unclaimed and taking her rightful place at my side. I never get tired of that look, or the zealous greeting that follows immediately: “Mama!”

Yesterday, her music teacher walked behind her, his hand barely on her shoulder. I couldn’t tell if this was by chance, or if he was accompanying her out of the class. When she called out to me, he smiled and raised his eyebrows, a warning, I suppose, that he was escorting her for a reason. He is celebrity-handsome, by the way, a blonde kind of creature who, were he not teaching music theory at the public conservatory, could as easily be modeling Calvin Klein underwear.

“I wanted to talk to you,” he said, “about your daughter. She was very nervous today.”

She was a bit flustered when I picked her up from school to take her to the conservatory. The frigid temperatures didn’t make playing in the school courtyard very pleasant; she’d gotten a chill after lunch and couldn’t shake it all afternoon. I explained this.

“Yes, that’s what she told me,” he said, “but she is very often a bit nervous and dans la lune.” (I’m translating this exchange from French to English, except for these few words, dans la lune, which mean, literally “on the moon” and figuratively, “in the clouds.”)

“It would help if you could work with her, between classes,” he said, “to be a bit less dans la lune.”

I understood exactly what he meant. He was telling me that Short-pants is easily flustered and a bit spaced out. Though she can be totally focused; she wrote and illustrated a 22-page hand-made book on how to make a Mandala, and worked at it tirelessly, without any prompting from us. But it’s true that often she has her head in the clouds, leaving her eye-glasses who-knows-where, reading four books at the same time, bookmarking them by leaving them spread eagled in every room of the house. It’s a little bit of a miracle that she gets out the door with all her belongings in the morning.

“Yes,” I said to him, “except she has so few years left to be dans la lune. It’s a pity to cut that connection while it’s still so strong.”

“Oui, c’est dommage,” he acknowledged my point while standing firm: “but eventually, you must.”

Short-pants and I walked home without talking. It was too cold for words.

The much-heralded New Year’s Eve blue moon is waning, but the last few nights the sky has been so clear that I could see the unfiltered moon through the skylight, beaming in the girls’ rooftop bedroom, proud of its auspicious ranking. Tonight I stole upstairs and searched for that moon again – just a half-moon or even a sliver would be reassuring – but the cloud-cover lays a dark amber blanket over the city, hiding the moon from view. My heart is heavy, though it shouldn’t be. Short-pants is a resilient one. She’ll go to the moon if she wants to.

Photo Credit: Jean Paul Roux via Space Fellowship

Lest I become the cobbler with shoeless children, I am occasionally reminded to practice what I preach professionally and enact a few creative, reflective and even visionary exercises with my own family. This time of year is good for such activity; the idea of a new beginning conjures up a tabula rasa and the urge to rectify any imperfections of the previous year.

I had stellar inspiration: Four women, three of whom I don’t even know. This is the beauty of social media; if you follow a few new and fascinating people outside your circle of known friends, you’ll get a few new and fascinating ideas.

The zen-like social-media maven Gwen Bell wrote a blog post about creating a personal manifesto that I wanted to eat, it was so nourishing. Also via one of her tweets, I discovered the mixed-media artist, writer and designer Lisa Sonora Beam, who adds a special aesthetic to the activity of goal setting. Both of these women inspired me to be deliberate about documenting our goals for the coming year.

More inspiration came from writer Gretchen Rubin, who I really wanted to hate because she’s so, well, happy. Except when you make even a short visit to The Happiness Project, it’s really hard to resist getting in step with her life-is-short-why-waste-any-of-it-not-being-happy philosophy. Even my prickliest friends would agree it makes sense.

Then there’s my colleague facilitator Delphine, the Maman Creative whose blog is all about mindfully engaging her children’s creativity. From her I get ideas of things to do with my kids, not just for them.

So I put Gwen, Lisa, Gretchen and Delphine together and came up with the idea of the All-Family Personal Goal Manifesto Collage Day.

De-facto has plenty of fruitcake in him, so he was up for it. If it involves cutting and pasting, I can count on Short-pants and Buddy-roo to participate. So this is how we spent the entire afternoon on the first day of the year: I’d dug out every magazine in the house and set out glue-stick and tape and scissors so my peeps and I could create our personal manifestos for 2010.

I tried to simplify the process to three steps: 1) Imagine who you want to be in 2010, and make a collage to demonstrate it; 2) Make a list of goals that will help you become who you want to be; 3) Make a collage about those goals.

Later it became: 1) Just make a collage of your goals for 2010. (This was an instruction that Buddy-roo and De-facto could handle.)

The flipping of magazine pages and ripping and cutting began.

Short-pants and written her goals the night before, when I first suggested the activity. (She is not the recipient of the procrastination gene that De-facto and I both share.) She re-copied her first draft and set about bringing it to life with images. You might notice that the #1 goal on her list is “Get more independince.” She’s been walking around saying, “I declare my independence!” ever since she finished this exercise.

Buddy-roo didn’t seem particularly interested in articulating any of her goals; she was more in the mood to shop. Her collage soon became a book with six pages of pictures: women in elegant dresses, a pair of high-heeled shoes, a sterling-silver jeweled bracelet, a Dolce & Gabbana perfume flask and two designer kitchens. The visual cues were undeniable; It could have been a mood board for any luxury brand. I made a few gentle suggestions, like, “Can you add any images to represent things you’d like to do, or things you’d like to learn in the next year?” She answered my prompt by gluing in a picture of Jennifer Aniston. “Tell me about that,” I probed. “I want to grow my hair out,” she said. Then she pointed to another picture I hadn’t seen yet, “And I want a horse.”

De-facto finished his collage first, a complex composition of his aspirations for the year, which he prepared with running commentary about all the other facilitators we know who do strategic goal-setting activities. “This isn’t how Frank Prince would do it,” he said.

“Just pass the glue,” I said, in my newfound happy voice.

I was, of course, the last person finished, still searching for that perfect image to convey the rather abstract concept of “letting go” when our dinner guest arrived and I realized I had to clean up and start cooking. I thoroughly enjoyed this very tactile activity, elbow to elbow with my most loved people, the table covered in magazine scraps and sticky fingers. It was a vrai moment of being aware; I was happy, even in the midst of the simplest activity. (And that’s one of my goals.)

Gwen Bell says, about this process, “When you write your goals, the whole world opens up in front of you.” I know this to be true; when you write something down, it takes form and shape. But what happens when you wrap your goals in a picture of long, blonde Jennifer-Aniston hair?

Yesterday morning, Short-pants was early out of bed – a rarity – and crawled in with De-facto and me for a ritual cuddle. Buddy-roo came down a bit later and heard us whispering. She lurked in the hall outside our door, sniffling.

I took the bait and asked her what was wrong. She said she’d wanted to be the first in our bed for the morning cuddle. No urging could get her to let go of her disappointment and join us under the warm covers. She alternated between crying and pouting.

For a few moments she disappeared, and returned to deliver a picture she had drawn, indicating her love for me and her papa and sister had been withdrawn. She dropped it on the bed and returned to her post outside our door.

“I don’t care if she doesn’t love me,” said Short-pants, “all that matters is how much I love her.”

I’m not making it up; she really said that. As if we needed any more evidence that she possesses that little extra dose of love, strength and wisdom, and understands how to employ it.

After a long period of silence, Buddy-roo offered a suggestion.

“Mama, you know that store over near the Pompidou, with all the toys stacked in the window?”

“Yes?”

“You could go there and buy me something.”

“That’s one idea,” I said, in my best non-committal voice.

So this is Christmas, I thought, from one end of the range to the other.

In the spirit of both of my beautiful children, I’d like to wish all the readers of this blog – loyal and occasional – a Merry, Merry Christmas, Joyeux Noël, Feliz Navidad, and don’t forget a belated Happy Chanukah. I send warm greetings to you for the whole season; may you find all the love, strength and wisdom – and toys – you need.

And thank you for reading Maternal Dementia this year, that’s the best gift I could ask for.

Sometimes De-facto and I work together, professionally.

I’m wary about this because living, loving, and parenting together are hard enough. Adding the vocational dimension is tricky; it could put us over the 24/7 edge. He always rolls his eyes when I say this, but I think it’s important: We each need our own time and place in the sun. And honestly, we’d drive each other crazy if our careers were absolutely inextricable.

But on those occasions when we do get to team up, we do pretty well. We pass the baton back and forth and mix things up a little with our different styles. My favorite part is when he gives his little spiel about patterned thinking. It starts out something like this:

“Humans are actually hard-wired to locate, create, and sustain patterns. It’s part of our survival. The brain is a pattern-making machine.”

He goes on to support this with a little bit of scientific research, a few diagrams of the human brain and a little exercise that people always flub up because they get too caught in a pattern they think they see but isn’t really there. It’s a good set-up for raising awareness about the assumptions we make on a day-to-day basis, in order to free them up to break patterns and try to be a bit more creative. While he’s making his case for breaking patterns, he reminds us why we have them to begin with:

“The human brain uses patterns, structures or routines – cognitive scientists call these mental models – to make us more effective and efficient.”

This is the part where I usually have to leave the room or look down at the floor so I don’t laugh out loud what I’m thinking in that moment which is, “You mean all human brains except for yours.”

Ours is a relatively egalitarian household. We share chores, more or less in equal measure. We never actually sat down and divided the jobs, they just ended up falling into the hands of the one who seemed to care the most or had the aptitude for a particular task. I deal with the administration and paperwork. He is Vice-President of renting-a-car. Most mornings I get the kids up and dressed and fed. He makes the morning walk with them to school. I load the dishwasher, and he unloads it. I manage the laundry, because I’m particular about which clothes go in the dryer and which don’t. He does the grocery shopping, because he hates to waste money and prefers to buy in bulk from the The Ed, the cheap grocery store that I find too exasperating to even enter. He enjoys negotiating the best deal for produce in at the street market. While I find open markets a romantic place to look and stroll, my experience of shopping at them is agonizing.

Not that our assignments are written in indelible ink. Sometimes I pick up groceries or walk the girls to school. Sometimes he does a piece of household admin or loads the dishwasher with dirty dishes.

The loading of this appliance, I’ve found, can be satisfying. I relish getting in as many dishes as possible, whilst maintaining optimum cleaning capacity. This equilibrium is essential. Too few dishes haphazardly placed on the racks, and you run an inefficient wash, wasting money and energy. Too many dishes and they don’t get really clean, you have to leave them in for a second wash or do them by hand. You have to strike the right balance.

It’s not rocket science. Plates down below, from the side to center, big dinner and then smaller luncheon plates, followed by saucers. Coffee pot and tall glasses on the tall spokes. Pots and pans or big bowls strategically placed around these mainstays. On the top rack, café-au-lait bowls tucked under the fold-down flap on the side, allowing for shallower accessory bowls and short glasses to rest on top of them. Cups, mugs and other glasses filling up the rest of the upper rack. And in all cases, load from back to front.

Listen, I’m no neatnik. Open my closets and things fall out. I have photo albums from 2003 that haven’t been assembled. My life is filled with colorful piles and partially-finished, imaginative messes; I like a certain amount of organized disarray around me. But when it comes to the dishwasher, well, I figure my strategy saves money and helps the environment. (Honestly, I’ve reconfigured one of his loads and cleared half the space, putting off a dishwasher run for 24-hours.) But when De-facto loads the dishwasher, it makes no sense whatsoever. He has a pattern, I suppose, but it’s a rather pathetic one.

Well, you may say, his job isn’t to load the dishes, it’s to unload. But wouldn’t you think that after years of unloading a dishwasher that’s so precisely arranged, he might notice some kind of a pattern? We’ve lived together for nearly ten years. He’s probably unloaded that dishwasher at least 2,000 but probably more like 3,000 times. Wouldn’t your pattern-recognition machine pick up something?

When I was her age, I don’t think I believed in my own opinion anywhere
near as much as she owns hers. At six – not even, she’s still a few weeks shy – she has an abundance of self-esteem. She stands, solidly planted, unquestioning in her dominance. At the park she reigns. She barks out orders and her friends comply without complaint. They seem happy to do her bidding. Nobody messes with Buddy-roo.

Yesterday an argument between sisters came to blows and resulted in two girls in tears. Buddy-roo, frustrated at her sister’s unwillingness to follow orders. Short-pants, annoyed at the repeated, relentless, nagging request that would not accept a polite, or even an impolite, no. It was one of those situations where a brief separation was the best solution.

Buddy-roo sulked beside me in one room, refusing to discuss or debrief the angry encounter with her sister. “I’m not talking to anyone,” she said, “even you.” Sometimes when I’m mad, I just need to be mad, so I understood. I read my book while she curled into a ball beside me. She wanted me close, but quiet, which is just as well because I don’t know what I could have said that wouldn’t have just made things worse. I could equally query one about being relentless and the other about being inflexible. Three sides to every story.

I overheard De-facto in the other room telling Short-pants about his grandmother, how when she was 2-years old – or so the story goes – her grandfather, a man with a friendly Irish name but a gruff Irish disposition admonished her for climbing up a bookcase. Much to the surprise of the rest of her assembled family, all of whom trembled before the overbearing man, she glared back at him over her shoulder from the third shelf and retorted, “You don’t own me.”

De-facto always has a good story, and knows exactly when to share it; this one perfectly timed to strengthen Short-pant’s intended resolve against her bossy little sister.

Short-pants returned and stood in the doorway. “You don’t own me,” she pronounced. Buddy-roo regarded her, unimpressed.

A little while later, I heard the two of them playing together upstairs. They fell into their imaginary world of pet-shops, fairies and princesses, as though nothing had ever come between them.

I have a childhood memory – it can’t be exactly true and yet it resides in my visual recall – of playing with a ball of mercury. Maybe it was in a science class? Or else a thermometer had broken and maybe it was my brother showing me but not letting me touch? I can’t remember, except for an image that is engraved in my mind. The wild silver ball slipping around the ring of a porcelain saucer, the force of its motion breaking it apart into dozens of little balls and then easily fitting itself back together in one seamless piece. How immediately it could fracture. How permanent it looked once re-bonded.

Sometimes my experience of mothering two daughters is like looking in one of those three-paneled mirrors in a department store fitting room. I see myself straight ahead in the center. Flanking me, one on each side, I see the girls, turned slightly toward me, surrounding me, reflecting at me their actions and dramas, reminiscent of some part of me. Oh, there I am, part defiant, stubborn and bossy – as a young child I confidently wrote letters to my teachers pointing out their errors, and there are abundant teenage tales about how I head-ached my parents. Oh, there I am, the sensitive, uncertain one, eager to please – I was always compliant about things like homework and helping with the dishes, and I excelled at making polite conversation while serving hors d’œuvres at my parents’ cocktail parties.

Oh, here we all are.

I suppose it’s natural, but it’s downright creepy sometimes, how these two girls produce this reflection of me. I’m not sure if I want to encourage them heartily or apologize profusely. But I need only turn the other direction to observe my own mother, and to see – stunningly – how much of her they must see reflected in me. How much of her – I finally understand, now that I’m mothering – is now so much part of me.

It’s like we’re all part of that ball of mercury, temporarily split apart but within view and shouting distance, so clearly made of the same shiny silver substance, and yet separated from each other – except in those rare, complex, and rather profound moments when we can all see each other for who we really are.

Words count for a lot in our house; me being the aspiring writer, Short-pants, a voracious reader, De-facto, an enthusiastic speaker (goes to Toastmasters) and Buddy-roo, the consummate chatterbox. Not to mention that in our household we speak two languages, so we have double the number of words to navigate. Words matter.

Hang around with us and you’ll occasionally hear one of the adults suggesting calmly (and not to each other), “use your words.” Pointing and grunting are frowned upon. Our children have been indoctrinated to speak in full sentences and even the magic words are pretty well embedded. Not that an occasional reminder isn’t necessary, but frequently enough to impress me, the girls make good use of please and thank you – and do so with real feeling.

Every household has its “words,” part of the family folklore that is generated by the cute or clever mistakes made by children as they learn about life and language. Often these words relate to scatological subject matter; a topic which I deliberately avoid in this blog because a) I find it unattractive, b) nobody cares about my children’s potty habits, and 3) it would be a nightmare if a Google search on my name produced something so distasteful and yet memorable. But it’s a subject we all talk about – at least privately – and it is often the cornerstone of a family vocabulary. My brother and sister and I made a blood pact never to divulge the words to another living person, a vow we all have kept. Even De-facto doesn’t know the words from my childhood, and never will.

Having said that, there is a word that De-facto and I introduced to our lil’ nuclear family that I will share – because my friends love it so much – the word we use for one’s “private parts.” It’s not that we have such a hang-up about the technical terms; we’ll get to them when the girls start posing probing questions about the birds and the bees. But honestly, I never wanted my 3-year old over-employing the word vagina in a loud voice at the supermarket, so we came up with a gender-neutral signifier instead: the business. Typical use at bath time: “Did you wash the business?” Another common usage: “If your business doesn’t hurt, why are you holding it?”

It’s a bit easier on the ear than the v-word or the p-word, and can be used discreetly in public, like a code. It only backfired on me once, when Buddy-roo, at the age of about 4, bounded into my office despite the closed-tight door, to announce something important. I shushed her in a panicked whisper: “Shhhh! Mama’s on a business call!”

“Business?!” she shrieked as De-facto apologetically pulled her out of the office and shut the door behind them. I could hear her laughing in the hall, “Mama’s making a call from her business? Ha!”

Yes, well it seemed like a good word when we first came up with it.

Some of these invented family words come into common use because of an adorable mispronunciation or mal-interpretation that turns out to be quite astute. Buddy-roo is the originator of some of our best terminology. She of course utters the typical breafquist, an oft-mispronounced word. Don’t get me wrong, it’s cute when every child says it, but it’s not that original. Part of Buddy-roo’s linguistic charm is her strange non-rhotic accent which amuses us to no end because even De-Facto, who hails from Boston, doesn’t share her aversion for the letter ‘R.’ But accent and odd pronunciation habits aside, Buddy-roo excels at inventing words. And they make more sense than you’d expect. A few examples:

Rainbrella: the round, collapsible device one uses as protection from the rain. This makes so much more sense to us than umbrella, which, um, has nothing to do with the element against which it’s designed to offer protection. (I guess it makes sense if you speak Latin, which we don’t.) She also suggested the word Sunbrella, similarly styled and found at the beach. No doubt Buddy-roo’s French has informed the invention of these two words, as parapluie and parasol are both used for the rain or the sun.

Unlistener. This is a person, initially a child in the first grade – but you can imagine this applying to any segment of the population – who, despite being within auditory range, prefers to remain in the state of “not having heard it.” An unlistener can be quite selective, but ultimately, this is someone that you can’t really count on to receive or re-transmit information of any importance. Common usage: “You can’t ask him anything, he’s the biggest unlistener in the class.”

Smashed potatoes. So much more descriptive than mashed ones, don’t you think?

Short-pants, on the other hand, takes very seriously the correct acquisition of new words for her vocabulary. Last week, she got the idea to sleep with her dictionaries, reasoning that the words might seep into her brain by osmosis, a word she then had to look up. It makes for an uncomfortable night’s rest, as she feels compelled to stack under her pillow three dictionaries – English, French and French/English – to accommodate her hunger for words. Hard to say if it’s working, but we must admire her commitment to learning.

Short-pants is a stickler for correctness, and this kicks in when she overhears me speaking French. My French is operable, but I don’t have the linguistic muscle that she’s acquired by starting it at such a young age. Since she feels compelled to correct my pronunciation and grammar, we’ve made a deal: I will receive her corrections enthusiastically, as long as she delivers them gently with the intention of helping rather than humiliating me. It’s a beautiful thing. She’ll wait until nobody is around and leaning toward me, in a conspiratorial tone, she’ll suggest something like, “Mama, you might want to say le instead of la with the word pain.”

Buddy-roo, I can already tell you, won’t treat me so kindly. Her corrections, when they start coming at me, will be marked with eye rolling and heavy sighs of disgust, which I will tolerate for only a short while before I tell her to mind her own business.

We couldn’t get enough of our country house this summer, and even though the September back-to-school routine is a welcome one, we snuck out of town on Friday with hopes for an Indian Summer weekend à la campagne.

The weather cooperated with the gift of flawless blue skies and unhindered sunlight. A constant if somewhat reckless breeze raced through and around the stone house – slamming doors and flapping curtains – announcing the arrival of autumn. The sun was a bit lower as it arced across the sky, but still warm enough to dry our laundry and nourish our garden from which we harvested the last of the carrots and lettuce, and even a few last treats offered from a lone tomato plant.

But the news – the real news – is about the vendange. There were grapes to be harvested! After three years of attending to those stubborn stalks without any reward, this year the vines have produced plentiful bunches of succulent grapes.

“Who’s going to help with the vendange?” I shouted boastfully to the girls.

“We will!” they both shouted back in tandem.

And then, a few moments later, Short-pants asked, “What’s a vendange?”

How to explain the romance of the vendange? I’ve seen grape harvests in Western New York state, when I was a teenager, and in Switzerland where I lived for a year in my early thirties. Driving out to the vineyards in the back of a truck, jumping off with a crate in hand, gliding down each row of vines, filling the crates, bunch by bunch with round, ripe grapes. It’s backbreaking work, but harvesting bushels of fresh grapes for eating and for wine making is somehow so very satisfying. Something about the completion of a seasonal cycle, or else the anticipation of the (finally) well-deserved sampling of the end product.

“Do we have to be barefoot?” Buddy-roo asked.

“No,” I laughed, “that’s for making wine. We’re just picking the grapes.” I racked my brain to figure out where she would have learned about grape stomping. It has to have been a movie, maybe the DVD of Brigadoon has a scene like that? Or has she seen that famous episode of I Love Lucy?

The grape vines – left for us by the previous owner of the house – grow in four different spots on our property; the green grapes on patches of land that get more sun, the purple ones in more shaded areas. After rummaging through the junk in the barn – also left for us by the previous owner – I found a dirty crate and hosed it off and set out to collect my bounty.

“To the harvest!” I called out. Short-pants ran along beside me. She watched, and then followed suit, reaching to grab the stems and pull off the grapes in full bunches. Buddy-roo appeared a few moments later in her pink plastic high-heeled slippers. (I did not buy her
these come-hither shoes. They are hand-me-downs from the girls who live down the road.) She folded her arms and watched us as we carefully set each bunch of grapes into the crate.

“Dressed for the harvest?” I asked.

She nodded. “In case we need to stomp on them.”

Isn’t it romantic to think that I might make my own wine someday? De-facto keeps asking, and I keep telling him – and everyone else who asks – that I harbor no fantasies of producing a fine wine, or even a modest or mediocre one. I am proud of my little harvest, but I am no oenologist. Besides, the yield of my crop isn’t enough to make but a few bottles, hardly worth the investment or effort. The idea of making wine is a lot more romantic than the actual activity. But if I ever change my mind, I know who will help me stomp on the grapes.