Gribouillage

When Little S plays sometimes he uses pens and because he's a Real Boy he uses his pens like explosives. Suddenly he'll be drawing straight lines then he'll start making the airplane sound, then the explosion sound and BOOM all those sound effects. There's always a narrative like "the airplane is going reallly, rreaalllly fast and then ...pooooo, aghgg pow!" It always surprises me to see all the scribbling. The calm stillness of his straight lines is suddenly an explosion of color as he fills the page. It's out of nowhere. Last night I was thinking my life has been like that lately, calm lines then an explosion of airplane crashing scribbles.

So much happend in two weeks it's hard to imagine that it's been so short, wow. Writing about it all in detail would take me three posts so I'll just try to summarize. School was finishing up for Little S and we were planning a party with a few moms, straight lines and then it all started snowballing into about 15 moms and all their siblings, scribbles starting. I was cleaning all weekend in preparation and Monday night I got mad because Seb brought home a last minute dinner guest, an Arab collegue. It was a trying evening because he was anti feminist, heck anti woman from what I could see, and I had to REALLY bite my tounge the whole evening to keep from starting an argument. I was happy at the end though that he was there just as our bathtub came in a truck from Lyon at 9 O'clock, a long story funny story actually, but the short version is that a teenage couple brought it in a pickup truck, and anyway he was there to help unload it, so he did serve a purpose even though I was ready to pitch him into the driveway for being an asshat.

The next night I told Seb to try to get home early to help me with the garden because we'd lost a night. He owed me this after forcing me to entertain his lovely dinner guest. Seb was tired but one of the jobs was to burn all the trash at eleven o'clock when the neighbors are sleeping. And that's when after pouring gas on the fire I saw my husband in slow motion flying through the garden backwards. He ended up with second and third degree burns on his legs and he couldn't walk for a week. I still had to have the party because at least half of the moms coming were casual aquaintances and I didn't have phone numbers, plus Little S was a completely traumitized seeing his dad taken away in an ambulance at midnight. The party was a good distraction. Ummm, yeah you could say that.

We still had the workers coming from Portugal to begin the job on the house in three days and there was no way to cancel it. That meant lots of boxes had to moved, heavy furniture stored and we had to prepare the work area. Their boss, Seb's friend who was loaning us his guys said over the phone that he couldn't cancel, "but don't worry they'll help you move everything." I tried to move as much as I could, running up and down the steps over the next few days, filling boxes, fetching Velux windows, but I started to lose my mind with Seb in bed needing full care (he should have stayed in the hospital, we realize that now) and the kids under my feet, bored and restless. We called the in laws but they launched in to their usual speech about how they were busy. A day later I called back and we begged. Could they please come? They came the next day with their camping car ready to go with us into a campground. It seemed like such a good idea at the time but it makes me laugh now. Lots of scribbling.

The Portuguese arrived at 10 am on Monday. The camping car was in the driveway, husband was in the bedroom surrounded by piles of laundry and I was taking Little S to a birthday party. Everything normal right? A mom at the party asked if I could water their garden while they were gone on vacation the next few weeks and then she said "hey why not just stay in our house too?" What a stroke of luck. I think sometimes we have an angel. I thought about that when I saw Seb flying through the garden too. An angel because he had singed ear hairs and eyebrows but his face wasn't touched, just one leg very badly.

The Portuguese, all four of them, ahem took over our house. They did great work but for two weeks they used my tea towels to mop up grease, slept on the kid's mattresses and blankets in the dust upstairs (they borrowed them from the living room boxes) and littered our yard with beer and YOP bottles. They broke every trash bin in the vicinity and they never did move the furniture from upstairs but instead used the handy sofa table to cut boards. Seb's response, so typically male you have to laugh, "why do you even like that table anyway?" There was a lot of cringing in between admiring their work, truly a love-hate relationship. I was torn.



Yesterday we moved back in and I cleaned the toilet while Charlotte screamed in that whining "mom, bananas, nowwwwwww" voice. I was completely grossed out and I said to myself "are they really coming back in two months?"

The whole two weeks was like that. I also got a root canal, Little S knocked out his front tooth on his slide, we had dinner in Normandie with Seb's parents and I had a lot of moments where I sat in the wonderful garden at my adopted house and drew pictures of the view. And we watched the town empty as all of Paris went on vacation.



And that was what all the scribbles were about. Like when I moved to France and later to Mexico. And when Charlotte was born. And so many other times in my life.