Big G is sitting in the cab of the truck we borrowed for a run to the dump. He’s dying to show me something cool, and it’s not the broken toilet in the bed of the truck. I come around the open passenger door, my curiosity piqued. What did our friends leave in their truck that’s so amazing to a 9-year-old? A kitten? Secret cigarettes? Marcellus Wallace’s briefcase?

“Watch this!” He leans forward and grabs the window crank. “This is how you roll up the window!” His eyes shine in wonder.

I can’t help it. I laugh out loud on the spot. THIS is exotic to my children: manual controls. You would have thought it was an on-board butter churn.

My girls like to play with my old silver flip phone — it has actual buttons. I tell my 7-year-old one day, “You know, that was my first cell phone.” Agent A’s mouth drops open. “When you were a kid?”

I chuckle in that condescending way parents do. “No, we didn’t have cell phones then.” Her brow wrinkles. “Then what did you use?”

Um. Really? “Remember that phone we had? That plugged into the wall? That you couldn’t take away from the house?” Well, it was cordless, but still. Her face is blank.

Technology from my lifetime is going obsolete in theirs. Typewriters. Film cameras. This is hard on an over-40 mom’s mental well-being, but I have to make my peace. Still, I fret: is technology making my kids soft? And by them, I mean us.

My children have always been able to pause live TV. The 3-year-old believes everything is on demand — the concept of “live” is foreign to her. The Internet is always there. Like air. Or granola bars, because those get in the house by magic too, right? They don’t know how to make popcorn without a microwave.

At the library, they run their hands along bulky VHS cases, perking up over titles they recognize until I say: “We don’t have a machine to play those.” Before long, I think their memory of CDs will dry up too. We download our music now.

I don’t give them a hard time. I’m as technology dependent as they are. When an ice storm knocked out our power in the night a few weeks ago, my first thought was, “There goes the heat,” and my second was, “What am I going to do all day with a 3-year-old and no electricity?” It’s as bad as it sounds.

I have decided to keep one activity in our world low-tech, at least for the kids: reading. I have a Kindle, but they don’t use it. Even better, Agent A has warmed up to a series that I devoured as a kid: The “Little House” books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Being a Kansas girl, I loved her stories about frontier life in these parts a century earlier. No phones. Kerosene lamps. Wolves at the door.

I read to her last week from book one, which starts with a detailed description of how they preserved meat by salting, smoking, and drying it for the winter. It was a long, smelly process. I stopped reading to point out they didn’t have a freezer like we do. Or a grocery store. My sweet little first-grader considered this and nodded solemnly. “We’re really blessed, aren’t we?”

You bet we are, Half-Pint. Thanks for reminding me.

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“Are you here?”

“Almost. Wear your coat with the hood — it’s cold.”

When mom signs out of her assisted living facility, I notice her signature is also under yesterday’s date, next to my sister’s name. “Oh, Peg was here?” I ask. Mom’s quiet for a second, then agrees: “Mm-hmm!”

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She asks, “How are the kids?” I tell her It’s spring break and they’re all a little bored. “Are you keeping busy?” I’ve had a few writing projects, I say, but it’s been a little quiet. Mom asks which movie we’re seeing, and when I tell her she says, “I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it.” I only say, “I haven’t.”

I take my 82-year-old mother’s arm as we brace for the sharp March wind. How can she be 82? I wonder. She still has hardly any gray hair. Inside, she asks, “So, are you still freelancing?” Yes, I say. I’ve had a few projects, but it’s been quiet. “How do the kids like school?” Pretty well, I say. They’re on break now. I try one: “So, did Peg take you to lunch yesterday?” She looks at her knees and purses her lips. Finally: yes.

This is how many of our conversations go. There’s not much I can ask Mom because her short-term memory is such a loose weave. Some things catch. Some things slide through. And I don’t like to frustrate her. But it makes for short exchanges if I don’t stick to the present.

As the lights go down, she asks: “Have you seen this before?”

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I’m still musing on the movie’s themes of disillusionment when Mom smiles and says, ”I usually see that movie a few times a year on TV.” Then: “I remember Pearl Harbor so clearly.”

She was 11. Her family had just come home from mass, turned on the radio, and bang — their world shifted on its axis. “No one could believe it,” she continues, talking about how Japanese envoys had just been in the U.S. She reminds me that Dad served on a tiny Pacific island near the war’s end. On the wall of her apartment is a display case of my dad’s Army Air Corps memorabilia. My son loves when Grandma lets him take it off the wall for a closer look at Capt. Perry in his dress uniform.

Happy Birthday, Grandma!

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We had a little party at my house yesterday for Mom’s birthday. My sister Lisa says Mom enjoyed seeing the kids Saturday — we’d gone to an Easter egg hunt at her place. Lisa and I share a look: she remembered. These are the little victories of memory. We know not to expect them, but we celebrate the ones we get.

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Grandma left this morning.

I’m left with three kids withdrawing from five fabulous days of mutual adoration, eating out, and lax bedtimes. Of craft time and story time and basement hide-and-seek.

Grandma is a rock star.

Grandma is whipped cream on top of frosting with rainbow sprinkles. Grandma is Christmas wrapped inside of a birthday with pony rides and a bounce house.

Grandma is the best staycation ever.

I never had a Grandma like this. Mine were older. They weren’t playful, per se, but at least one of them had a sharp wit and a fun personality. They both had so many grandchildren (48 on one side, 21 on the other) that they weren’t particularly close to any one, that I know of.

Grandma shows Little G how to make tortillas on a previous visit.

My mother-in-law is far more involved with her grandkids. It may be a generational thing. She dotes on them endlessly, soaking up every minute of her visits because they come at a premium. She drives 10 hours to see us, and we’re the closest. To see the rest, she has to fly across two time zones, or an ocean.

There’s no way that five days of indulgence could undo every scrap of discipline I’ve fought to build in my children. Right? I want to say I believe that. But during Grandma time, I inevitably start pulling in the other direction.

I insist that the kids put on shoes by themselves and get their own drinks of water, even when I know Grandma’s just trying to help. I frown in that way my mother used to, that way I hated, when they load their self-serve frozen yogurt with gummy bears, because Grandma’s treating. I reach for the stick a lot quicker than the carrot. It’s a bizarre compulsion to balance something that is special and fleeting for them, with… what?

I think I have this fantasy that if I keep reminding them about plain old everyday life, their Grandma withdrawal won’t hit them like a sugar crash. All it really does is make me the bad cop. But on the other hand, sometimes I feel forced into that role. If no one else is hitting the brakes, don’t I have to? Enforcement gets deflected my way: “Oh, your mommy said not to dig up the shrubs…”

So I ask myself: what if things were different? What if she was controlling, impatient, or indifferent? Like my own unfun grandmother, whom my older sister remembers as downright mean? Would that really be better?

Of course not. My children have banked piles of fantastic memories with Grandma, and I can’t begrudge them that. No matter how mopey they get.

Being Irish is a big deal to some people. They frame the family crest and get Celtic knot tattoos. My husband once visited a friend’s house, where the mother was listening to some traditional Irish music. She looked dreamily at my husband and said, “Doesn’t this just make you pine for the homeland?” She’d never been there, of course. Neither had he.

Americans have this funny love affair with the Irish, and it’s funny because the Irish were once a despised minority, poor and Catholic. Today, though, people will inflate a smidge of Irish background into a full-blown excuse to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, by which I mean, get s—faced at noon. Maybe not so much in my part of the Midwest — Oktoberfest is a bigger deal — but if you darken a tavern door in Chicago or Kansas City on March 17, you better be able to run with the big Irish setters. (I also learned this year about St. Practice Day, the idea of which makes my liver hurt.)

So here I am, married into a heritage, but not the culture. My husband is no Hibernophile. He doesn’t celebrate or collect anything Irish. What he knows of his family’s background is that 1) his grandfather moved to Texas from Chicago and 2) he was likely a bootlegger for the Irish mob. I’m a little thin on age-appropriate material here.

After more than a decade with this name, I’m still surprised by how people respond to it. Once I called animal control about a stray cat that was dying on our deck. The woman who answered told me straight away that didn’t respond to anything but dangerous dogs. Then she said what a wonderful name I had (which, hey, isn’t a bad compliment) and settled in to question me about my “heritage.” In our town, a beloved TV personality with the same name as my husband used to head up the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade. When he died a few years ago, we got loads of misguided condolences.

I know this day is coming, too, for my kids. The only advice I have for them right now is to omit the apostrophe when typing our name into computers because THEY HATE IT. But we have learned that the first king of Ireland was an O’Donnell, and my son thought that was pretty cool. So maybe this year we’ll talk about the significance of the shamrock. Or I’ll just introduce them to the Shamrock Shake (and maybe Irish up one for myself).

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Reflecting on art: The kids cross the glass bridge over a suspended Dale Chihuly glass sculpture.

I love that our city’s art museum has free admission on Saturdays. I hate that we’ve taken advantage of it only twice in 7 years. Why? Does the mental image of a tiny chocolatey handprint on a Lichtenstein print not give you the shakes, too?

Now, I can trust Big G and Agent A to follow museum protocol. And I figured Little G would get the hang of the no-touch rule; I’d even spot her a few false starts. We were finally gifted with a free afternoon and clear roads; it was time to get out of the house. And anyway, the museum had me at “free.”

The first work of art we see inside is above us — a glass seaform sculpture by Dale Chihuly, sandwiched between heavy panes of glass, so that it can be viewed from above and below. Up on the second floor, you can take off your shoes and walk over it, peering down into something that looks like a coral reef by way of Dr. Seuss: glass flutes and flowers in shockingly vivid shades, twisting and exploding, delicate but strong. The girls doff their shoes and pad straight out to the middle, giggling, fascinated by the paradox of looking through the floor. My son, as you can see above, is more cautious, sticking to the margins, unsettled by the illusion.

A herd of incoming patrons is pushing up the stairs, so we make way for them to have a turn on the glass floor — limit 10 people — and head into the gallery proper. The kids whisk past the printmaking exhibit that looks awesome to me, especially the aforementioned Roy Lichtenstein Bull Profile Series. I lag behind them and my husband and can’t seem to catch up, mostly because I take advantage of my position at the rear flank and linger. I feel bad for my husband, who is the one with the art degree, but not enough to close the gap right away.

Finally we regroup in a round gallery with leather benches, where I figure the kids can cool their heels and give us a chance to make more than a passing acquaintance with some paintings. It’s an exhibit of American Impressionists, including Mary Cassatt, known for her depictions of mothers in various states of parenting young children: bathing, dressing, even breastfeeding (no Enfamil in 1890, y’all). We saw one of her many works titled “Mother and Child,” this one depicting a woman in simple dress holding a tired toddler on her lap. He’s tucked into her neck and touching her face. It’s intimate and unsentimental and it almost makes me forget what little cavepersons they are at that age.

The museum’s card says the artist “devoted much of her career to a modern redefinition of the ancient theme of motherhood.” In the 19th century. Truth be told, we modern mom bloggers consider that ancient. But it seems Cassatt and we have something in common: to find beauty and purpose in the ordinariness of domestic life. To honor it by painting it honestly.

I pull my son, who’s 9, aside for minute to explain what we’re looking at here. They’re Impressionists, I tell him, because they didn’t paint things literally. They create an illusion, like the glass bridge. We stand close to one of the other works, a hazy beach scene, and I encourage him to focus on the details. Then, we step back — as far as we can go, across the room. And we turn and look back at the scene. Now, its ambiguous strokes come into focus. My 7-year-old daughter wants to know what we’re doing, and soon all of the kids are into it. They walk up close to a painting, give it a once-over, then dash to the opposite wall and turn back to see how it changes, like magic. Mentally, I pat myself on the back. Show the kids some culture: check.

I save the best part for last. We troop down to the museum’s kids area, which is currently celebrating Pop Art with BIG murals and prints by Pop artists. It’s a wide space fed with natural light and there are maybe four other kids and parents in there. It’s quiet. They have paper and crayons and pencils, and today a docent is helping kids make their own “books” with a yarn binding. The girls are drawn to the table of textures, where they can rub crayons over boards with all kinds of crazy items glued to them, like toothpicks and bottle caps and stars. When my son comes over, I hand him a couple sheets of paper. One is an Iron Man coloring page, and he’s pretty into the Avengers, but he opts for the blank sheet. He picks up a No. 2 pencil and sets to work on rendering a Balzeth, a creature in the Tolkien-inspired epic that he’s started to write. When it’s done, we post it on the magnetic gallery wall and admire it.

Artist at work

My husband has been trying to coax the kids away from their artwork for 15 minutes with promises of carbonated goodness from Sonic, but they want to stay juuuust a little longer. Big G is onto a new creature. Agent A is writing a book about a lost kitty, and Little G is fascinated by tracing letters inside of fat stencils. They’re absorbed and content. I’m no Mary Cassatt, but I’d like to think she’d feel at home in this scene.

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Oh, but unless you were here, YOU DON’T KNOW. In my stretch of the Great Plains, we got socked by two powerful snowstorms in less than a week. One must have been a make-up storm for the dry winter we had last year. Those leaden clouds sent down 14.2 inches of snow in the first round. Here’s a pic, and it’s not my porch, so there:

And it was still coming down.

Probably half of that melted, then we got 6 inches more. So yeah, if it seems like snow is all we can talk about here in the middle lands, it’s because we saw nothing else for a few days. It left us gape-mouthed, and a little giddy, too.

The day it started, my husband had opted to work from home to avoid a treacherous commute. He decided to pick the kids up Iditarod-style.

The fattening flakes fell faster and faster. Soon the borders between the street and the yard and the driveway had disappeared. Everyone who drove by honked and waved at the kids as they played and I did some half-hearted shoveling. We knew we weren’t going anywhere for a while. And it was fine.

The next morning, we woke to the kids chattering excitedly: “Someone’s stuck!” All three of them were glued to the window in the girls’ room, which faces the street, where a small sedan had ground to a halt in the foot-deep snow. What were they doing out? I wondered. My husband stared blearily into the featureless white landscape and sighed. “Guess I’m going out there.”

Soon he was shoveling snowpack away from the woman’s tires. Two hands on the trunk, a little spin, then bang — traction. He huffed and puffed behind her as she pulled the last 25 yards into her driveway. The kids knocked on the window and waved and beamed and cheered wildly for their dad, the hero.

Later we hiked over to the neighborhood park to see if the modest hills there were any good for sledding. But it was just too deep. We explored the park anyway, alien in its white wardrobe, marveling at how the snow muted the everyday sounds we never seemed to notice until they’re absent. It felt like we had disturbed the peace if we talked too loud.

Our everyday routine went blank, too. Lunch might be at 11:30, or 2:00. Bedtime got fuzzier. Instead, the days revolved around the cycle of dressing for the snow and drying the wet gloves and pants and sweatshirts after going out. We felt suspended in time, frozen in place. With no schedules to keep, what responsibilities did we have outside of food and hygiene?

But we were getting itchy. You can only hold off cabin fever so long. It was apparent in the neighbors, too. We watched three of them get stranded at the ends of their snow-clogged driveways. I couldn’t help wondering where they needed to go so badly. My husband suited up again and grabbed a shovel, his sense of neighborly duty stronger than his annoyance.

But a craving was tugging at him, too. “Pizza,” my husband said, and we all nodded. “Who’s open?” He made a few calls. It wasn’t looking good. For two glorious minutes he believed Pizza Hut was delivering, but it was only a cruel rumor.

Little Caesar’s was open, though. For carryout. “You’ll never make it,” I cautioned. He gazed at the street. His stomach growled. He grabbed his coat. We watched him back out, crunch into the gutter … and stop the van. Because he spotted another car stuck two doors down. He got out to help them, then returned to the van and rolled back up to the garage. He was forced to admit defeat. I made some unsatisfying chicken.

By the time Storm No. 2 threatened to top us off with another foot of snow, the magical glow of snow days had worn off — at least for the grownups. Sunday night I went to an Oscar party, where we struggled to see the red-carpet fashions around the school-closings ticker at the bottom of the screen. Our hostess — a teacher — predicted two more days off, and she was right. I predicted by then we’d all be dead-eyed from an overdose of streaming Netflix and leftover Valentine’s candy. The kids somehow still managed to get a charge out of each closing announcement, not connecting, as I did, that this meant another day in the house while blizzard winds howled, no friends near enough to come play and break up the sameness.

Little G sounds a barbaric yawp atop the sledding hill.

It was Tuesday when the weather broke. At that point the kids had been in school exactly four and a half hours over a week and half’s time. We didn’t get pummeled as bad in the second storm, and my fellow citizens were over it. Businesses bellowed across social media, “We’re open!!” The school district declared classes were on for Wednesday, period. Normal life was back.

And though I had longed for this moment lo, these many claustrophobic days, my heart sank a little as I shook out backpacks for forgotten worksheets or notes, as I set the bedside alarm again for the first time in a week. We were liberated from the cabin. But I was still a little nostalgic for the freedom we’d enjoyed inside of it.
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