I Know It is Five O’Clock

The doorbell rings and I can see the tops of Nora and Pepper Wood’s heads through the shimmering opaque glass of the front door.  Betty jumps off of her kitchen stool where she has just begun the coveted 2 hours called screen time her mom gives her.  I tell Bettyu to take off her headphones and leave her electronic device behind, since she has grabbed them and is running to the door with them.  I tell her this because the day before, I saw her run off to play with Nora and Pepper, taking her electronic device and I thought, “We are never going to see that again.  She is going to leave it somewhere, not remember where it is, no search of the property will help us see it, and I am too tired to run after her to get it.”  Still it came back last night.  I don’t want to have all of those same negative thoughts about the ipad again today, so I halted Betty, but it was not without a battle of wills – hers against mine.  She was afraid the girls at the door would leave if she didn’t get to the door in a timely fashion, so Betty leaves the electronic device behind.

She opens the door and before they can say a word Betty says, “I know, it is 5 o’clock and you want to play on my device.”  I am both choking back laughter and knowing I should make an intervention.  In the families of those little girls, children don’t have their own electronic devices – just a parental choice to keep them present in the real world, instead of the imaginary electronic gaming world – not a choice because they can’t afford the electronics.  So I back up the parents and say, “Out you go with them, Betty, but no electronic device in your hand.  She heads out with them, but it is only a few minutes before they are around on the back porch asking Aunt Bonnie to come out and supervise them on the zip line.  I intercede there, as well, since Bonnie is busy and I tell the 3 girls, I will meet them at the zip line as their supervisor.  I do that.  Soon they are joined by Alice, Evangeline and Sidney, Nora’s older sister, all from next door, and all 5^th generation little girls on the land.   

I feel a stirring in my heart of gratitude.  Well, not just a stirring – overwhelmed that I have the chance to untangle the rope at the end of every zip line run – at least for the younger girls. So sweet, all 6, ages 5 to 9 running back and forth, their long hair flying in the wind, some of them so skinny that they look like only skin stretched over joints, their little bodies always in motion, never walking, always doing a dash from one place to another – and it has been like that for them all day. The older ones seem to be able to jump off the zip line without having the rope swing back through the air and circle around the two wires of the zip line, locking the handle bars in place at the end of the run.  I look back up the line and there is always one coming down the line, the noise  of the zipline zinging in my ears, one girl on the platform waiting for her next turn, and four lined up at the bottom of the ladder that they will use to climb up to that platform.

I seem to have time to bend down and pull weeds in the 60 seconds between runs and I think to myself, “Why don’t I grab garden gloves each time I come down here to supervise?”  But again, I haven’t though I have the thought each time I am down there. 

I did bring down 3 buckets of compost to drop in the bin the last time I came to supervise.  I thought I could dumpt the buckets unnoticed, but Nora came over to ask, “What are you doing?” 

“Putting my compost in the bin, just as your grandmother Moiya does on her lot.  My bin is just a different shape.”

“Is that why you have flies all over you.”

Now I am laughing again so hard.  I had forgotten the swarm of flies that comes out of the bin when I open it to add more vegetable matter to it.   Dumping the compost just has to be done, so I choke down all the  negative parts of doing it: the swarm of flies that emerge and now hang around my own body, the smell of organic compost at work, my swiftness at trying to dump and get the lid back on so that I am swarmed with fewer rather than more flies. 

“What a sight I must be.  An old grandmother, fruit flies swarming my aura”, I think.  “I hope this child will not need therapy when she is old, about the idea of growing old.”

Later Matthew Wood joins me at the zip line. 

“Coming to supervise?” I ask. 

“No,” he said, “I am coming to see where Evangeline is.  She ran off without telling Autumn where she was going.  Autumn was supposed to be supervising the girls.” 

“Oh,” I said.  “Did you ever get in trouble for running off to play with the other kids when you were young.” 

He laughed and responded, “No.  I can never remember having to tell my parents where I was going.” 

He gathers up all of the girls, Evangeline who is now in trouble, and the other girls who are foot-loose and fancy free shouting, “Yay, we are going home to movie night.”

Thus endeth my supervisory duties both of electronic devices and at the zip line.