Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [87]
Sheep. Maybe next year.
And yet there are beautiful days. On a lovely Saturday morning when my mother-in-law and all three sisters-in-law are visiting and request some grown-up girl time, I put our two recumbent tricycles in the back of the pickup truck and drive to a local bike trail (if you question the environmental propriety of trucking one’s bicycles around, I encourage you to attempt a series of 10 percent grade hills on a tandem recumbent with a weeping seven-yearold as stoker and get back to me). Amy is pouty upon departure, wishing as any little girl does to be one of the big girls, but by the time we hit the bottom of the first hill she is happily shooting the breeze. This is becoming an established pattern. After a short drive to the trailhead, we unload the trikes, hook them in tandem, and set out. Behind me she narrates nonstop. “Can you tell I’m helping?” she sings out when we hit a slight grade, and indeed I can. The poor kid, as tall as she is, is nowhere near sized for this bike and is basically lying flat so she can reach the pedals. We roll along the river into downtown Eau Claire, then cut across the old railroad bridge and down to Phoenix Park, where today a local arts festival is in full swing. As we draw near we can hear live music. Amy stops pedaling and sits up in her seat. “It’s the Cheese Puff Song!”
The “Cheese Puff Song” has been in heavy rotation around our house for some time now. The artist, Magic Mama, is a local resident. I hustle to get the bike parked, and Amy makes it to the music tent in time for a chorus. For the rest of the show she sits glowing in the front row, singing along to the songs she knows—including “Go Barefoot” and “Take It Outside”—and happily participating when Magic Mama hands out used potato chip bags and encourages the children to crackle the bags in time.
Next we go to the craft tent and make a puppet. While Amy swabs glue and cuts out eyeballs, I take two thin strips of construction paper and show her how to make dangly accordion arms like I learned back when I was eating paste. When the puppet is finished, we wander through the farmer’s market and stop at the local foods booth, where our friend Aaron lets us sample farm-direct apriums. Amy spots a bevy of belly dancers and says she wants to watch. Who am I to argue? Amy likes the belly dancers very much, and points out her favorite costumes. In order to serve honesty I must skirt the edge of propriety and report the demonstration expanded my appreciation of the female form in both an artistic and a more basic sense, and it didn’t hurt that the scent of patchouli was prevalent throughout. Even as a guy with pickup truck sensibilities, I have always gone a little weak in the liver for patchouli. After the belly dancing we find the body art tent. Amy gets a henna tattoo on her foot and I get a henna wedding ring. Can’t lose it. Later we wander back over to the music tent, where the musician Bruce O’Brien is accompanying himself on banjo while singing another one of Amy’s favorite songs, the chorus to which goes “Peace and joy and harmony, and love is in the middle.” She is sitting beside me on a hay bale, and when she leans her head to my shoulder during the chorus I hope he’ll reprise it again and again. After the concert Amy asks if she can talk to Mr. O’Brien, and when she looks up at him without guile and says, “I really liked your music,” I get teary at her earnestness. We circulate a while longer, Amy gets a ride on a goofy bicycle that is doubling as art, she plays a while with the children of some friends, but there are clouds moving in now, so we have to go. On the ride back Amy pedals just as eagerly as she did on the way in, and when we are tooling right along she says, “I thought this day wasn’t going to be fun, but it was!”
I have been saving the best surprise for last. Anneliese and I have split an order of chicks with our friends Billy and Margie. The chicks have arrived, and I am taking Amy to meet them. (We have a week-long family trip planned soon and won’t take our chicks until after we return.)