Down on the Farm

On the way back from Uncle Jeff's, we dropped in on Nanny and Docdoc on the "farm". Jack and Docdoc (my stepdad) have always had an incredible connection. Jack and I first visited when Jack was about 3 months old (Mum started chemo and radiation the day Jack was born, so she'd been unable to visit, and we'd been a little busy ourselves!) From the moment Docdoc first picked him up, and ever since, Jack would be (is) quiet and calm in his arms. They sort of melded together and now they sort of pal around in this lovely quiet way. I snapped this picture of them off swinging together. Docdoc will often take Jack out to the barn to show him the mower (always a hit) or they'll wander the field a bit. Like old friends.

A bit later we all headed out on an adventure to the "caravan". My grandparents in England had some land where we'd have bonfire parties, and there was always a caravan on it, that smelled like old caravans do. So a trip to Nanny's caravan is in order. It's out by the pond, and Jack informed us of the danger of the sharks in the pond, who apparently can sometimes come out in search of lunch. We took shelter in the caravan but were soon set upon by what we thought was a large, hungry shark. Luckily it turned out to be a large, hungry docdoc. We "had tea" (the English kind, as in, a meal, and an imaginary one at that!), Jack took some memento photographs, and we headed in.

The problem with being an only child with a very chatty mother and grandmother is that things get boring. Mum and I were holding forth on another of our lengthy topics about something or other, when I happened to glance out the window and see this....

It's Jack, dragging python out of the basement and up to the kitchen, where we are. Python was knitted by Mum one winter, about 8 or so years ago. Why, one might ask? I think, perhaps, because she was bored. And really only knows how to knit a cylinder. She divised a contest prior to Christmas where we all had to guess how long the python would be by Christmas holidays. (I won, I might add,a t something like 39 and 1/2 feet!!) She also had an image in her head of her grandchildren playing with it one day, and finding it in different places when they came to visit. So the fact that we saw this vision played out was very sweet. The fact that Jack just went off and found python and then invented some reason to drag him out of hiding was even sweeter. And what really brought a tear to my eye is this : I remember that winter of the python vividly. We had been trying to have kids for years already. We'd had a miscarriage earlier that year and were about to find out that our third procedure since then had failed, too. I remember that winter feeling like I would never be a mother, it would never be MY children that would play with python. And here he is, my beautiful, miraculous little boy, here and so much more marvelous than I ever could have imagined, the physical realization of all that hope and faith, the repudiation of the fear and pain that told me to stop, to give up, that hope was futile. Here he is in all his marvelousness, and he's dragging that python that seemed to taunt me with the futility of all I was striving and dreaming for. There's a lesson in there somewhere, but it's for someone more profound and more eloquent than me to describe it. All I know it that it was breathtaking.