He has been making paper cranes for several weeks now

– part of a current, perpetual, unending origami obsession he now holds.

One day we checked out 43 origami books from the library — but he prefers to learn how to fold directly from You Tube videos.

There is a guy — a teacher — who is his favorite.

His high school brother, who was studying Hiroshima, taught him how to make a paper crane.

Then, his obsession became “how small” can I make a crane? Amazing to watch him fold such tiny folds.

During the party, a friend told him the story of a 1,000 paper cranes.

The next morning, he told me he was not interested in making 1,000 paper cranes. “I could never do that.” I wondered, thinking back on all of the strips of paper I had picked up from snips he had made with scissors to turn paper into squares, if he already had. Then he asked me if I thought it was true, that your wish could come true?

I said, “Sure, why not?”

Then, he said, “Well, I don’t think that’s true at all.” Then, he came back later and said, “If that’s true, than you need to be very careful about your wish. That’s why I don’t want to make 1,000 paper cranes.”

On May 22, 2011, I woke to the sound of cartoons, softly muted, making their way up the stairs. Then, the sound of dishes clanking, spoons tinkling and the microwave. My husband and I snuggled deeper into our sheets, relishing the fact that finally, after all these years, the kids can finally take care of themselves in the morning. and we can sleep.

Next, there were two beaming faces standing in our doorway, each holding a bowl of oatmeal with a spoon. “Happy Anniversary,” they said.

Eighteen years.

The oatmeal was one of the best bowls of food I’ve ever eaten — but of course food you don’t make yourself always tastes better. Downstairs, there was hot chocolate waiting for us, with clumps of powder still in the bottom of the mug.

Do you have any idea how precious this is? Did I have any idea that this is what I was really signing up for, 18 years ago when I said, “I do?” No one can tell you how deeply love will spread, I guess.

There is not a moment that goes by that I don’t look at the “gift card” and I am in awe of the radiance and power of their love.

When complimenting him about how great the oatmeal tasted, he looked at me in wonderment… “Was the oatmeal really that good, or are you just saying that to make me feel good?”

I did my best to reassure him — yes it indeed it was good… and then stopped. What difference does it make if I liked the oatmeal, or wouldn’t it be better if the oatmeal was horrible… but it was because I treasure you, the oatmeal was delicious and that’s why I loved it? Because of you?

Love can be so complicated. This couldn’t have been a more abundant 18th wedding anniversary. There were soccer games (the older boys were refs, and one even referred his little brother’s game)  — there was a moment when three of the four boys were on the field at the same time. There was steak, banana cream pie… and good wine — and the faces of lots of old friends. They were radiant.

This photo, taken a few happy weeks ago, is my touchstone for how I will define the summer of 2010.

Yet, summer is not cooperating with me. Summer wants me to identify its memory with something more sinister. This was before my husband started crossing the continent on airplanes, and we started just missing each other at home, and at the lake. Our schedules are completely out-of-sync, and in late-night panics, I wonder if there will ever be a time again when our heartbeats occupy the same time in space.

This was before the great accident of the summer, which, in the words of my husband, “changed everything.” Since that accident, I’ve been on my own, while my husband is busy traveling, and the workload seems to have tripled. All the things that my son could do before he can no longer do. So, I am doing all the work that he once did, and we are taking care of him. The younger boys haven’t quite embraced the concept of “picking up the slack.” When people ask my husband, “How’s Susie’s break at the lake,” he says, “It’s not really a vacation any more.”

I know how to be strong, and I want to appear that all is under control — but sometimes I am not. I’d really love to have an adult give me a break in the evening. But my husband and I have been like ping-pong balls in opposite sides of the court lately. When I was home for surgery, my husband was in Seattle. Then, through some fluke of flight scheduling, I came back to the lake, anticipating seeing him here, only to learn later that an emergency meeting sent him right back home less than 6 hours after he arrived. The kids are happier here at the lake, so that makes life easier here, and the thought of packing for another 3-hour car ride with the boys, only to turn around and come back in a few days seemed silly. When we were home, the boys rarely ventured outside. So we settled in and stayed. Besides, you lake friends do make life bearable.

While those solo moonlight boat rides to watch the shooting stars may have happened only a few weeks ago, they feel stretched in time, sitting in past decades. Uncle Bud and Aunt Joyce are coming Friday morning; they always are a refreshing break. If all goes as planned, I’ll be in my husband’s arms again by Friday afternoon. Until then, this is my touchstone.

The two of us sat outside, under an arched portico, at a marble table that was meant to seat ten. Next to us, there was a table of 6 giggling girls. They had stolen the chairs from our table, before we arrived, leaving us with a single padded wicker bench, curved to match the outline of the table, which had enough berth to easily seat six. Yet, we sat close enough for our knees to touch, leaving the outside seats of the bench bare and desolate. He ordered the Sapporo we would share, and our sushi — tuna and salmon for him, tempura for me. “Please bring us extra wassabi,” and “extra ginger for me,” we neglected to say. We switched up the bench so that it faced the street, rather than the eclectic modern bar, so that we could people-watch.

Then the sky opened up and sparkling puddles formed on the sidewalk and the busy street, while the people ran for cover under awnings and jackets; others folded their bodies into the taxis that appeared out of nowhere. Rings of rainbows glistened under the streetlights, as we huddled closer together for warmth, despite the propane heaters that stood guard behind the marble arches. Water danced on the cement ledge in front of our table, splashing water all over our table, and the cars swooshed the water from the street across the sidewalks. We scooted our table back further underneath the portico. The drivers of the cars impatiently blew their horns at the slower drivers, while their windshield wipers tried to keep up with the downpour.

The sushi took forever to come, which was how we discovered the strange unisex bathroom in the back, by the bar. I watched him sip his Saporro, and my eyes lingered a bit over his jaw, and his shoulders, defined from that time he spends in the gym sometimes after work. When the sushi finally did arrive, it felt like the smoothest rolls we’d ever felt against our tongues. After dinner, I ran to the that unisex bathroom one more time, and along the way, reached out to the valet, who was drenched, despite the tent, to hand him our ticket. I got soaked just from reaching out to him. When it was time for us to leave, the sky parted wider, and the rain beat down on our heads, harder yet, while we tucked ourselves into our car for the short drive home.

We were grateful for the show the rain gave us, and grateful that our food was late. We were grateful for the table of giggling girls who stole our chairs, and for the people who inadvertently provided our entertainment. We are grateful for the 17 years of marriage that has left us serendipitously contented, at ease, and happy, despite the rain, the rainbows, sunshine and more rain.

I am grateful for the simple miracle of frozen time – how can my heart still flutter the same way it did 23 years ago when he asked me for a kiss on New Years Eve? How decades can feel like yesterday…

It’s all I can do to not share this scene with you via You Tube. But I’ll have to wait until next Friday. For now, you’ll have to guess. This should be fun. Below is the dialogue from a scene in a movie. See if you can recognize what movie this is from:

“Let’s not go out for dinner. Let’s stay in.”
“We have to eat.”
“We can eat here. I’ll cook.”
“I thought you didn’t like to cook.”
“No, I don’t like to cook. But I have a chicken in the icebox and you’re eating it.”
“What about all the washing up afterwards?”
“We’ll eat it with our fingers.”
“Do we need any plates?”
“Yes. One for you and one for me.”
“Mind if I have dinner with you tonight?”
“I’d be delighted.”

You have until next Friday, March 5, 2010 to email me your guess, to sjotest AT (spelled out to avoid spam) yahoo.com.
If you’re correct, you’ll be entered to win an Amazon Gift Card and this gift.

Dear Kids,

The three days that herald Memorial Day Weekend leave us full of greed, year after year. All winter long, we hunger for these 3 days so that we can hammer through so many of the warm weather projects that we can’t touch all winter.

This year, we were blessed with warmth and your feet pattered around the grass barefoot. As we plowed through one task through the next, I reached that tipping point when one task piled on top of another so quickly that I questioned my own stamina for handling the work required to handle a lake house.

Charlie, the Heron, visited us.

All day long you played. You used the boxes from the furniture we bought to build a horrendous fort in the basement – the bunk room. Most of your time was spent at the neighbor’s building a “lake” on the edge of the lake out of sand. I worried about you and skin cancer all day long; do you have enough sunscreen? Did I miss that spot above your upper lip where cancer attacked me? Is it time for more? When I went down to your “lake” to apply your second helping of sunscreen, sand was impossible to separate from your skin and the sunscreen, so I ended up rubbing it all in together to create a combination mud mask, sunscreen. I wonder, how do you interpret that? Certainly not as an act of desperate protection from someone who loves you. You don’t have the perspective yet.

When I wasn’t de-cluttering the house from the junk we’ve collected over the past three summers, I was out in the garden building your fort. A fort that is undeniable taking up valuable real estate in the garden, as I have enlarged its size by four times since last summer. Will you even play there this summer? Your Dad was busy assembling our new furniture, which you helped build too. A little bit.

Then night fell, and your sprits seemed to soar up, in an inversion parallel with the setting sun. You caught four frogs within the first few seconds after the sun dropped. Dad started the bon fire, and you came into the kitchen searching for marshmallows and graham crackers. While you were busy with the frogs, we took the chance, while we had it, to pull out a few of the boxes from your fort and fan the flames of the bonfire. I’m sorry… but there was no way to walk though. “It was a fire hazard.” Not sure what that means, but that’s what my parents told me when I was a kid and I got out of control.

The bullfrogs are mating; we could hear them in a symphony across the lake. You searched through your drawers for long sleeved shirts, and “long-sleeved pants”, as the mosquitoes were out. Then you headed off in the canoe with your Dad, and your flashlight, to gawk at the frogs. One made it inside of the canoe, but soon jumped completely free and back into the water. There were tears.

Then there was the annual wrestling to get your teeth brushed, and finally we hit our heads on the pillow and you were all blissfully quiet.

As night fell, most of the projects we knocked out were invisible to the naked eye; grown-up stuff that we often find so important, and necessary. You show us, everyday, especially when we’re at the lake, how simple and clear your needs truly are. You would feel complete, I think, in a simple cardboard box that is close to the water’s edge. For a second, I think I would be too.

This weekend, your parents reached their 16th wedding anniversary. We just want you to know, life couldn’t be sweeter; and we’re learning every day, especially from you, what really does matter in life. Sweeter every year.

Dance club is a clandestine ritual that parents can only attend by invitation, when you are lucky enough to be asked to serve as a chaperon. I was invited.

First,  Dad was out of town, so the boys and I huddled around the computer together as we watched You Tube videos that explained how to tie a tie.  After several failed attempts, with the clock ticking, we bailed on the Windsor, and just went for a basic knot.

My son and I left, already sweaty from the stress of our preview, the tie dance. Here’s what I observed about dance club.

• The girls stand in a line; the boys line up directly across from from the girls to form parallel lines.

• The instructor serves as DJ, and coach, calling out the dance steps they’ve learned so far with his very Madonna-like microphone. He changes the music seamlessly (covering several eras of music).

• On cue, the instructor tells the boys to move down the line every 5-7 minutes. The girls stay put, as a different boy moves down the line to dance with a new partner every few minutes.
• The instructor has been teaching dance club at this school for 35 years. He’s elderly, and he’s hip.
• The kids have learned a lot… the mashed potato, the cell phone, the electric slide, and the box step.
• Also, the dip.
• I felt a bit cheated when the instructor said, “How many of you gentlemen dipped your Mom’s last week?”  I did not get dipped.  I’ll be looking into that.
• During the box step, the participants are asked to discover three new facts about their partner.
• It was the boys, some of them, that found their groove, and had arms flying and heels kicking in a flurry of excitement. They were truly enjoying themselves, and were sad to see the time ending. This surprised me. Some boys didn’t want to move, at all.

• Girls enjoyed dancing with other girls, and often paid more attention to the girls beside them, rather than the boy across from them.
• The energy radiated off the four lines of kids dancing in unison was intoxicating.
• During the Box step, the music was The Bee Gees, How Deep is Your Love. Tears filled my eyes at the prospect of realizing many of us will all be together again, in some shape or form, as parents at our children’s weddings. I looked around, and many other Moms were wiping tears away as well. I hope I am standing with every one of them at some wedding in the future.  Just so we can say, “Remember when…?”
• If none of those Moms are there at the weddings, I will trust that the Moms I am with experienced something similar, somewhere else, and I’ll try to form that bond with them, and share a tear.

I waited for at least 35 minutes for my son to finally make it down the line to where I was standing… close to my Nikon D80 camera. I lifted the camera to shoot, and my son’s face, in a panic, mouthed the word “No!” to me.

I chose to go with the “building trust” route, and gently put my camera down. I shot only hands and feet.

Next year will be even better, and I can’t wait to be invited again.

A Mother’s Ring is something I’ve always coveted.  I’ve never bought one because Mother’s Rings look too matronly.  This one is perfect.  See more of Mad Maggie’s Designs, here.

There’s nothing quite like the first week of back to school to light a spark under your marriage. I don’t think I have the strength to sign one more school form, cross reference yet another medical form, or enter one more sporting event on our family calendar. But I do have the energy to sit in a nice restaurant, sip a fine glass of wine, and stare at my husband across a plate of carefully-crafted sushi. And, we won’t be talking about the kids.

This past week was, and already the one ahead is promising to be, grueling. The school supply list required a trip to three different stores, there were late night runs to the grocery store for paper bags for the required book covers that are due tomorrow, the endless parent information nights that we drag ourselves to when we really should be putting our kids, and ourselves to bed. I’m just done with all of it.
That’s not all. Re-entry to land-locked life, from a summer at the lake, has been difficult. First, people are EVERYWHERE; I feel so cramped all of a sudden. Secondly, my sunsets, which once looked like this, now look like this:

That’s the sun there, behind the garage, between the telephone lines. We don’t even have telephone lines at the lake. We barely have cell phone coverage. And, we’re fine with that. Inner turmoil is running rampant through my mind now that I’ve left the lake, and I’m back here to stay. Difficult to put into words.

So, tonight, while fixing dinner, I’m already planning how we’ll take full advantage of my oldest son’s capability of baby-sitting his younger brothers, so that we can sneak off for some adult time. Then, my husband comes home with a frown. He’s sick…it’s something he ate.

I mixed up some peppermint essential oil for him, he rubbed it on his belly, and in a few hours he was doing much better.

Still, there were more roadblocks to come. My oldest son opens his homework… he has a lot of homework. Lots of homework. So, we’ll be staying in tonight, after all. I’m beginning to think there’s no break in sight until next summer at the lake.

There’s no way to describe the feeling that comes when I crawl into bed with my husband, and I feel those silky, yet muscular, legs between the sheets. This is the part I dislike the most when he’s training for an Ironman Race. The race that is a swim 2.4 miles, 112 miles on the bike, and then to run a marathon, 26.2 miles.

People assume the reason triathletes shave their legs is because it makes them more aerodynamic. This is not true. The real reason for the shave is that not having hair makes it less painful when they have an injury (their average speed on the bike is 25-30 mph) and the lack of hair makes the injury easier to clean.

The absence of hair means that race day is getting precariously close. My heart and stomach are take a leap whenever I think of this. This time, he’ll be sitting on the airplane by himself as he travels to Idaho. There will be no little boy climbing all over the airplane seats, looking out the window, and when he sees the city, saying “Look at that GOTHAM city,” when it sounds like God Damn city, as we bury our heads, and the passenger erupts in giggles, while his brothers say, “Say that again!” And the little boy DOES say it again… and again… and again.

The impending date of this race is causing me to think and to remember. Last time, there was lots of heat. Ninety-seven degrees. Very hot for Idaho. Racers were collapsing on their bikes out of exhaustion, and crashing.

I’m remembering now all the little things that we did for him… not that I don’t think he can’t do the race without us. He will finish, but will it won’t be the same. Things like having someone to eat his oatmeal with at 5 in the morning. Tucking little boys in bed while you’re too nervous and jittery to sleep. Hearing little boys yell “Go Daddy!” Putting sunscreen on his back. Still, of course, he’ll have the team there with him.

The boys were so clever last time, as we tried to manuever our way around the race as novices. We found it impossible to find our Daddy/Husband in the crowd when they all came out of the water from the swim. I frantically searched the crowed of wetsuits climbing out of the lake, dripping, running to transition to the bike, peeling off their suits. I realized there, sadly, that we probably wouldn’t see him for the rest of the day. He would be a blur in this wet suit crowd, a blur on the bike, and maybe, we’d see him briefly on the run. No chance to cheer, “Go Daddy!”

My son had a flash of insight — a brilliant idea. The night before, we had stood along the fence to see his bike and gear — standing, waiting and ready to go. Guarded, by watchful volunteers, all night long. And his bike was close to the end, right by the path for spectators. So, following my son’s great idea, we rushed as quickly as a Mom can when she’s pushing a stroller with three other boys behind, through the crowd, and found the spot and waited. I hoped we weren’t too late. Nope. Bike still there. So, we waited with the crowd and watched other swimmers file in to jump on their bike.

Then, he appeared. Of course, the boys saw him first. We called out his name, knowing, and rightly so, that this would probably be the only cheer he would hear from us for the rest of the day. We startled him. He didn’t expect to see us here, in this “perfect spot.” Not only would we see him, but while he was putting on his shoes, we could spend at least 1.52 minutes with him. Still, the excitement of seeing us flubbed him up a bit, and he forgot which row his back was in, as he stared at us. My son, of course, directed him to the right bike. “Dad, you’re bike’s right there,” he says on the video, while the crowd laughs.

So, I’m crawling into bed with my husband tonight. Hairless legs. While I think about his big race, what happened before, and not yet knowing what’s going to happen this time.

I’m at the lake, enjoy yourselves this weekend. Yesterday was our 15th year anniversary. And check out my review on a great game, that we’re probably actually playing right now, here.