The Van Buren Boys

There was a lady who lived in a house around the corner from mine. A widow, she spent many hours in her garden, weeding and--well, I don't know what else. She always seemed to be weeding, crawling on her hands and knees inch by inch, finding weeds that were all but invisible to to everyone else. She had these trees--I'm not sure what kind they were (I'm terrible at identifying plants and trees), but she had them shaped, almost topiary-style, so that they resembled open umbrellas. She obviously loved those trees. Most of her weeding and manicuring was concentrated on the little beds at the base of the trees. She had a professional come to trim the trees themselves, so that they'd maintain their perfect umbrella shape.

The lady was very reserved. I started to work part-time, often from home, when my son was in 2nd grade. So on nice days, my other son (who was four at the time) and I used to walk to Bel Pre Elementary School to pick my older boy up after school, and we'd all walk home together. We tried a few times to say hello to the lady, thinking that maybe we'd make friends, but she'd just nod politely and then return to her weeding. I didn't mind. Not everyone is outgoing, and not everyone likes little children.

The lady died a few years ago. I'd heard that she was sick and had gone into hospice care, and a few months later, I saw a For Sale sign on her front lawn. The trees are gone. They were kind of hideous, so I don't blame the new owner for taking them down. Even the beds are gone, replaced by what look like little rock gardens. I don't miss the silly-looking trees, but it seems sad that there's nothing left on the property to remind neighbors of the lady who used to live there. I never knew her name.

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I don't really know what made me think of that. I was thinking about something earlier today; something that I thought I should write about. Now it's gone, just that quickly.

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So here's a little known trick, which I learned from a cooking blog. Male bell peppers are different from female bell peppers: the male ones have just three bumps on the bottom, while the females have four. Male bell peppers are better cooked; and they're less messy when you cut them up, because they don't have very many seeds inside. Female bell peppers are sweeter, so they're good in salads and vegetable trays. I usually look for the male ones, because I make a lot of stir-fry dishes.

So I was in the grocery store, looking for boys among the peppers, and an older lady (even older than me, I mean) stopped and looked at me, looked at the peppers, nodded, and looked at me again, smiling. Then she walked away without a word.

She knew that I knew about the peppers, and she wanted me to know that she knew that I knew. It was like a shibboleth. It was like a secret handshake. I felt like Kramer, accidentally flashing the Van Buren Boys' secret sign.

"Martin Van Buren was the eighth President! That's their sign!" 

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Another grocery store story, and another nice old lady: My children were pretty well-behaved when they were little (and lucky for me, they still are). I often used to get compliments from strangers about how good my children were. But even good children have bad days.

We were in the grocery store again (because that's where I hang out). My older son was not quite 4, and my younger son was about 7 months old. The not-quite-4-year-old asked for something (probably a car; they still sell little cars at the grocery store) and when I said no, he flung himself onto the floor and commenced his second-ever (and last; he never did it again) public temper tantrum. I had to abandon an almost-full cart of groceries to get him out of the store and into the car. He was asleep before we even got out of the parking lot.

Anyway, as the tantrum progressed, I saw an old lady shuffling toward me, and I braced for what I was sure would be a world of judgement raining down on me. Instead, she looked at me and said "Honey, the years go by really fast. But some of the days are reeeeallly long." We didn't have hashtags in 2005, but that was a #truth moment if I ever heard one.

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My youngest son is 13 today, which means that I don't have any little boys anymore (and it also means that I live in the same house with two teenage boys). I remember things that happened, and I'm astonished to realize that they happened 8 or 10 or 15 years ago. Blinding speed, even amid some long days.

While it's nice to have older children, it's all going way too fast now. We have only a few more years of band concerts and swim meets and track meets and baseball games. When my children were little, I'd listen to older friends, parents of teenagers, and wonder why they were nostalgic in advance. Now I know. Now I know that all of the old ladies--in the grocery store, and weeding their gardens--were changing diapers five minutes ago, and now their children are grandparents, too.

Sometimes, though, things slow down for a few minutes. Sometimes, two teenagers decide to build something, and then I don't even mind stepping on a pile of Legos in my bare feet. The years go by really fast, and some of the days go by even faster.