Christmas in Asheville

It wouldn't be Christmas in Asheville, it seems, if we didn't find ourselves herding chickens.

The same chickens, in fact, who had survived Audrey's hunting expedition in September. It was, without a doubt, our duty to see them safely home, both as a matter of holiday good will and because we still feel kind of guilty about the whole Audrey-catches-a-chicken thing.

Fittingly enough, Christmas kicked off with an invitation from the chickens' owner.

It was the 22nd, a Saturday, and she really issued the invitation to our housekeeper. I saw the two of them chatting in front of the house and thought it was nice that a Spanish-speaking neighbor would take the time to chat with our shy, non-English-speaking housekeeper.

Then she turned to me and Hubby. Her tenant, she explained, missed his home in Mexico and was anxious to meet some neighbors. Now. At this moment on a darkening Saturday afternoon before Christmas.

She was quite insistent.

I explained that I had to take our housekeeper home, and the chicken-neighbor assured me our housekeeper had already accepted her invitation. It kind of surprised me to hear this, but I thought maybe our housekeeper knew the chicken-neighbor. And it wasn't like I had anywhere I absolutely had to be.

So off we trooped, Hubby with The Boy in front, our housekeeper walking uncertainly behind them, and me taking up the rear, so as to be respectful of the housekeeper, who seemed as unclear about what we were heading into as we were.

A man we took to be the tenant from Mexico stood on the front porch with another man, smoking cigarettes and speaking in hushed, relaxed voices. They stopped talking and watched with mild interest as we straggled through the front gate.

Hubby turned to me. "Are we sure this is the right house?" he asked.

My response was not as positive as it might have been.

The man we took to be the tenant from Mexico finally asked if we were friends of the chicken-neighbor. He seemed quite unaware of his anxiety to meet some neighbors.

We made our way inside to find a polite but lost-looking college student seated at a table set with ham and a small cooked chicken. Awkwardness ensued.

I looked out the propped open back door onto the screened porch and admired the chickens peeking inside at me.

I asked if the cooked chicken on the table had once resided in the yard. Our chicken-neighbor assured me it had not.

Hubby and the housekeeper ate some of the store-bought chicken and some ham and some pecan pie.

At some point, our housekeeper gave me the nod, and we wished everyone a happy holiday and set out to continue ours. In the car on the way to her house I asked if she knew the chicken-neighbor. She told me she didn't. I told her I didn't really either and felt released from any responsibility.

Hubby and I failed to return the chicken-neighbor's invitation the next day when other neighbors came by to share The Boy's first birthday cake. No doubt it would have been the neighborly thing for us to do, but I think we were both still a little bit shaken by the awkwardness.

And, really, chickens were the last thing on our mind as we watched The Boy open the first of his gifts on Christmas eve. My mind, in fact, was taken up with a horrifying realization. Both of the gifts we gave him to open were from his aunts -- a tradition Hubby wanted to carry on from his childhood. And both of the presents required assembly.

This fact alone is not a cause for terror. We'd have plenty of time to put them together on Christmas Day, after all.

This year.

But in a flash I saw The Boy at two years old, when he would not calmly examine the box with the toy that required assembly and look at us with a perfectly happy four-and-a-half tooth smile and drool on his chin. Instead, he would scream as Hubby and I, hands shaking from the pressure, struggled to understand the instructional pictures that have now replaced any attempts to explain in clear English how to assemble a toy but have failed to make it any easier. Plainly, Hubby and I agreed, we would have to budget pre-Christmas time for gift assembly in the future.

And therein lay the horror. Exhausted from the effort of buying and wrapping gifts for an expanding family and a child with the bad luck to be born on December 23, I tried to imagine how -- where on earth -- I will find the time next year to also assemble gifts. Of course, I knew. Gone will be Mommy's time for sleep. Which should make for an especially pleasurable holiday season.

This year, however, was proving most pleasant. It was Christmas afternoon, The Boy was upstairs snoozing away the overwhelming fact of three straight days of gifts, and Hubby and I were enjoying the quiet of a house with a sleeping baby.

Then Audrey broke the silence with a strangled cry of excitement and frustration. Across the street, the chickens were taking a stroll down the block.

Our first instinct was to take pictures.

After a few minutes I asked Hubby if it wouldn't be the neighborly thing to put them back in their yard.

"Can you herd chickens?" he asked, quite reasonably.

I recalled how our next door neighbor had rounded the corner of our house with the chicken Audrey caught wrapped gently in her tee-shirt. The chicken had seemed calm and not inclined to peck. After all, I told myself, they let someone reach underneath them to take their eggs. Surely I could just sidle up to them, one by one, scoop them up, and deposit them in the hen house.

Except that, up close, these chickens were really big. Exceptionally beautiful, I noted, as I admired the fluff of feathers above their talons and the way the black and brown melted together over their sharp beaks. Surely holiday samaritanism didn't extend to being pecked and clawed by angry chickens whose walk I was interrupting.

Yet, bravely, I crept closer.

One of the chickens made a run for it. "No!" I yelled, shooing it back onto someone's front lawn. "Don't go in the street!" If that chicken found itself under a car's tire on my watch, I thought, I would forever be branded a chicken killer or, at least, very bad luck for any chickens who happen to cross my path.

Hubby ran ahead to do some reconnaissance. There was an open gate, he said, but could we be sure that was how the chickens had escaped?

We couldn't, but there is only so much one can be expected to do when a neighbor's chickens are taking a Christmas walk through the neighborhood.

So I herded them.

Maybe it's a skill I've picked up in four months of country living. Maybe it was simply ingenuity borne of necessity. Maybe the city girl in me hates to back down.

But I managed to get the chickens to the side yard, where Hubby waited with his hand on the open gate.

"Go home," I said sternly, as one might to a vicious looking dog who you just know will be obedient enough to take your order to heart if only you sound serious enough and wish it to be the case hard enough.

The chickens pretended not to understand.

I made as if to pick one up. I can't say if I would have -- if, say, I would have actually touched it had the chicken called me on my game of chicken. Luckily, it blinked first and ran for the safety of the yard.

And with that example set, it wasn't too hard to convince the others that bolting for the yard was a great idea. They are, after all, chickens, who I understand are not particularly original thinkers.

As for us, Hubby and I felt a little bit less ashamed about all the presents we and The Boy had received from other lovely neighbors over the past few days. Birthday and Christmas gifts for The Boy, cookies and party invitations for us. Just when you think you know how well you picked your new home, you find out the neighbors are even more neighborly than you had imagined.

Hubby and I may not have bought gifts for the other kids on the block, and we still haven't delivered holiday cards because we disagree about the name of one neighbor and want to make sure we get it right before we drop off any of the cards and, besides, now I have to write thank you notes as well. We may, in short, have been unprepared for just how generous the people living around one can be. But at least by herding the chickens home we contributed our little bit of kindness to Christmas on our block.

Birthday Boy

Having a baby is, in some ways, like conducting a controlled experiment testing your unfounded beliefs about cause and effect in your own life.

Like my certainty that sleeping eight hours a night makes me smarter. (Or the corollary that having a baby has made me much, much stupider.) Or my faith that the more I practice yoga the more good things will happen to me. (Hey, it introduced me to Hubby, and I'm sure hoping my Asheville yoga classes bring some focus to an otherwise meandering life. Which leads me to feel quite certain that I will lose my way forever and spend the rest of my life searching for some shred of meaning to my sad existence because I have to miss a week of yoga while The Boy's school is closed for the holidays.)

Yesterday I received a damaging confirmation of my unfounded belief that a bit of indulgence, however deserved, is simply not without consequences.

Curse ye fates! For when is indulgence more deserved than on one's first birthday? When should one expect consequence-free pointless pleasure? If not on one's first birthday, then never??? The thought is too sad to contemplate.

Not that The Boy exactly leads a life of asceticism. Still, when a body is that young and unsullied, parents like me and Hubby tend to obsess over every perceived pollutant -- from the fears of off-gassing that led us to buy an unfinished crib that we got rid of a month later when it turned out to pose a strangulation threat, to our fear of medication that faded greatly once we realized that a simple dose of Tylenol will actually make a teething or feverish or ear-infection-afflicted boy feel much, much better, to our insistence on all-natural house cleaning products except when the chemical ones work a lot better.

For all these reasons, and probably a few more too embarrassing to admit, The Boy approached his first birthday without ever having experienced first-hand the dubious pleasures of wheat and dairy.

In this case, our parental craziness was not without foundation. Among the other joys of breastfeeding The Boy and I shared was the discovery that he had more than a few food allergies -- dairy among them. We never tested wheat because I don't eat it myself, as I have what I like to call a "sensitivity" to it which doubtless belongs above on my list of unfounded beliefs about cause and effect in my life.

Still, Hubby has the dreaded peanut allergy, and it's hereditary, so in this case, I am allowed to harbor crazy fears about food on behalf of The Boy.

But a first birthday is a first birthday, and cake and ice cream were a must. So we invited some neighbors to join us in some afternoon cake eating, and, in the meantime, did the other things that make first birthdays so special.

Like first birthday presents. The Boy chose just one to open in the morning -- a little piano with real keys that make sounds whether you bang them with your fingers or with the little plastic German boy you like to carry around in your mouth or with the wooden blocks your grandmother gave you.

Small toy pianos are also good for hoisting yourself up to standing, an increasingly favored activity that suggests walking is right around the corner. (An event to await breathlessly or one to dread as one spots all the dangers lurking in the house? Discuss.) And when you really get warmed up, you can bang a few times, pull yourself up, and warble away. The Boy, in short, was thrilled with his first birthday gift.

By the time he had figured out how to pull the top off the piano (not a deliberate design feature) the morning rain had cleared up and a perfectly gorgeous, un-December-like day had begun. So, post-nap, we loaded The Boy in the car for a walk in the nearby Botanical Gardens on the UNC Asheville campus.

Actually, even if it had been pouring rain, we would have found an excuse to put The Boy in the car. Because there is one event that accompanies turning a year old that is even more magnificent, of even great importance, perhaps the most exciting thing ever and even better than cake and ice cream.

Turning the car seat around to face forward.

The Boy found this new situation a hoot. He laughed all the way to the botanical gardens. He grinned and clapped and kicked his feet. We wondered if we shouldn't have waited to turn around his car seat until our next ten-hour drive to St. Louis in the spring.

We returned from the botanical gardens with time to open another gift before our cake-eating neighbors arrived.

This one, from Grandma, was a wooden box, full of beautiful wooden blocks, with wheels and a string for pulling. The Boy grabbed the blocks faster than I could put them back in the box in a losing effort to keep them out of the reach of dogs' teeth. So far all are still accounted for, but it's only been a day and the dogs have been out in the yard a lot.

With neighbors came yet more gifts -- a set of construction trucks with the wheels that are a current source of fascination and a musical thing that talks a lot and flashes lights and I haven't figured out. The Boy likes it a lot. I don't think I will for long.

And then there we were, with our new neighbors sharing a glass of wine (with us) and cake (with The Boy). We sure wouldn't be doing this in Long Beach.

The Boy approached the piece of cake Hubby placed on his high chair tray cautiously, as is his nature. A little pinch of cake, another little pinch.

And then he figured it out. Cake is to be eaten by holding great huge pieces and shoving them as far in your mouth as they can go.

Inexplicably, we have no pictures of this joy. We decided it was high time we figure out how to use the video camera I bought Hubby for Father's Day. It has snippets of The Boy at six and seven months that I like to play back for myself from time to time, but the technological challenge of putting them on line for others to enjoy has stymied me. Maybe if Audrey hadn't chewed the necessary USB cable two months ago I'd be more motivated. Or maybe I ought to be more motivated to buy a new USB cable. At any rate, if you want to see The Boy eating birthday cake, you will have to either come visit and view it on the video camera or buy us a new USB cable or wait until his second birthday.

Also inexplicably, we gave The Boy as much ice cream as he wanted. I do not know why it occurred to neither of us to stop after the first bowl. Indulgence is one thing when you can chide yourself with your own stupidity as you find yourself huddled in a cold bathroom at 3:30 in the morning wishing like you've never wished for anything before that you could be back in your own bed sleeping.

The only immediate effect of the cake and ice cream was a sugar rush of which I've never seen the likes before. If The Boy could walk, he would have run laps around the house. As it was, he repeatedly threw himself at one of our neighbors, demanding that she pick him up, then, with a screech of delight, threw himself back at the floor so he could crawl after her and once again grab at her legs and haul himself up to ask to be picked up again. Luckily, her own children are grown and she doesn't have a grandchild handy so she was more than happy to help The Boy out.

And MORE gifts to open after the guests left and before the sugar high wore off. The Boy banged his piano impatiently while Hubby assembled the wooden walker. The second the handle was secure, he grabbed it with both hands, stood, and pushed it out of the living room and into the foyer.

This act would not seem so remarkable if The Boy knew how to walk.

Apparently, he realized that he can not, in fact, walk after he pushed the walker into the front door. At this point, he opted to crawl it back to the living room, a reasonably impressive feat, but not one worth videotaping.

By the time we made it through the animal book with the prominent basset hound puppy and the magnetic animals he might or might not recognize as resembling his bath toys and therefore as being related to the funny sounds Mommy and Daddy make with them when he's in the bath and the electronic drum that is just as annoying when you elect the Spanish option he was too tired to see straight.

So we gave him a birthday bath and he fell asleep drinking his birthday bottle.

Which would be a lovely end to the story of the Birthday Boy. But then there'd be no moral. Not that I need a moral. A wonderful, fun, sunny first birthday is all I need, and I'll speak for The Boy on that as well.

But ice cream and cake, it seems, can hurt one's tummy come nine thirty. And sleeping with Mommy when one's tummy is hurting and one has spotted Daddy saying goodnight before heading for the day bed in the office is not much fun come eleven o'clock. Especially when Mommy's chest is kind of bony and uncomfortable and she is not bright enough to figure out that those screams are borne of rage, not pain, and all you really want is your Daddy.

Or maybe she's just tired and warm in the bed and a little bit offended that she's not good enough for you and therefore pretends not to know what you really want for five or ten minutes.

Ultimately, The Boy spent the night of his first birthday sleeping it off with Daddy while I was the one on the day bed in the office. Which I guess is only fair, since a year ago he'd spent an awful lot of time sleeping close to me.

Besides, it turns out one can get a pretty good night's sleep on the day bed in the office where no babies are kicking you and no husbands are snoring and you can sleep off your own over-indulgence in ice cream and, yes, cake. Because occasionally ignoring your own unfounded beliefs about your "sensitivity" to wheat doesn't mean you can't go right back to them the very next day.

The Gift of the (Aunt) Mary

When The Boy's Aunt Mary met him for the first time, she gave him a lovely blanket she had knit, adorned with stripes of orange and tan and green, just the right size for a baby boy. "His cousin says it's so bright it'll wake him up," she laughed, but The Boy slept quite cozily beneath it.

He was six weeks old then, and by six months, the blanket had become a staple of our lives. If it was a tad chilly during our morning walk on the beach, I tucked the blanket around him in the stroller; his chin shone baby-skin white against it and he looked warm and safe. If he fell asleep in his car seat while Hubby and I grabbed a quiet lunch out, he snoozed beneath it, the stripes wrapping him securely. We went nowhere without Aunt Mary's blanket.

When The Boy and I flew to our new home in Asheville, Aunt Mary's blanket was peeking out of his overstuffed diaper bag. When we explored our new neighborhood, it lay in the basket under the stroller. The Boy grew, and Aunt Mary's blanket settled into lap rug status, still perfect to keep him warm on mountain fall mornings in his miniature fisherman's sweater and wool stocking cap with the football stitched on the brim.

And then Aunt Mary's blanket disappeared.

"Have you seen Aunt Mary's blanket?" I asked Hubby one morning. I was slightly crazed, as I often am when we are trying to leave the house on a cold morning. A few minutes ticks into several minutes, which inevitably become fifteen or twenty as I corral and layer a crawling boy, put on and remove my own gloves ten or twelve times to snap snaps and guide small thumbs inside tiny mittens and pull socks up and pants legs down.

"Nope," Hubby answered. He doesn't sweat going outside in cold weather the way I do. As long as The Boy is wearing a hat, Hubby figures he'll stay reasonably warm.

"He needs something over his legs," I moaned. Although the days here tend to reach bearable temperatures, the mornings can be bitter. Our morning walks to the park, where Hubby throws a tennis ball for the girls and The Boy and I huddle together pretending to enjoy the spectacle, were often nothing more than stubbornness on my part. "I can survive another real winter. I think I can, I think I can . . ."

"The blanket my cousin made him will be fine," Hubby said. His voice carried a note of decisiveness with which I vehemently disagreed.

I became even more certain that The Boy could not do without Aunt Mary's blanket when Hubby returned downstairs with the replacement blanket. It was flannel, not knit. It was a serene green, not bright slashes of color. It was bigger than lap rug size. It would not do at all.

Still, I said nothing. Sometimes it is best to let your partner do some parenting, even if he's wrong.

You'd think the sight of The Boy awkwardly wrapped in a green flannel blanket would have inspired me to find Aunt Mary's blanket, but it didn't. Apparently I was too busy searching for my own lost life.

And so the weeks passed. An unseasonably warm spell was met with relief, as The Boy could be strolled to school blanket-less. Cold days became an occasion for unearthing the sweet collection of blankets in which we used to swaddle The Boy, back in the days when he could be swaddled and leaving the house was not cause for fear of frostbite. And still, Aunt Mary's blanket remained mysteriously absent.

Hubby and I wondered again about it this weekend.

We had taken a drive to Maggie Valley as The Boy napped in the back seat. Maggie Valley, it turned out, had little to offer a family out for a Sunday excursion. If we had been looking to rent a room in a motor hotel where we could sit in a hot tub next to a running stream, we were in the right place, at least according to the hopeful advertisements outside a surprising number of motels adorning the main road. The stream, apparently, dipped and turned to accommodate the maximum number of hot tubs.

Alas, we were looking for nothing more than a cozy meal and perhaps the chance to purchase those last few holiday gifts. Maggie Valley offered nothing to meet these needs.

Eager to extend The Boy's nap, we kept driving, out of Maggie Valley, down the road to the ski slopes and the Cherokee casino.

I noted with some vague interest the snow dusting the sides of the road. Mostly, I was glad it was here, and not on the side of my road at home.

Then I looked through the windshield and saw the same fine white dust dashing horizontally across my line of vision. My line of vision isn't the best -- the only way I can tell it's raining short of getting wet is to examine puddles for ripples of raindrops because I am absolutely incapable of seeing precipitation falling from the sky -- so I figured if I could see the snow there was more than a little bit of it.

The car slid on the icy road.

"It says 'last exit before Parkway,'" I said hopefully as I pointed at a sign on the side of the road.

"Do you want to try the Parkway?" Hubby asked.

Hmm. Higher elevation, windier, narrower road. The Parkway did not seem the wisest solution.

"It's kind of windy," I allowed.

Hubby must have found the weather conditions more than a little worrisome, because he turned the car around and drove back through Maggie Valley instead of wending his way through new, no more interesting but at least undiscovered, towns.

We stopped for lunch in Waynesville, which we had visited before, but which we knew would at least offer food and warmth. And as we wandered Main Street after lunch, we wrapped our arms around The Boy to keep him warm because we lacked Aunt Mary's blanket.

We came home in the afternoon with one more short outing on our list -- a visit to the music store around the corner from our house where we hoped to find a gift for our musically inclined nephew.

Hubby grabbed The Boy and I grabbed myself. We dashed through a cutting wind to the store, quickly discovered nothing there, and walked back in a lull between gusts of wind.

Hubby let out a gasp.

There on the sidewalk, covered in leaves and the dampness of more than one rainfall, was Aunt Mary's blanket.

"Maybe I dropped it on the way to the bagel shop one morning," Hubby laughed.

"I'll bet it fell out of the stroller when we walked to Greenlife," I said, certain now that I remembered exactly when it had happened.

Aunt Mary's blanket is washed now and almost dry and ready to use.

But why the Gift of the Magi reference? What made me immediately think of that story when I first saw the blanket, its fall colors poking out of the faded fall leaves? What, in short, is the irony in the return of Aunt Mary's gift? (What makes the hair combs useless because the wife has cut her hair to buy a chain for the watch her husband sold to buy her the combs? for those of you a bit vague in the classic literature department.)

Well, I thought hopefully, maybe the irony is that although we found Aunt Mary's blanket there will be no more need for it because the winter will continue to be uncharacteristically warm and I will make it to spring without ever once having to wear the Timberland boots I bought in college for the deep, cold Providence snowfalls.

To the contrary, the irony, it turns out, is that -- far from my fantasy of endless warm days being fulfilled -- a light snow fell that night, dusting the ground of our front yard. It looked just like the dusting of snow on the road outside Maggie Valley.

I Visit a Pawn Shop

For most of my life, pawn shops have been a sort of fictional abstraction. They are, to my mind, the places where seedy criminals in police procedurals go to sell stolen watches and down-on-their-luck sad sacks shakily forfeit their wedding rings for a hit of heroin. Or, in earlier, G-rated memories, the places frequented by Andy Capp. Since I was about seven years old when last I read an Andy Capp comic, I didn't understand that he was both seedy and down-on-his-luck and that a comic strip about an alcoholic actually isn't a very funny thing at all.

I imagine in more recent years I've seen real pawn shops -- perhaps driving through a part of L.A. I only ever drove through to get to Dodger Stadium or the Disney Concert Hall. But I surely don't recall getting close enough to, say, look in the window. Even when my apartment at 92nd and Riverside in Manhattan was not considered prime real estate, I'm pretty certain there were no pawn shops nearby. (Off Track Betting, on the other hand, was a mere three-minute walk from my front door.)

But now I live in Asheville. And not only do I live half a mile from a pawn shop, I have, as of last Saturday, been in one.

Before you form your opinion of my neighborhood, I must explain that -- the presence of both a Wendy's and a McDonald's within a quarter mile of each other notwithstanding -- we are at least upscale enough that the store does not call itself a pawn shop. No indeed. It is a consignment store.

I am happily familiar with consignment stores. Consignment stores are where I sell the turtlenecks I received two Christmases ago. A consignment store played a large and cathartic role in my abandonment of a promising career as a law school professor, and I'm sure there are some happy professionals wearing my hip teacher clothes somewhere. Better them than me.

No, when we first arrived here, I was far less troubled by the consignment store with the collection of bicycles in front and the amps in the window than I was by the bleached strip malls up the block. And the aforementioned Wendy's. And the general clutter of nondescript buildings and the sorts of store signs one usually sees in deeply depressed economies that line the main thoroughfare by our house.

I arrived here, you see, straight off the pleasures of Second Street in the Belmont Shores neighborhood of Long Beach. Daily -- or close to it -- I meandered half a mile past well kept beach homes to a stretch of shops and restaurants and happy pedestrians smiling in the sea breeze. Second Street had its share of dusty old stores like Herman's Shoes and the American Cancer Society Thrift Shop. But, surrounded by Peet's Coffee and Banana Republic and Taco Surf, they were funky, not sad.

I failed to find similar charms on my first few walks up Merrimon Avenue last August. Narrow sidewalks dumped me and The Boy's stroller practically into the stream of traffic. My legs protested the hills and the heat. I felt alone and stupid strolling down a sidewalk plainly made, not for strolling, but to provide a small buffer zone between the parking lots fronting the stores and the traffic speeding its way past.

I cried for Second Street. I longed for some remote plausibility to the rumors of zoning plans designed to make Merrimon Avenue more pedestrian-friendly (wider sidewalks, parking lots relegated to the backs of the stores). I imagined myself five years from now enjoying my daily walks in Asheville so much that I no longer missed the smell of the ocean. And I despaired of walking anywhere in the present.

And yet. Slowly, my gluteus maximus adjusted to walking uphill. Hubby discovered some lovely side streets that led more pleasantly to Atlanta Bread Company and the Children's Trading Post. Urban Burrito soothed my ache for Wahoo's Fish Tacos and provided me with a good reason to venture into the bleached strip mall and discover it wasn't such a scary place after all.

These days I don't even notice the Wendy's. I know that jewel upon jewel lies nestled among those nondescript Merrimon buildings: Jus' Running with the owner who pooh-poohed my claim that running destroyed my knees because "you're so slight you shouldn't have any problems with your knees" and thus secured him a place in my heart forever; The Wine Guy, who turns out to be a gal, although she can't be expected to carry Two Buck Chuck; The Toy Box, where they let The Boy play with the wooden train set for as long as he likes without ever pushing me to buy anything (rest assured, however, that my Christmas expedition has paid for a year's worth of playing with the train set). I don't even mind knowing that I will never live a few blocks from a pedestrian thoroughfare lined with elms and charming storefronts.

I am, in short, ready for the neighborhood pawn shop.

It was Hubby's idea. Frankly, I was at the point where I didn't even see it as I walked by. It is located on the downward slope of the walk home, just before we veer left through the park. It has its own front walk, separated from the sidewalk by a set of stairs and a reason to walk up them -- a reason not provided for me by the fast-food restaurant next door. I don't have a burning desire to buy a used bike and I don't like fluorescent lights. Don't even get me started on what my mother would have said if I had told her, growing up, that I would like to visit a pawn shop. On my own, I was plainly on a path that would never take me to one.

But Hubby does have a burning desire to buy a used bike. Many used bikes. I am truly not certain how many used bikes Hubby has purchased because: a) he tends to pull them up on Craig's List to admire them far more often than he actually buys them; and b) when he does buy them he takes them apart and reassembles them into new Frankenstein-like vehicles of his own design.

So there we were, out for a stroll on a Saturday afternoon, approaching the pawn shop. And Hubby's eyes lit up.

I could have refused to accompany him, remained a perfectly content pawn shop virgin for the rest of my life. But it is the holiday season. Besides, he had control of the stroller with my baby boy inside. So I followed him through the not-so-menacing doors.

We were greeted warmly when we entered the store. I fooled myself into believing I might look like someone who is perfectly comfortable in a pawn shop.

Assuming an air of interest, I wandered among the keyboards and drum sets, looking them over as if deciding which one best suited my needs. Unfortunately, as I am not in fact accustomed to wandering among keyboards and drum sets, my shoulder glanced what sounded like a snare drum, and I felt all eyes turn to me.

Trying for all the world to look like it was no big deal, I steadied the drum and turned, just at the right angle to bang my knee against a guitar. It is not a given that I would have caught it, so I counted myself doing very well when I did.

Shuffling my way out of the music section and telling myself I wouldn't have to return until The Boy one day demands his own drum set, I looked around hopefully for gift ideas.

The remote control trucks were actually kind of neat. But until the mortgage catches up with us, I'm not ready to wrap battered used boxes with heartily handled toys for my beloved eleven-month-old. Hubby eyed the leather jackets longingly, but I just couldn't see him wearing a leather jacket someone else once wore. Or a leather jacket at all, but don't tell him I said that.

And the rest was the kind of stuff I might find shopping for empowering under different circumstances. Power tools and dehumidifiers and shovels -- the sorts of things I used to borrow from the men in my neighborhood in St. Louis, when I was a single female homeowner and proud to own my own power drill, damn it.

Now, however, I sit with my baby in the front yard as my husband hangs the Christmas lights and cleans the gutters and rakes the leaves. It's not that I no longer remember how to use a power drill. It's just that I'm more likely to use it building a crib. And it is, after all, so easy to let Hubby do the stuff I don't like to do.

Which means a few things. It means I am a 41-year-old mother who does laundry while her husband tackles the manly chores. It means there is nothing wrong with putting aside the power tools for a stroller and a high chair and a beautiful baby boy. And, best of all, it means I will never have to visit a pawn shop again.

Yogini Again

Most people, I understand, will not be unduly disappointed if they are unable to wrap their feet behind their head.

Most people who know me know that is not the case where I am concerned.

Once upon a time, I lived in Los Angeles, a hotbed of uber-yoga, a place where classes constantly challenged me and no one looked askance when I wandered the aisles of Trader Joe's in stained yoga pants and hair dried into clumps from the sweat. I could take classes whenever I wanted -- no baby, frequently no job, no need to pay because I was an instructor.

Under these circumstances it becomes possible to devote one's life to following the path of yoga. Or at least the parts of the path that one can follow while still living a semi-normal, consumerist life with a sane, non-yoga-addicted spouse.

Ironically, my path led me to a life stripped of yoga classes.

First it was our move to Long Beach. I sampled a few studios and felt lost without the familiar comforts and challenges of the Center for Yoga on Larchmont. I did a little teaching in the ghettoized afternoons before the popular post-work class, but the connection just wasn't there. For a time I drove up to L.A. a couple of times a week for my mysore class, but everyone knows that yoga and L.A. freeways just don't mix.

Then there was the pregnancy. I put together a lovely little practice for myself. Alone. In a room so small I had to take care not to smash my face on the dresser as I bowed in my sun salutations.

Which was fine until it came time for the post-pregnancy yoga. Any new mother who has tried to get back to her yoga practice will recognize these popular offerings: The When Is There Ever Time??? yoga. The What Is That Blobby Thing Between My Swollen Breasts and My Varicose Vein-Covered Legs??? yoga. The I'm So Tired I Think I'll Take a Nap on the Yoga Mat yoga.

It's been eleven months now since I ignored all the medical advice to take it easy for a few weeks after birth and did a defiant bound twisted high lunge in the living room when my mother-in-law was visiting her two-week-old grandson. And while I now have a lovely large room in which to practice my yoga and a view of the trees outside the windows as I bow in my sun salutations and ceilings high enough that I can circle my arms and gather energy instead of bruised knuckles, my practice is not what it once was.

As I mentioned, I miss being able to put my feet behind my head.

Yes, I know the yogi thing to do would be to respect my body's limitations and their precious cause. And, to be perfectly clear, it was worth it. It was worth it. It was worth it.

But I miss that clarity of purpose that yoga brought to my life. I miss wanting to eat healthy foods because I can honestly feel the difference. I miss the certainty of following my heart because I know what my heart really wants.

Hubby tells me I need to go to yoga classes.

I answer that he is stoned if he thinks I have time for yoga classes.

He offers to juggle his schedule so he can watch The Boy while I go to yoga classes.

I say, "Mmhmm" and turn on Reno 911 because I know it will distract him.

I did try a few Asheville studios a few times.

On my birthday, soon after we arrived in Asheville, I went to an all levels yoga class at a cozy little studio in funky West Asheville. It was nice to hear music other than one of the three Krishna Das CD's I faithfully put on when I practice at home. And the teacher was a lovely person with whom I will, one day, I promised both her and myself, go to a meditation practice. (You think I need it??) But sore muscles were not had.

Last month I ventured to a class of something called anahata yoga. The teacher said some nice things about energy but I didn't have to summon a whole lot of it to make it through class.

My options, it seemed, were dwindling.

On a visit to Asheville a couple years ago I took a class at a very scary studio where overly tanned, too-thin, suburban-looking fifty-year-olds kicked my butt in shoulder stand and the teacher frightened Hubby by changing clothes in front of an office window under which Hubby and his brother were parked. I was not anxious to return.

Which left me with . . . only a studio close to me and promising some tough classes.

I begged off because they heat the classes to 80 degrees and I have low blood pressure and a tendency to faint in steam saunas. I moaned about their schedule and my limited time and the fact that I can no longer put my feet behind my head.

And yesterday I went to a class there.

I sweated. I shook. I did not faint.

Today I am taking my sore butt back and buying a one-month unlimited pass.

I have studied the schedule and underlined all the classes I might take in order to make a one-month unlimited pass an economical choice. Most of the classes I have underlined start at noon. This means that I sit unshowered doing a few hours of work in the morning, go to a yoga class during the heart of the day when normal people are eating lunch or plugging away at a juicy work project or doing something that does not involve getting sweaty and sore, and take a shower at two o'clock in the afternoon. And I can't remember why, a few days ago, such a schedule didn't make sense to me.

Which just proves how great this yoga studio is. Because plainly it has me back on the path, where my days are, naturally, structured around my yoga practice.

Home Improvement

We have a fence.

It is amazing how something that would have mattered so terribly little to me fifteen years ago is such a source of joy today.

No longer must I stand outside on the deck, The Boy wrapped in a down lap duvet, yelling at the dogs to hurry up and pee already. No more days of leaving them trapped on the deck while the house is cleaned and I look out the window every few minutes to be sure Lilah hasn't escaped. Best of all, I look out at our fenced-in yard and I can see The Boy growing up, turning the tin-roofed tool shed into a fort, throwing a ball with Hubby or me or Audrey, imagining whole worlds in the corners where the bushes hide him from the house.

I think about being four years old and playing "Here Comes the Witch" with my best friend Julie and riding the huge flying birds that to my distressed mother were bushes not designed to carry imaginative little girls. And I feel very grown-up and a little bit scared and very in love with The Boy and our home.

We are in that stage of new home ownership when we magnanimously give ourselves permission to buy important bits of home improvement that we can't afford. Like the fence -- something we promised ourselves as soon as Hubby realized how much work it is to train dogs to respect an electric fence. Or the bench and shelf set for the front hall that Hubby picked off the Pottery Barn website, much to my surprise and delight. Or the lovely sleeper sofa we bought at Crate and Barrel in Charlotte.

We went to Charlotte on Tuesday, when Hubby took the day off as scant compensation for working Thanksgiving Day. Charlotte lies two hours away from Asheville by not very interesting highways and is the biggest city between Washington, DC, and Atlanta. Neither of these facts recommended it as a destination for our vacation day.

Charlotte is, however, home to Trader Joe's. This status has left me wildly impatient to make the trek.

I justified it by hunting down what advertised itself as a kids museum where The Boy could stretch his legs -- and arms, as crawling is his sole means of locomotion that does not involve Mommy or Daddy or some other adult he has decided to trust. Not the best reason to drive to Charlotte, Hubby sighed, but we're parents now.

Then he gave me a surprise even bigger than the Pottery Barn bench and shelf set. He suggested we go to Crate and Barrel to look at sleeper sofas while we were there.

This is not, you must understand, the way Hubby traditionally shops. He favors the local stores, where you might have to wade through a sea of cheap and ugly but can make it if you hold out the hope that there is a gem buried in the back. Crate and Barrel, where everything is stylish and tasteful and therefore expensive is simply too easy.

Over the three months that we have lived in Asheville we have roundly exhausted the supply of such local furniture stores. We have repeatedly visited Tysons in Black Mountain, an endless maze of room after room of wood furniture, wicker furniture, bamboo furniture, patio furniture, and probably more that I haven't seen because you need a map or a salesperson to find your way around. Their collection of sleeper sofas, however, failed to make the grade.

We visited Hafferty's, a pre-fab furniture warehouse, but backed off a decent looking couch because of our lurking suspicion that the quality might not be what we hoped. Our neighbor assured us as much with a story of a sadly decrepit coffee table purchased there.

We even made the rounds of Ethan Allan, where an "interior designer"/salesperson created questionable ensembles of upholstery and throw pillows on a computer screen before my very frightened eyes.

And now, to my delight, we were visiting Crate and Barrel.

Hubby sat and poked and unfolded and tested while I followed The Boy on his journey across a playground of furniture just made for pulling oneself up to standing. The salesperson showed remarkable restraint as The Boy reached for a collection of fragile-looking bamboo baskets and then banged the Kona coffee table with the plastic holder of its information. Other customers pretended not to mind as The Boy showed off his new skill of yelling with impressive force for such a small human being. I wiped so much drool off of tabletops and chair arms that my sleeves were damp until dinner.

And then we were paying for a couch. A lovely couch that will be delivered to our home sometime early next year and will force us to turn that room you never get around to decorating and use for all the stuff that doesn't fit anywhere into a proper library. Surely, once we have a tasteful and sophisticated couch from Crate and Barrel the rest of our home will be perennially clean, warm, and sunny, just like their catalog.

From Crate and Barrel, we headed to Charlotte at Play, the advertised kids museum. I could hear Hubby's sharp intake of breath as the directions led us to a vast strip mall anchored by a Lowe's. I harbored the hope that his unguarded expression was merely disappointment that he didn't need anything from Lowe's and would have to hang out in Charlotte at Play.

In fact, he seemed to enjoy it almost as much as The Boy. He snapped pictures as The Boy played the child-sized Melissa and Doug piano that I now long to see under our Christmas tree. Plainly I do not know how much a child-sized Melissa and Doug piano costs. He slid with The Boy down the pirate ship slide. He sat in a corner of the speed raceway and let The Boy push cars into him. A fine time was had by all.

But whatever excitement and awe The Boy might have felt as he gazed upon the expanse of fun that was Charlotte at Play, it was nothing compared to the giddiness I experienced when we entered Trader Joe's. There was my brown rice pasta, my sundried tomato bruschetta, my beloved dried Tart Montgomery Cherries. We filled two shopping carts with booty and I knew that I would return one day, undaunted by the crushingly boring drive.

We had dinner downtown, where the plethora of cars reminded me of L.A., but the number of pedestrians out for the evening did not. I watched the bank trainees breaking for dinner in their starched shirts and suit pants and felt sad for them and for the person I was fifteen years ago. And as we left Charlotte, I looked forward to the uncongested streets of Asheville, even if they lack a Crate and Barrel.

We pulled up to our home at nine thirty. Our new fence glowed slightly in the darkness. It looked different from the house we bought, our definitive imprint on the neighborhood. It is more than a fence. It is a declaration that we are making a home here.

Now if only we could do something about those storm windows.

Why I Am a Tad Cranky These Days

I have lately come to realize that I am the Barack Obama of baby care decisionmakers. The choices Hubby and I have made tend toward the more liberal side of the spectrum, but not so far off the grid that we fall into Dennis Kucinich territory. We overthink everything without, thankfully, approaching Hillary Clinton equivocation. And we end up, like Obama, making heartfelt, lefty, but far from radical decisions.

Our record speaks for itself. Certain we wanted our son close by while we slept but unable to commit to the extreme of bed sharing for fear of rolling over and suffocating our newborn while as we shared sleep, we opted for the conveniently compromising co-sleeper. The baby sling was a wondrous thing in those early days when any fresh air was a balm to my withering sense of self, but, frankly, there were plenty of times when the stroller suited both me and The Boy just fine. We might even have gone for circumcision if we had uncovered a shred of evidence that it imparts a health benefit or two.

In short, if there's a middle path – preferably one that brings us close enough to the natural-way, selfless style of parenting to lend us a touch of cred – we're on it.

There is, however, one area of decisionmaking that simply does not lend itself to such a satisfying resolution. Sleep training.

I can hear everyone who remembers those years between infancy and "don't touch me, Mom" shuddering. It is a decision without a middle road. Either you let your child cry while you match him tear-for-tear in the next room or you put him in bed with you and try to pretend that your partner really doesn't mind sleeping on the day bed in the office.

To sleep train, or not to sleep train? That is, oh yes, the question.

Our recent bout with that seemingly lifelong conundrum came at the end of a daycare cold which brought with it a hacking cough. The same cough I have, in fact. The same cough that also wakes me up in the middle of the night. Except I am content to give snoring Hubby a kick, roll over, and go back to sleep.

At nearly 11 months, however, The Boy is old enough to know that he does not want to roll over and go back to sleep in his lonely crib. He has a fuzzy recollection of those nights a few weeks ago when an ear infection forced Mommy to prop him up on pillows in her bed (formerly known as her and Daddy's bed, but now Daddy is sleeping on the day bed in the office). And The Boy wants that lovely arrangement again.

The Boy came to this conclusion in the middle of my REM sleep. This is not a good time to discuss with one's partner the merits of Ferberizing versus letting the babe into bed so we can all just sleep and worry about creating a bed-sharing monster some other time.

Ferberizing was not a method we embraced easily. The Boy was a phenomenal sleeper as an infant, generally awakening only once a night (though not always going back to sleep particularly promptly). Then, suddenly, he was five months old and he was awakening every two hours. I can tend to a baby once a night with an impressive degree of cheerfulness. A second nighttime rendezvous renders me a bit less likely to coo in delight with him. By the third time, you will spot me tromping down the hall with him held like a football under my arm muttering, "I will tend to your basic needs, but I will not be nurturing, god damn it!"

A week of two-hour blocks of sleep got me on-line reading about Ferberizing. And what I discovered was that there are a great many parents out there who agonize over it. Probably, it is the most agonizing decision we make in that first year because it is so starkly a matter of whose needs you put first – your beloved darling's or, sad to say, your own.

But I also found that, for some families, it works. And you don't know if yours is one unless you try. So we tried. And it worked. I never had to hold my breath and fight back tears as I stared at a clock for more than five very, very long minutes of screaming from my child. And in no time at all we were experiencing, dare I say it, eight uninterrupted hours of sleep.

But, of course, nothing lasts when you are tripling in size and brain matter every few months. And so, this week, it was time to decide yet again.

Ferberizing, I discovered last time we went through this, is a lot more traumatic at nine or ten or eleven months than it is at five. Because at nine or ten or eleven months your child gets angry. Very, very angry. Angry enough to cry until you recognize the error of your ways.

Still, I am haunted by an article in the New York Times that I read during my pregnancy. It described an epidemic of nighttime bed shuffling as children for whom no sleeping boundaries had been set take over their parents' beds at night, forcing the adults to curl up in their children's rooms to sleep under the princess canopy by the glow of the Spiderman night light.

So when I heard the cries at 2 a.m. Saturday night, I rolled myself out of bed and across the hall. I put my hand reassuringly on The Boy's back and said, "It's okay, Mommy's here."

Plainly, it was not enough for The Boy that Mommy be "here." The point was for Mommy to be here holding him in her arms, a Ferber no-no.

The Boy reached out for me, grabbing at my wrists, hoisting himself toward me, banging his forehead on the bars of his crib, while I repeated in an increasingly clenched voice, "Mommy's here. It's okay."

Finally, it wasn't okay because I really had to pee. So I left him. And he screamed.

I returned, we replayed, I left and stared at the clock while he screamed.

And eventually it worked. The Boy slept and I lay awake drowning in my own guilt.

The next morning I muttered to Hubby, "Should we just put him in bed with us if it happens again tonight?" and Hubby said, "I don't know."

So I did.

It was not, I am sad to report, the idyllic solution for which I had been hoping. The Boy kicked me in the stomach. He tried to climb the headboard. He bounced his butt up and down so strongly the whole bed shook. And I concluded that the book I read claiming that mothers and babies both sleep better when they sleep together is full of crap.

It is possible that The Boy agrees, I reckoned at five 0'clock this morning when the house had remained silent all night. Maybe he figured out that sleeping with Mommy isn't all it's cracked up to be.

He did wake up fifteen minutes later and it was a struggle to convince him that 5:15 is a terrific time to get a little bit more sleep, but that hour or so we snoozed quietly together was . . . heaven.

So what will I do if we wakes up again tonight? I will remind myself that all children walk eventually and drink out of a cup when they're ready and, yes, sleep in their own bed, even if it takes until puberty.

I may not always like my decision to abandon Ferber for a nighttime of stomach-kicking and ear-grabbing. But it is my decision, and as long as I make it with love it's the right one.

Besides, it's always possible that tonight will be the night he stays asleep.

Fame

I just finished watching Fame.

Not your traditional Thanksgiving activity, I'll admit. But neither is having lunch at a Mexican restaurant on Hendersonville Road before Hubby heads into work. Who needs tradition when you've got a movie that reminds you of being 14 and in love with acting and heart-full of the belief that you were going to burn through life with energy and happiness and bigger-than-lifeness and, well, fame.

Honestly, what I remember most isn't the first time I saw the movie. It's coming home between the matinee and evening performances of Dracula in ninth grade to blast the song on my father's turntable as my friend Dana and I sang with far more passion than tunefulness. Fame! I want to live forever! I want to learn how to fly . . . high!

The next day I cried as they struck the set. Mr. Feldman put his arm around me and explained how actors have to move on after each performance. He made me feel as if I was an actor, and I realize now that a little bit of that kindness has stayed with me.

I watched the beginning of the movie with The Boy as the afternoon temperatures dropped into the 40's and winter blew into Asheville. He quite enjoyed "Hot Lunch Jam." He gave me a funny look but did me the favor of waving his arms around like Mommy as the kids on the TV screen danced in the street to "Fame." Mostly, though, he just played with his doggie ball.

I found myself hoping that one of my children has the passion for performing that I did. Because I want to see what happens when that passion is nurtured instead of tossed aside for Spanish 3 in high school. And tossed aside again for an honors degree in American Studies. And yet again when grad school is a far safer bet for escaping the law firm than continuing to take acting classes at the Studio Theater in D.C. Even the community theater that kept me going during grad school fell by the wayside when I got to St. Louis and discovered that I was a 33-year-old law professor, not an aspiring actress.

Such speculation about the future, it seems, is well beyond The Boy, who lives in the moment. At this moment he is much more interested in unlocking the mystery of toys that have wheels than in considering whether his future lies in the performing arts and, if so, whether his mother will try to live vicariously and inappropriately through him.

The Boy had had enough of Fame before the characters were done with sophomore year. And so, one bath, dinner, and a bedtime later, I returned to Tivo alone. I put on the headphones so I didn't have to worry about waking The Boy when I turned up the volume to match the adrenaline that pumps through me when I hear a song about being a performer, being famous, being someone bigger than my own life. I settled under the baby blue lap duvet and I let myself be 14 again.

The second half of the movie, unfortunately, packs in enough melodrama to cut into good, juicy guilty-pleasure musical numbers. But there were still plenty of moments when I imagined myself dancing with those bodies on screen and being able to carry a tune at the same time.

In those moments, I believed that it is only a matter of time before I find my way into that world. Sure, it's been 27 years since Dana and I sang "Fame" with the fervor of 14-year-old actresses. But I've been busy.

I was prepared for reality to hit when the movie ended. The idea was to spend two short hours camping out in a place where I see the beauty of my teenage life that I couldn't see at the time yet feel the biting truth of how I was far too young and uncertain to follow the passion only someone that young can believe in. Then it would be time to wake up. I am, after all, past 40. The majority of my waking hours belong to The Boy. A good chunk of those remaining belong to activities that help pay for Saturday's belated Thanksgiving turkey. I work at home without even co-workers to perform for. I've given up yoga teaching for a solitary practice in my office. There is no stage in my life for that person I've always wanted to be to act upon.

But as the final scene of Fame played itself out and the students sang and danced and graduated from the School for the Performing Arts, I knew I would write about this feeling. About a swirling sense of joy wrapping around my heart and a youthful burst of someone I still want to be animating me. About not caring if I'm over 40 and devoted to being a mother and in love with my private husband and our private life in Asheville, North Carolina.

I thought about how I still sometimes sit in front of the mirror and answer interview questions -- from Terry Gross usually, sometimes Oprah. I describe the book I've written and speculate on why it's touched such a chord with the reading public. I talk about the remarkable transformation I made in my 40's, when I finally became a writer. And I see in front of me a me liberated.

It feels silly to sing with headphones on. But when you're an actress you don't care. And when no one's home to hear you singing you can be an actress if you want to. So I sang and I got ready to write and I believed. And I still do, at least at this particular moment.

I sing the body electric. I celebrate the me yet to come.

Our First Asheville Snow

Ah, the first snowfall of the year. That crisp smell in the air as your boots crunch satisfyingly into the grains of ice sliding against each other. Dogs frolic and the yells of red-cheeked children drift over hills made for sledding. At home it is cozy but not too warm to wear a lovely rag sweater, and no one worries about the cost of heating.

Those who have seen my reaction to the first 50-degree day of autumn are sniggering right now. Those who have not experienced my five-month whining spree that is called winter should know: I hate cold weather.

It wasn't always so.

My freshman year at Brown I quickly discarded the bulky knee-length down coat my father bought for me at our trip to the L.L. Bean in Freeport, Maine. We went there en route to Rhode Island as a way of stocking up on the winter essentials a California girl lacked in the days before you could order all that stuff on the internet. A puffy, lavender L.L. Bean knee-length down coat, I quickly realized, marked you either as a weak senior citizen or, just as bad, a weak kid from California whom everyone would tease for being unfamiliar with cold weather. Besides, we were young and stupid and frequently drunk, so we didn't mind a little frostbite now and then.

By senior year, I was so savvy in the ways of winter that my only reaction to the first big snowfall when I was living off-campus and therefore did not have miserable student workers to shovel my front walk was to pull on a second pair of socks to wear with my penny loafers. By the time I made it to campus so many people had cried, "WHAT ARE YOU WEARING ON YOUR FEET?" that I realized I had moved beyond proving my mettle back into winter stupidity. I decided class was less important than heading home in shame and caught the next bus to Boston, where I purchased my still-beloved Timberlands and discovered the joy of warm, dry feet.

After college, I spent two years living in Boston and feeling so abjectly poverty-stricken that the idea of spending $60 on a month-long unlimited pass for the T (the Boston public transport system) sent me into a paroxysm of Ramen noodle dinners and begging my mother for new socks. I decided to forgo the T-pass until the weather forced me to give up my free walk to work so many times that I ended up spending at least $60 a month in T fare anyhow. I never came close. Instead, I braved the frozen tundra of the Boston Common bundled in a long houndstooth wool coat with huge shoulder pads draped over two extra sweaters, long underwear, my trusty Timberlands, red rabbit fur earmuffs, and thick mittens. The first ten minutes of my work day were spent stripping down to normal office wear in a cramped bathroom stall. I don't recall how I handled lunch.

Gradually, I moved to milder winters -- Manhattan, where I vaguely recall feeling the frozen pavement quite plainly through my thin black ankle boots; Washington, D.C., where my body retained so much heat from my early morning workouts on the Stairmaster that I made it to work without any appreciable suffering; Williamsburg, Virginia, home of my too-cool J.Crew barn jacket that swung fetchingly when worn open to the elements with a thin but stylish scarf to provide a modicum of chest covering.

And then I became an old woman.

Rather, my hands took on the persona of an old crone, one of those people whose very touch feels like frozen marble. I became a sort of modified street person, pausing over open vents in the street and searching out indoor sources of heat where I would could rub my hands together muttering with delight.

I had discovered both the bane of my I'm-as-tough-as-you winter posturing and my great excuse for looking pinched and grinch-like when anyone talks about the pleasures of skiing.

I have Reynaud's Syndrome, a condition diagnosed by a cardiologist friend who caught me cursing as I burned my hands on those pocket warmers they sell to hunters and other cold weather enthusiasts. Reynaud's Syndrome is a rheumatological condition that affects about two percent of women -- just enough to prove I'm not crazy. The gist of it is that under certain conditions -- most notably when one's hands get cold -- the blood vessels in one's hands constrict. Which, if you stop to think about it, means that when my hands get cold my hands get even colder. I consider this the physical equivalent of eating more ice cream when you are feeling fat.

How cold do my hands get when they get cold?

Crying because it is necessary to grip the cold steering wheel in order to operate an automobile cold.

Sobbing while running my hands under warm water after walking the dog cold.

Actual nerve damage cold, I discovered after visiting a rheumatologist who used a cool scope to look right through my fingernails.

One way to deal with Reynaud's Syndrome is to take vaso-dilators -- pills that expand your blood vessels, thus counteracting the Reynaud's symptoms and generally making you feel warmer. This solution, I discovered, is less than ideal if you already have low blood pressure and are therefore at risk of fainting dead away when it is lowered further. For a time I took the vaso-dilators anyhow, but the only time I could get away with it was right before getting into bed where it didn't matter if I felt woozy and disoriented.

The ideal solution for Reynauds is to live somewhere without a winter. I did this. The problem is, I did it with someone who likes winter. Further, he likes to point out pesky facts like the insane cost of real estate in Southern California and the alarming health hazard posed by the pollution from the Port of Long Beach. And he takes me to Asheville in the spring and summer when it is lovely and warm and I forget the days when I wandered my house in St. Louis wrapped in my bulky down comforter and skipping dinner because the kitchen was by far the coldest room in the house.

To my credit, I haven't cried once at the prospect of winter this year. By the time I left St. Louis, I spent every morning starting October 1 in a panic over the impending cold. Here in Asheville, I gamely bundle both myself and The Boy in warm layers of modern fabrics so we can accompany Hubby and the hounds on their morning run in the park a couple blocks away. I wear delicious and attractive fleece-lined shoes that I bought at Discount Shoes on Route 191. I even got myself the kind of wool cap that looks cute on 25-year-old hippie-chic chicks and looked cute on me just once, in the store where I bought it.

So I didn't panic the other day when one of the teachers at The Boy's school asked me if I had seen the flurries right before I dropped him off. "Flurries? Really?" I asked, proud that there was no rise in my tone, no catch to my voice.

Two hours later, they called me to tell me he had a temperature of 100.3 and anything over 100 earns him an afternoon at home with Mommy and banishment from school for the next 24 hours. This policy makes perfect sense when it comes to other munchkins sharing their viruses with with my precious bundle. But when I know The Boy is merely teething and those thermometers they use are inaccurate anyhow, it strikes me as a deeply unfair rule.

I noticed a few white grains flying through the air when I crossed the street to the school building. They could have been tiny pieces of styrofoam escaped from someone's moving boxes.

But when I came back outside a few minutes later, The Boy in my arms, I recognized them for what they were. "Look, your first snow," I said with a carefully cheery tone designed to avoid passing judgment on the things in life that The Boy is entitled to judge for himself.

We went to the toy store for the aids I felt were necessary to keep both The Boy and me occupied for the long, school-less, park-less afternoon. We sat on the floor and played with the other children and The Boy ogled the train set that is years too advanced for him, and it felt so holiday-like and cozy that I didn't mind when we walked outside again how much the density of the tiny white stones of ice had increased or how they bit into my face when I headed into them.

The Boy minded, and informed me in no uncertain terms that when you are rearranging straps to get a car seat ready to accommodate a small boy you are not to hold said boy out the open door of the car to be pelted by icy snow.

We did not arrive home to drifts of white on our front steps and a brightly lit living room with hounds curled up by the fireplace. This was not the kind of snow that sticks even if the ground is cold enough. We weren't surrounded by fluffy white flakes you catch on your tongue. In fact, it all felt a bit like standing too close to a shaved ice machine in great need of a tune-up.

Still, it was warm inside, and The Boy quite enjoyed his new set of toys with wheels -- car, truck, and airplane. He wasn't all that interested in the stacking blocks, so I fit them back into their box and put them aside for a Christmas present.

That's the nice thing about having a child who's not yet a year old -- he doesn't care that one of his Christmas presents is nothing more than a recycled snowy afternoon toy.

And that's the nice thing about a snowy afternoon, even one as unpicturesque as this one was -- pair it with a little boy pushing a wooden car across the floor and you can remember the excitement of playing with something new, even the something new that is the first snowfall of the year.

Three Things

A dear friend -- one of the two of you who read this blog -- mentioned to me recently that every night before she goes to sleep she thinks of three good things that happened that day.

I thought, "That's a really lovely idea."

I thought, "I'd never take the time to do it. In fact, I've been having such a rough few weeks that the very idea of trying to think of three good things every day would either make me slit my wrists or cheat by saying, 'The Boy, The Boy, The Boy.'"

By "rough few weeks" I mean: The Boy got an ear infection and missed nearly a week of school. This means that I missed nearly a week of the opportunity to not have to choose between yoga, a shower, or work during the hopefully two hours of his nap. That weekend, my parents visited and I played tour guide on an average of three hours of sleep a night (see "The Boy got an ear infection") trying to convince them that Asheville is a perfectly wonderful place to live and stressing over my now regrettable choice to prioritize showers and yoga over work. The Boy's ear infection did not respond to Amoxycyllin, so not only were we treated to the illusion that the infection lasted as long as my pregnancy but he ended up on Suprax, which, while apparently tasty, is quite strong and bothers a boy's stomach. As a consequence, he had a really bad week at school. On his one good day, I was desperately trying to get us packed for a weekend in West Virginia at my sister-in-law's house. Lovely as that time was, I failed to bring the power cord for my computer and probably wouldn't have done any work even if I had. On our return home, mother-in-law in tow, exhausted from the effort of trying to act like a person you would want married to a member of your family, I groggily searched for things I could convince myself my mother-in-law really wanted to do while I grabbed a few minutes to work on my laptop in the local bookstore downtown or at the Grove Park Inn, where I paid $12.95 for internet access before realizing I would have to print out those documents that had been emailed to me and was doing nothing more productive than giving myself a migraine and a burning desire to throw my computer in the oversized fireplace near the table where I was working.

So, now that our house is once again empty but for two adults, a 10 1/2 month old, and two hound dogs, now that I have finally completed that work project that was hanging over my head, now that I have taken my second yoga class since moving to Asheville, now that The Boy has started his week with a really excellent day at school, I believe it's time. Three good things.

First, I am a Virgo.

That is not a good thing, at least according to every assessment of the Virgo personality as controlling and critical (a trait I will admit to only because I direct all of my control and criticism at myself). I've rarely thought of myself as a Virgo -- the stay-at-home, quiet type -- and I certainly have lived up to my fantasy of myself as an energetic socializer for some decent periods of my younger days, not all of them even in college. During the four weeks I lived on an ashram outside Boulder, Colorado, training for my yoga teaching certification, I carefully studied an astrology book that explained my non-Virgo-ness. (If you care, on my chart the Sun is just barely in Virgo, while Mercury, Venus, and Mars all reside in Leo in some house that has something to do with public appearances.)

But the truth of the matter is, when you pass 40 and the best thing that can happen in your life is for The Boy to sleep past 6:30 and your partner is your best and pretty much only friend, well, anyone can become a Virgo.

This means that, while I love visitors and travel and being able to look at my calendar filled with notations in different colored pens, I'm really at my best when my days are steady and predictable and end with me lying slack on the couch in front of an episode of The Amazing Race.

Hence, the past month plus has been more of a strain than I like to admit. It has been hard with visitors to us and visits to others trying to fit what I need to get done into an even more compact space of time than my usual four hours between getting home from dropping The Boy off at school and leaving home to pick The Boy up from school. (My sister once pointed out to me that I could save some time by driving him there instead of walking, but, as I believe I have mentioned, I tend to experience some difficulty altering my favored routines.)

It's been even harder trying to be a decent daughter-in-law/sister-in-law/partner/mother when I am suffering anxiety attacks over the work I'm not getting done and then feeling guilty about displaying my crazy side to my in-laws or subjecting Hubby to my crazy side yet again. The one thing I will not do is be crazy in not-a-funny-Mommy way in front of The Boy, which means I am that much more pinched and jumpy with the others from whom I am trying to hide my craziness.

So what exactly, you are asking yourself, is the good thing? And why am I reading this?

The good thing is that I have a family who visits because we want them to and whom we visit because we enjoy it. A family who forgives me for being anxious and crazy, even if I'm loathe to forgive myself.

A family that, unlike being a Virgo, is a good thing.

Second, The Boy. The Boy, The Boy, The Boy. Because even if it is cheating to use him for all three things, it would be a crime to leave him off the list. Even when I held him from 1:00 until 2:30 last night while he was teething and finally let him cry in his crib because I really, really had to pee. Even when he wipes his runny nose on my sleeve and then cries if I try to use a proper item for the job. Even when he holds onto my leg rather than play with all the great things I have put on the kitchen floor for him because it is hard to cut up an apple when you are holding a 20-pound boy in one arm.

The Boy. Because he has the best four-toothed smile I have ever seen and it never fails to make me smile back.

Third, my dreams. Not my dream of "One day I will write a critically acclaimed yet still best-selling novel and be free to spend my days creating stories in my office where I will finally have hung the curtains and found a good rug and which will not be cold all the time despite being over the front porch and therefore not very well insulated."

Not the dreams where you wake up warm and jelly-like and frequently a little bit embarrassed about what you have been dreaming.

The dreams I mean here are my anxiety dreams.

My dreams in times of anxiety follow two patterns. There are the wave dreams. I am trying to swim in the waves and I am terrified and about to drown and out of control. Or I am watching the waves and scared of them because if I were in them I would be terrified and about to drown and out of control. Occasionally, when I am feeling really good about my life, I conquer my fear of the waves and have a lovely swim, but it never seems to last.

And then there are the bus dreams. I clearly remember relating my first bus dream to my friend Joe senior year of college when we both had finished our theses on time and spent pretty much every afternoon for the remainder of our college days at the Grad Center Bar splitting a pitcher of beer, smoking cigarettes (okay, I generally smoked "cigarette"), and listening to Tracy Chapman with tears of angst and determination in our eyes.

In the bus dreams, I am either on a bus and don't know where I'm going or I get off the bus and don't know where I am and everyone I know is still on the bus leaving me further and further behind. It does not take a Ph.D. in psychology to figure out my bus dreams.

As the years have gone by and I have moved further and further away from holding down anything that resembles a real job, the bus has sometimes morphed into an airplane which is going more quickly toward a definite destination but never seems to land. Unless I am late for the plane, usually in my childhood bedroom unable to leave my parents' house. The first type of airplane dream suggests that I feel I am progressing toward my destination in life. The second does not.

The other night, it was a bus again. A school bus, in fact. In Malibu, where I spent my first few years of elementary school. The bus went up a street I didn't recognize and deposited me in a big house I didn't know with a kind of a creepy man whose role in the dream I haven't yet figured out.

But in the house, young and beautiful and nearly forgotten by me, was Roxanne. My first baby. Four-legged, velvet-eared, but no less my baby than The Boy.

When someone is that close to your heart, when they love you fiercely and unconditionally, even if or maybe more so because they are canine, you are very, very lucky. You are lucky even nearly two years after you lose them because you no longer have days when you are so anxious and buried that you don't have time for a cuddle. You are lucky because, even if you know that your partner loves you unconditionally, and your baby as well as a baby knows how to love, you can still remember when she was all you had. So you not only remember how lucky you were to have her, but you are reminded of how very, very, very lucky you are to have all you have now.

Most of all, you are lucky because when you need that kind of love, she is there, in a dream. And she feels as real as she is.

If it takes six weeks of feeling like I just can't keep up any more, like all I can do when I have so much to do is cry, like the days are getting colder and there are fewer people to smile at on the sidewalks -- if that's what it takes to have a few minutes with Roxanne, then that's a good thing too.

Our Appalacian Tour

Having grown up in Los Angeles, I have long and incuriously harbored the notion that everyone in the United States lives in a big city or in a suburb of a big city or in the sprawl of the less expensive or more regal or sweetly rural-picturesque homes built in the distant reaches of a big city that make you think, "How do these people commute all the way to the city every day?"

It's not an attitude I'm proud of. When I went to college in Providence, Rhode Island, I considered what is a reasonably sized metropolis to be part of Boston based on the fact that I had to go to Boston every time I wanted to do any satisfying clothes shopping. Similarly, I justified my four years in Williamsburg, Virginia, as merely an extension of the previous three I had spent in Washington, D.C., and proved that my new home was nothing more than a far-flung corner of the D.C. Metro Area by stubbornly driving 2 1/2 hours up I-95 to visit friends every weekend. I even harbored a vague sense of St. Louis as a satellite of Chicago, even though in my four years living there I visited Chicago exactly once.

The point is, when you live in a major urban center, you simply can not conceive of life in a small town. You lack the raw materials to even begin to construct a picture of what people do in small towns.

I still don't quite understand where everyone goes to work every day. They can't all work in the Main Street stores that serve both locals and the tourists who choose to spend a quaint weekend at a precious B&B in the area. Surely there are plenty of residents who refuse to work at the Super Wal-Mart on the grounds of politics and self-respect. And with only one teacher to every thirty or so kids, the schools provide a meager margin of employment.

Because I am enough of a liberal to feel bad about my innate sense of superiority, I make a point of trying to learn from the small towns that surround the big town in which I now live. I marvel at the vast array of selections at Discount Shoes, many of them brands for which I used to pay twice as much in the hip corridors of Los Angeles. I wrap myself in the security of Earth Fare and tell myself it's even better than Whole Foods, even if I can't quite allow myself to spring for the six dollar guacamole. I even bow to those hipper, prettier, more urban than myself.

The real test, however, comes when I venture outside of my new comfort zone, my oasis of This-Isn't-the-South-ness that I call home. This weekend, for example, we visited Hubby's Sister and her family in West Virginia.

I'd been to Lewisburg, West Virginia, before, so I was over the shock of how little it resembles what I had come to think of as the vast emptiness of places near nowhere. I had visited the four blocks of downtown that harbor the stores where Hubby's Sister regularly buys me much cooler birthday gifts than I am able to find for her in all of Southern California. I had hidden my jealousy at the home they built, with its plethora of windows and heated floors and its open floor plan. And I had met Hubby's Sister's friends, educated liberals who favor Birkenstocks and wool caps and the common sense to dress comfortably. I was not, in short, expecting any surprises on this trip.

It was The Boy's first time in Lewisburg, and I got to see Hubby's Sister's house through his eyes. Low windowsills to grasp as he proudly shows off his standing skills. Hounds of a nonthreatening size who dash out of the house to chase raccoons with a thrilling thwap of the dog door. New creatures, called cats, who lie in Mommy and Daddy's laps, purring and making them wonder if a feline companion would help them feel this cozy in their own house. The experience of tasting goat, which his parents are unlikely ever to cook, even when it is professionally raised organic farm goat, not the pet that lives in many a West Virginia kitchen.

By the end of our first day there, I was certain that The Boy would vastly prefer growing up within the confines of Hubby's Sister's house to the Asheville home we so proudly purchased just two and a half months ago. After all, I would. It was warmer and better decorated. It had beautiful built-in bookcases with just enough books to feel comfortable but not overwhelming. It had a better kitchen and better bedrooms and better light. I felt like the college student who realizes after a few weeks at home for summer break that no one in their right mind could live in the dorm room in which she has spent the last nine months.

My sense of yawning inferiority increased on Sunday when we visited the Greenbriar Inn.

An enormous white structure with columns reminiscent of the White House, the Greenbriar Inn is a super-exclusive golf resort. We went there to buy a copy of the New York Times (sadly not available by delivery to the residents of Lewisburg, West Virginia, in case I ever gave any real thought to living there, which, I hasten to add, I haven't). We stayed to extend The Boy's nap by pushing him in his stroller about the grounds.

We managed to spend our first hour inside the enormous white structure of the hotel. There was a lobby to gawk at, with twenty-foot painted ceilings and drawling chandeliers. There was room after room of comfortable chairs and chess sets and even a writing table set up with Greenbriar Inn stationery. I wanted to take some, but I knew my cramped handwriting upon its creamy surface would be a crude advertisement of how inadequately I mastered my fourth-grade cursive skills.

Still in that vast building, we wandered an entire mall of stores selling items we couldn't afford and stared at people wearing golf-shirts we wouldn't wear if we could afford them. I munched on a lovely free apple as I checked my email, also for free. We could have purchased a good cup of coffee or even better homemade chocolate to savor with the paper had we so chosen.

Except that we plainly didn't belong. Coiffed head after coiffed head turned to look at our precious boy bundled like a papoose in his stroller, wrapped in my big, curly brown coat, a flannel hat brushing up against his slack, fat cheeks. And humorless face after humorless face looked away without smiling.

Let me repeat. Not a single person in the Greenbriar Inn smiled at The Boy.

The Boy, I may have mentioned before, is a gatherer of smiles, a magnet for praise, the bellwether of my ability to do something right in life. He is, even to one not his own mother, a really cute baby. But not, it seems, to the patrons of the Greenbriar Inn.

Plainly we were not classy enough for the joint.

Chastened, we returned to Hubby's Sister's house to play H-O-R-S-E and eat smoked turkey (another hit with The Boy) and to laugh as he shrieked with delight when his ten-year-old cousin chased him around the living room.

And with each passing moment my vision of my lovely Asheville home became darker, more twisted. Sagebrush-sized mounds of dog hair grew in the corners of the stairs, and rust stains overtook the sinks. Icicles formed on bare feet touching the no longer polished wood floors. I saw our furniture as sagging and small, cowering against the bare walls that cried out for good taste and a few trips to a gallery.

It's no wonder that, for perhaps the first time in my life, I looked forward to visiting some antique stores before heading back home on Monday. Lewisburg, I reasoned, must harbor untold treasures if Hubby's Sister could live there for so many years and create such a superior home to mine.

I still don't like the smell of antique stores -- the dust mote strewn sense of stale carpets and wobbly card tables holding tiny china figurines that weren't cute when they were new and look sad and faded to me now.

But I was able to look with new hope and appreciation at the furniture and even fall in love a little bit with the wardrobe with a big mirror on its front and rotating coat hooks inside that I thought would look perfect in our front hall (because, with all the rooms begging for furniture in our house, the front hallway should be my priority). I called Hubby over to share my appraisal of hutches and chaises and coffee tables.

And then we did it. Together, Hubby and I bought an antique -- a mirror with a frame carved with flowers and a slightly gilded finish. It was, we concluded, perfect for that spot in the entryway sporting three picture hooks on which we had promised we would one day hang a horizontal mirror. At least, I thought with a thrill, people will be impressed by our home when they first step inside.

Six and a half hours and lunch in Bristol, Virginia/Tennessee, later, we pulled up to our home.

It looked nice enough to remind me why we had stopped that August afternoon of house hunting and eagerly called the phone number on the For Sale sign.

The hounds leaping up and down behind the front French doors were happier to see us than the Lewisburg hounds, part of whose charm, after all, lay in the fact that they were not our responsibility when they chewed the blocks being saved for eventual grandchildren.

And even though it turned out that the mirror is too big to fit horizontally, it looks lovely anchored vertically to the wall by the front door. It serves as a reminder that our home is beautiful in its own right, in part because we have the courage to live in a small (sort of) town.

Lilah Gets Arrested

It's always the quiet ones.

Lilah, for those not familiar with her, is a kind of goofy, very affectionate basset hound we found a year and a half ago on Craig's List. Her former owner told us she loves babies (mmm, not so much), was training to be a therapy dog (if she could spend all day having people pet her she'd think she'd died and gone to heaven), and was raised on a diet of raw chicken every third day (we quickly remedied that). She did not tell us that Lilah is an escape artist.

Not that we didn't find out well in advance of today's criminal activity.

After she had lived with us for a few months in Long Beach, Lilah puzzled us greatly by visiting our neighbors while we were out at the Santa Ana Science Center for the day. Apparently cell phones don't work in the Santa Ana Science Center, because it wasn't until we were on our way home that I picked up the message from the neighbors. Lilah was in their yard, they informed us. Audrey, they continued reassuringly, was still in ours.

How could we have left the gate unlocked? we wondered. And why hadn't Audrey escaped as well? (She was not, at the time, twice Lilah's size, and may even have been a bit smaller.)

We arrived home to a locked gate, a pleased Lilah, and a bummed Audrey. Sucks to be her.

Hmm, we thought. A mystery. Surely Lilah couldn't fit her bulldog-ish shoulders through the small gaps in our gate. On the other hand, we couldn't quite figure out who had locked it after her, since locking the gate required a key. Perhaps our landlord had stopped by unannounced, as was his wont, and left his feral children in our yard to play? It wouldn't be the first time, although it would be the first time they had visited without managing to unroll gardening tape all over the yard, scatter dog kibble up and down the walk, tie ropes in strange places with unfathomable knots, and generally leave their mark for us to clean up.

Much as we resisted the idea that our gate couldn't keep in a bow-legged basset hound, we had to concede defeat the following weekend when she made it to the next block before someone took her in and called us.

I still marvel when I remember the tiny spot where the curved ornament of the gate could maybe -- just possibly -- admit a limber basset hound. And then I caught her preparing to do it again, and we had to put up chicken wire, which didn't look great but saved us further forays about the neighborhood to fetch her.

It's much easier to escape our yard here in Asheville.

The fence people are supposed to show up any day to actually enclose it, but until then we have craftily rigged up a lawnchair propped sideways across the stairs to allow the girls some fresh air on the deck (but not, alas, toilet access, which still requires my supervision). The fence, by the way, was supposed to be one of our top priorities when we moved in. But we were delayed by Hubby's brief but enthusiastic flirtation with an electric fence (still in place after he sliced through it with the lawnmower, turning it into an unreturnable and very expensive boundary-marker) and the local tradition among fencing companies of not returning calls requesting an estimate.

Prior to the lawn chair barrier (which, I hasten to point out, works just fine on Audrey), we used an even more ingenious combination of the Weber kettle and an aluminum garbage can filled with about 25 pounds of charcoal. This arrangement required me to balance a 20-pound baby in one arm while dragging a 25-pound trash can across the deck every time I let the girls into the yard, so I wasn't entirely pleased with our solution to the fence problem, however temporary.

And then Lilah got out anyhow.

That first call came from an accounting business that backs up to the houses across the street from us. Apparently Lilah wandered through some yards and showed up at their back door. From what I could piece together, she was welcomed with open arms.

"She's been lying in our boss's office in front of the T.V. getting her belly scratched," the sweet blonde woman who brought her out informed me.

I decided there was no point in explaining the concept of positive reinforcement to this woman because I was simply going to make sure Lilah didn't escape again.

I didn't do a very good job of it. Just a couple of weeks later I got a call from an insurance company on the same street. This time it took me a bit longer to find Lilah because she had been picked up on the far side. This is a scary fact to anyone who knows the street because cars drive very fast down it and . . . I don't want to think about it and I really wish Lilah hadn't made so many friends at the insurance company because it guaranteed that she would try to go back.

Did I mention that she can contort her body like the magician's assistant who gets cut in half? I believe she would be perfectly comfortable, her head sticking out of that box while she curls her hind legs back up against her chest inside a space half her size.

So, of course, she made a run for it again today. It was another beautiful almost-70-degree day, the air was fresh, the sky was blue, and I thought I'd do the girls a favor by letting them hang out on the deck while I walked The Boy to school. They are, after all, reasonably big dogs, and this is a reasonably safe neighborhood, so I felt confident that no one would walk in our wide open back door in the forty minutes I was gone.

I was happily walking the empty stroller home (amazing how many people don't seem to consider that I might have a perfectly good reason to be pushing an empty stroller down the street) when my cell phone rang. It was Hubby.

"I just got a message that we're supposed to call some number or the police are going to take one of the dogs to the pound," he said, sounding understandably distraught.

"I'm walking, I can't write a number down," I huffed, feeling suddenly crushed by the fact that I desperately needed to get some work done and could not spend my time getting one of the dogs out of the pound. I hoped Hubby would say he'd take care of it.

He didn't. "I'll call the answering machine and leave it there," he said. I would have liked to tell him what I thought of this plan.

I didn't. "There are some people in front of our house with Lilah," I said instead as I turned the corner.

Those people turned out to be two police officers.

"Are you the owner?" one of the officers asked. Apparently she had spent enough time with Lilah to know that the affection I was receiving didn't mean a thing and was possibly even less heartfelt than the affection she had received upon their meeting.

I admitted that I was.

"I'm glad we found you," she said. "I sure didn't want to take her to the pound."

"The engraving on her tags is terrible," I babbled. "It's so hard to see my cell phone number." Why is it that I felt the need to explain why I am not quite as irresponsible as I seem when I was, after all, irresponsible enough to let her get out in the first place?

"That's your cell phone number?" The officer looked at me sharply.

"Um . . ." Of course they had called. Of course I had left my cell phone on the stroller sitting on the front porch of The Boy's school while I sat inside with him trying to make him believe that it's safe and fun there and it would be an excellent idea to loosen his death grip on my arm.

"I'm afraid I'll have to write you a warning," the officer said kindly.

She was so kind that I decided to have a conversation with her and her partner. A very stupid conversation.

"My last basset hound got arrested too," I laughed. "One day there was a knock on the door and they were checking for licenses--"

"Is she licensed?" The officer paused in writing up my warning, her pen poised to check off yet another infraction.

"She's licensed in California," I lied. If you are an authority connected with the California Bar, you did not just read that last sentence. "We just moved here a couple of months ago."

It actually turned out pretty well. She gave me two forms and specific instructions on licensing the girls, which was a lot easier than figuring it out myself.

Still, Lilah has a criminal record, Audrey is a notorious chicken thief, and I can't help but be worried about the bad influence they are having on their little brother. His admiration for them is apparent already. He chews on their bones, samples the food in their dishes, and helps himself to their water bowl.

And he was, after all, a dog for Halloween. Hound behavior can not be far behind.