Whew, I’m back. Traverse City is a really pleasant town with very good coffee and a nice but not overpowering healthy hippie feel to it. There is an abundance of water sports, kombucha, and frisbees. I liked it. I liked being in the car too. I liked stopping at the antique stores on Lake Michigan and talking to very old ladies about Victorian clothing and handling fractured flapper dresses with pounds of beads and crumbling silk shoulders, while Aure played with hundred year old dolls, miniature windmills, ancient light bulbs, flaking egg beaters, and other pleasantly hazardous toys. I have a heap of brand new old indestructible linen tea towels and a pile of ragged old clothing in patterns and textures I couldn’t resist, despite their unwearability. We played on the beach in Lake Michigan and grilled things out of doors and ate quantities of cherries and honey and Michigan maple syrup, which is dark and sharp with a mineral, molasses flavor.

And now– good god, finding child care occupies an astonishing amount of time and thought.  So instead of pretending anything else, I will just cave and admit I haven’t had the energy or the spare brains to think about the world outside a fairly distinct bubble. And you know, when you’re sequestered like that by a glut of immediate things, it becomes both harder and more necessary to look up—sort of the way sitting too long in front of the computer makes you blind after a while. And speaking of small family spaces, there is an apartment in Barcelona featured in Dwell right now that I really love. It’s beautiful and crumbly and distinctly unslick. Go look if you get a chance… I have a theory that the physical spaces occupied by families privileged enough to choose the details of their surroundings serve as a sort of concrete representation of the relationships within them. I’m not saying it very well, but I think sometimes people stay together for years, each interaction with the other adding to and firming their definitions of themselves and each other, which the domestic architecture begins to reflect and further. They may see an increasing brittleness in the relationship, but in the space accreted around them and worn through with deep conduits by a great sameness over the years, they find themselves unable to change direction, trudging along in the track they’ve been bumping around for years now with their eyes closed. Really, I’m making a mash of metaphor and reality here, but I do mean actual physical spaces. If you grew up in suburbia, think about the living room of your childhood. The layout of the kitchen. Your parents bedroom. The place where the washing machine lived… And I can’t help thinking of the place I live now and wondering whether we’ve succeeded in making something that reflects and reinforces the what’s good about each of us and what’s good about us together as a family. And speaking of family and childhood, Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky responds to that well written but kind of dumb article by Michael Chabon in the NY Review of Books.

And while I’m on family—adoption, it turns out, is in the eyes of the law much more like a marriage in which one partner has all the decision making power, than a parent child relationship at all. If it doesn’t work out for you, the partner with the power, you can, with some inconvenience, throw your child away, and his take on the matter is irrelevant. Of course some children can’t live in families without being a danger to themselves or other, but I wonder why adopted children in that category are treated as legally distinct from children born into their parents family? (In fact, not only is there a distinction, but there appears to be no statute of limitations on the distinction.) This seems especially shocking after the appalling business of creating a new birth certificate on adoption, as if the child sputtered into existence only at the moment of adoption. Here’s what I know: when we’re the ones in power and they are “the least of these” it is abhorrent to sever ties as though the child involved were a self sufficient adult. The adult in the position of power is morally culpable… How’s that? I’ve gotten soft from all the years of buttery liberal moral relativism and empathy and squishy self protective niceness and superstitious pop tripe about karma, but I can still dig up some fine Brethren style absolutes about millstones and necks and oceans.

My own baby is really and truly a toddler and despite a fancy for purple sequins really and truly a boy. He has entered a phase (from which I s’pose he’s unlikely to emerge) in which he articulately compares most objects in the physical world to his dingling. It’s! like! a! dingling! (No, mothers-to-be who populate the pregnancy message boards of the world, you don’t actually get to choose the discreet euphemism or strict anatomical term your child will settle upon for descriptions of breastfeeding or genitalia. Anything said once by anyone is fair game.) (And please little potato, can’t we draw pictures of hands or feet or even belly buttons for a little while?) He rarely appears to be paying attention but often uses language that surprises me. The other day he was piping on about torres de agua (Is that how you spell water towers? Also– nice and consistent, right?) from the back seat as we drove through the countryside in Michigan, and this morning pointed to Russia on the globe and shouted Rusia! over and over again. When I came over to look, he pointed to the mountain ranges and told me they are rocks then asked me about Costa Rica. I’m pretty sure no one has been teaching him geography since his old babysitter did some five or six months ago. In the same way, he’ll occasionally curse companionably if I act particularly emphatic, though we’ve been pretty careful of our mouths now for ages. It’s a little like having a little back-up conscience. Hell! He’ll bellow as I stamp and sputter about forgetting to buy lemons or public education in the Bronx.

Oh yeah, and one more thing: Did you know there are round trip tickets to Costa Rica right now for some $260 bucks! Really, why stay home for dental work?