President John Adams on a stick

As Holly started the school year, I knew from past experience that once third grade was upon us, the Colonial puppet project couldn’t be far behind. Off it loomed in the distance as the school year wore on, somewhat like a dentist appointment. I knew it was approaching and I knew we had to make our way through it and I just wanted it to be behind us.

But it turned out I need not have worried. I say that not because we did such a bang-up job making a puppet modeled on one of the Founding Fathers or another historical figure of that era, but because Holly went into this project with the mindset that it was her task, not mine. She chose her character (John Adams), she found her research materials (illustrated picture books from the Famous People in History series at the library), she sketched out her puppet blueprint, and then she sat down and made the puppet. All she asked me to do was collect necessary supplies: popsicle stick, glue, black and brown construction paper, cotton (for a fluffy wig of hair).

And then she stuck googly eyes on John Adams. For reasons I can’t explain, any face looks funnier with googly eyes. In general, our second president has a rather grim mien, at least as represented by Holly; but the eyes make me giggle. But even funnier still was after she tried to glue the popsicle stick on President Adams’ back. It wasn’t sticking; I explained she’d have to apply pressure, so she pinned her puppet under my recipe box and left him there to dry. With his black cardboard shoes sticking out from under one end and his cottony head of hair at the other, he looked like the witch in the Wizard of Oz after the house lands on her.

Having constructed the puppet to her satisfaction – little yellow paper circles for his coat buttons, a wide rectangle colored in with pink crayon for his mouth – she began drafting the script for him to recite. “I’m John Adams. I went to Harvard, and I’m proud to be a lawyer!” she exclaimed. So far it was sounding more like my last high school reunion than a Founding Father. “I don’t like it that the king of England tells us what to do and makes us pay taxes!” she went on.

As she practiced, I paged through the newspaper. And there was a photo of President Obama and the First Lady at Buckingham Palace with the descendant of the very same king that my little historian was railing against three feet away from me. “Look at this!” I interrupted Holly. I pulled up the same photo on line so she could see it in color, and then showed her a related photo of the Obamas meeting with England’s newlywed prince and princess. “What do you think John Adams would make of these photos?”

Holly studied the screen, and I could see the proverbial wheels turning. Nearly 240 years ago, a man who would become president helped write the Declaration of Independence with the intent of cutting ties with English royalty, and as Holly’s class found out during their visit to the Freedom Trail earlier this month, men died in the fighting that preceded that outcome; it was a violent and far-reaching conflict. But here was another U.S. president all dressed up and smiling with the queen by his side. And he was visiting her at her home. In England, no less.

“So you see?” I said to Holly. “They eventually learned to get along after all.”
Even for Holly – or perhaps I should say even for me – this is too simplistic a message. She deals with conflict among groups and friends every day – on the bus, on the playground, even in the classroom – and she understands that political differences aren’t exactly like third grade cliques.

Moreover, it’s not like the U.S. and England only recently resolved their differences. Unlike Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Ireland earlier this month, there’s nothing surprising about seeing an American president at Buckingham Palace.

But it makes me wonder what seemingly irresolvable political differences that exist now will be resolved with enough time – or with enough new conflicts to erase the old ones. Arguably, the U.S. and Britain have in recent decades been not so much friends as allies united against common enemies.

So it may be a stretch to try to incorporate this into Holly’s talk about the Founding Fathers. But as I looked at this week’s photos from London, I couldn’t help wondering what lesson there was to be learned from the duality playing out that moment in my kitchen between past and present. Maybe if nothing else, it was a reminder of how alliances and enmities are ever-fluctuating, and must always – whether they are as small as a playground snub or as large as world powers – be viewed with a sense of context.

Project herbal

Amidst all the work over the past few months of packing, sorting, and organizing, I indulged a few times in thoughts of what I would do when those tasks were behind me. I challenged myself to come up with a positive and proactive plan for something I could do once we moved: something beyond the necessary corollaries of unpacking, sorting and reorganizing.

I came up with the idea of growing herbs. This house has a deck right off the kitchen. I’ll put some small flowerpots of herbs on the deck and see if anything comes of it, I told myself. I know I don’t have the attention or ambition for vegetable gardening right now, but I imagined that I could nurture a small pot of some savory growing thing that didn’t require protection from pests or need special kinds of fertilizer.

My sister Lauren, an expert gardener, wrote to me with some advice on growing herbs when I asked her about it. Her long explanation reassured me that some of it would be just as straightforward as I’d hoped, even if a few parts might be a little more demanding than I’d pictured. Lauren encouraged me to think in terms of seedlings and not seeds, and I liked that idea. I didn’t feel ready to test my green thumb by actually having to wait to see something come out of the ground; using plants that were already sprouted and growing, and restricting my role to trying to make them grow some more, sounded like a task that was about my speed.

I imagined that I’d visit some high-end nursery to get the best-quality herbs I could find along with lots of garden-center advice to increase my odds of success, but as it happened, over the weekend I visited my friend Jane. We went for a walk and then ended up at her house; I was already in the car backing out of her driveway to head home when she remembered that she had planned to offer me some herbs to take home.

“Could I possibly take some that I could try replanting?” I asked. She conceded that I probably could. She fetched a trowel and some plastic bags from her garage and showed me what she was growing. We agreed that I would take a cutting of garlic chives and a cutting of mint from her.

As soon as I arrived home, I went out to plant them. Our yard already has a fenced-in area where the previous residents gardened in the past. I couldn’t find a trowel, but I found a large rake and a small one that they had abandoned in the garden, and those two implements seemed sufficient to till the soil enough that I could put my garlic chives and mint into the ground, at opposite ends since I didn’t know how much they’d spread.

I watered them, tamped down the dirt around them, and mentally encouraged them to take root. I sprinkled some water over them from the watering can, also left in the garden by the previous residents. Overnight I heard a light rain falling and hoped that it boded well for my herbs.

The next day I was shopping at Whole Foods and in the produce section discovered some herbs still in their soil, growing in small pots. Buying seedlings at the supermarket didn’t quite fit in with my vision of a visit to a high-end nursery, but then again, neither did taking them from Jane’s yard, and both opportunities had presented themselves over the weekend. I bought a cilantro plant and found a place for it within the garden when I arrived home.

In the day and a half since I planted the third of my three herbs, we’ve had a few light rainfalls and not much sun. I’m not sure how my plants are doing. The garlic chives from Jane’s yard look fairly firmly rooted, and I’ve heard no one can mess up with mint. The cilantro, on the other hand, is looking a little peaked and ragged, more like a pile of produce you might see on the floor at Whole Foods than a thriving crop. But it’s still in the ground, and I’m hopeful it will perk up in the next day or two.

Growing my own herbs would bring me great pleasure. It’s a new endeavor and one I’m not yet sure I have the skill to manage. But somehow it seems like the pieces all fell into place: the encouragement from Lauren, the visit to Jane’s yard, even the fact that Holly, who normally doesn’t like food with strong flavors, ate several stalks of garlic chive right out of the garden yesterday afternoon (and reeked of garlic and onions for the next several hours). Just as I’d hoped when I came up with the idea over the winter, though, it’s something positive, something far more appealing than more unpacking and reorganizing. It’s an attempt to do something new and proactive, and for all of those reasons I’m hoping that it turns out to be something I do well.