Author: Erin

Fruity, with fleas.

Posted on by Erin

One of my kids ate their own hair today.

We were working on writing and he had an awesome story going about a murderous Barbie taking over a summer camp.  I looked up at him at one point and he’d plucked a hair out of his head and was squinting at it.  He said, “This is so I can make my twin.” 

Excuse me?  Were we discussing cloning and I missed it?  He said, “No really, I can.”  And then he popped it in his mouth, chewed, and swallowed.  How do you even reprimand that?

I said, “Did you seriously just eat your own hair?”  To me, hair in my mouth is one of the most uncomfortable and disgusting feelings I can imagine.  He was totally cool with it, though, like he’d just filled us all in on his favorite afterschool snack. 

But what about all the dirt and environmental stuff that might be on your hair?  “No, it’s fine,” he said, “I just took a bath.”  When? When did you just take a bath? “Um….hhmm…this morning?”  If you had to think about it, it’s been too long.

What if there’s lice? “Oh, no, then that’s perfect!  Lice are bad!  I’ll eat the bad lice!”  Oh, no, dude…don’t eat lice.  You’re a primate and all, but that’s not really how we roll up here at the top of the food chain. 

I decided to let it go for the time being so that everyone could settle back down and get to work.  After a few minutes, though, a kid said to me, “Hey, why are you still looking at him like that?”  I said that I just couldn’t believe he’d actually eaten his own hair.

“What?” he said, “It’s fruity and stuff!”  Then, “And it has fleas…” 

Oh, Lord, help me.  Last year I had to have a conversation with this kid about how his tropical fruit flavored chapstick was not a snack.  I think we’ve escalated.  Blech.

Visions of Fall

Posted on by Erin

If you were to look in the photo album of my brain under the heading “fall,”  this is what you’d find:

This is the side yard next to the old hotel in Hooper, WA.   It just needs some pumpkins scattered around the tree trunks to look super harvesty. 

Flip through a couple more mental photos and you’d find this:

And this:

Those are both overlooking the Snake River.  Ok, keep flipping, keep flipping….there…Palouse Falls:

Somehow over the years my brain has begun to equate “Fall” with “Eastern Washington.”  Not just Eastern Washington, though, the Palouse region.  And not just the Palouse region, Hooper.  

It’s probably got something to do with this:

Hunters. 

And this:

What’s left of the thing that got hunted.

Hunting season kicks off in October and every October several members of my family set up a secondary residence in Hooper, where our cousins live.  I don’t hunt, but I also don’t like to miss out on opportunities for family togetherness.  Or opportunities to see pretty, ranchy things like this:

There is a surprising lack of fence-posts and barbed wire in my daily teaching life.  It’s weird. 

Also missing in my daily life–these guys:

Kirstin came to Hooper with me this year and we tried to make friends with these guys.  We tried our hardest.  There was some small talk involved, we asked about their families, and inquired about their hopes and dreams.  We pulled out all our best material, batted eyelashes…no dice. 

They rallied their buddies and charged us.  See:

We had to run for our lives.  I think it was the eyelash-batting that did us in.  As a redhead I’ve actually got red eyelashes (that I keep carefully concealed under layers of mascara, for everyone’s safety), and it’s possible that all that blinking and batting stirred up some latent-anti-matador instincts.  They couldn’t help it.

Okay, so they didn’t actually charge us, it was a slow saunter.  But still, I know I was intimidated.

Either way, those guys are a permanent part of my visual reference for Fall.  There’s something about the clear crispness of the air over there and the turning leaves against the warm tan of the dry grasses…it really leaves an impression.  Oh, and there’s this one last image:

Big ol’ pile a deer skin.  Yep, that’ll stay with ya.

Happy Autumn!