you are beautiful and add a stick

The pile of sticks is not a fort. Japhy says that after school, the kindergarteners and first graders go into the woods in the school yard and select good fighting sticks to joist with. Many of the sticks come from the “beaver dam,” which is not actually a beaver dam, but a sunken patch of the woods by the school that we’ve given a cooler name. When it’s time to go home, the kids set the sticks in an alcove like swords laid down after a battle.

The kids have been stuck inside too much this winter with all the snow. Japhs got into trouble for putting a friend in a headlock. On the way to and from school, he and Scout will try to stomp through the snow, seeing where they can drop through a trapdoor of crust or slough off an ice disc to kick along. There has been so much snow this winter that the only sticks you can find are the victims of violent winds. The rest are waiting under snowpack. You can see how satisfying it must be to fetch a jagged black line from the woods and drag it through the flat world of ice.

I have told Japhs for a long time now that there is a rule you can’t take sticks out of the school grounds, so he lays them against the fence, worried someone will take his stick by the next day. Here’s something I know as an adult: no one is going to take your stick.

*

At bedtime, Scout told me she doesn’t like her head because it’s oval instead of round.

“I’ve been told that I have a beautiful head,” I lied, “and you have the same head as me.”

“You are beautiful,” she told me, “but your head is oval.” Then she started taunting and laughing: oval head! oval head! oval head! She also told me I have small shoulders. Good thing I have a mighty ass.

I had my own crisis of confidence in January. I looked up my performance review at work during a low point, poring over it in the intranet for kind words. Desperate for affection, I had to click to expand the boxes where the data had been entered. “Meaningful impact”—I held it to my chest to see if felt warm. “Teamwork is a particular strength.” I could learn to love a stone.

*

I’ve been taking landscape painting for three years now. I started it because it was the only nighttime class offered at the arts center, and I stayed because you can never graduate landscape class—it is a forever problem.

My classmates will often poop out an hour in. I’ll catch my easel neighbor sitting on his stool staring passively at a patch of rocks and yell, “Fred! You’re not painting!” Fred is a retired framer who refuses to be dragged into anyone’s framing dreams. Frames cost a bomb, and the secret is that painters often switch different pictures into the same frame for art shows. That’s not Fred’s problem; his issue is the submerged rocks in half-see-through water and the clump of pines that need to read separately from the pines further back.

Our teacher Deborah has to read a safety announcement partway through class. She reminds us not to chew on the ends of our oil-covered paintbrushes. I look down at my brush handles, which are fogged with pale grey. Several have taken a roll across my palette paper. I’m trying to paint snow. I’ve got cadmium on the brain.

Down the back of the studio is Conard, whose landscapes are composed like still lifes, an island of ripe rocks clumped satisfyingly in front of evergreen curtains and a lake rippling toward the viewer like a tablecloth. He likes Cezanne, I know. We all watch Conard’s colors, which are very good, but he says he’s thinking more about what makes for a good composition these days: forms and leading lines (there’s a whole cult around harmonic armature, if you don’t know). He paints a lot of Adirondack scenes he’s photographed while hiking, and I noticed this winter that there is often a nice big stick slicing through the scene.

“Conard, be honest, do you place that stick there just to look good,” I asked after seeing a stick in several paintings. He gave me a dangerous look.

*

I go to morning program, which is the monthly assembly the school puts on that parents can attend. I wave gigantically at Scout and Japhy in their clods on the cafeteria floor so they know that I’m there, MUM IS HERE HI SWEETIE.

Kids are brought up to accept their certificates for “Motivation.” They are so proud, but they’re also coy. The smile they do as they walk past their parents trying not to smile kills me. It’s a slanty line with a hook at the end.

***REQUEST FOR YOUR HELP!***

I’m looking to speak to families who have Titanic kids—you will know if you have one—for a story. Please share my info or contact me yourself! janetamanley@gmail.com

beauty is everywhere if you know where to look

after I made a special lunchbox note, hand-picked the best berries to put in her lunchbox, and gave a big hug at dropoff and pickup

Scout: you’ve been mad at me all day

goodies

people with dull jobs have been placed in the unusual position of defending them recently. Hamilton Nolan wrote about the unsexy public servants at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, who had been Musked by DOGE:

On a cold Saturday morning, dozens of members of the CFPB’s staff union gathered in front of the agency’s boxy, modern headquarters on 17th Street in downtown DC, a block from the White House. The protest of their own disemboweling displayed the earnest nature of the CFPB’s employees. “Five, six, seven, eight, Dodd-Frank is pretty great!” they chanted.

on eating from a pharmacy chain:

Self-love is an unobservable phenomenon that cavils forever. I should be punished but not killed outright. I bought a big bag of Doritos in Blackheath in the morning and started eating them in rough stacks outside the shop. I then sharpish turned and emptied the rest into a bin there and used the empty Dorito bag as a shiny mitt to force the Doritos deep into the bin, then. Everything else in the bin groaned and shifted downward.

Choire is onto something with this four-day-a-week marriage:

Last night, I was out with straight married friends and they asked where my husband is. “I dunno! It’s his life!” I told them. They were all questions about this because they have become accustomed to being in a marriage first, before being a person. I did not say, “It’s not my day to watch him,” but, in fact, that is the best possible way to think about being happily married. Just do it a little less! Where is a spouse? Ideally off on some unknown adventure or spending two days alone with your children. Later, they will return, like a German shepherd. (In fact, later I found out that he was “watching The Sound of Music.” Another typically brilliant choice from a brilliant spouse!)

You could spend three days a week with your falcons. You could be practicing your Spanish. You could finish that novel. Instead, you are spending the time engaging in marriage — still somehow unaware that this overengagement is actually what is eroding your marriage.

it’s a passing discussion in this piece on population decline, but the idea that until people hold a baby they might not understand what a baby is, or where they themselves came from, struck me

great chat about editing between Merve and Kaitlyn Greenidge over here

very up my alley

nice piece by Sarah Wheeler about release that I am still thinking about

song