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.