It's National Poem in Your Pocket Day! This is the day when the Academy of American Poets encourages everyone to carry a favorite poem around in their pockets and then "share with co-workers, family and friends."

Well, my co-workers are really more into swinging, and playing with toy ponies, and dumping dried beans all over the floor, than in listening to poetry. (Although I did read from A Child's Garden of Verses during potty time today). My husband likes poetry, but he's at work. If my poem were actually in my pocket, it would stay there, all folded and covered in lint and being crumpled up whenever I shoved pacifiers and barrettes and stray graham crackers in next to it. So I will cast my poem out into the wilds of the Internet in hopes that it will reach a wider audience.

Leisure

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this, if full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

--William Henry Davies

I read this poem in the Writer's Almanac today and it struck me immediately. I wish I took more time in my life to stand and stare, instead of always being full of care.

Some signs that my 4-year-old is growing up way too fast:

Eagerly braving icy lake water to sit on a jet ski, just like Daddy.

Offering to roll our 32-gallon garbage bin in from the curb--and doing it successfully, no sweat.

Tenderly calling her little sisters "darling" even as she orders them around and gets frustrated when they do not obey her.

Saying, "No thanks, I'll tuck myself in," when I attempt to snuggle her blankets around her at night.

All those things I managed to take in stride, but I just about swerved off the road and killed us all when she called to me from the back seat yesterday: "I'm interested in sex!"
"What?" I said.
"I'm interested in insects!" she repeated.
"Oh...yep. Insects sure are interesting," I replied.

At least she's not growing up that fast.

I have a lot of blogs on my feed reader, and when I'm too darn busy I don't always get around to reading each one every day. This morning I took a minute with my cup of coffee to read the last three days' worth of posts from 5 Minutes for Parenting, and wouldn't you know that every single one of them was great.

The kind that makes you nod, and smile, and sigh thoughtfully. And then frown at your own blog and wish you spent more time putting out deep, thoughtful, lyrical posts. If you've got a minute (cup of coffee recommended, but not required) check these out:

As Long as I'm Living, a beautiful meditation on the ways that being a parent will change you.

Happy Winds-Day. Finding glory in a blade of grass.

Praying for a child's future spouse, and why I don't do it. From one of my favorite bloggers, Veronica of Toddled Dredge.

For a long time, Britain and France fought over Grenada. The French left behind place names. Morne Rouge, Lance Aux Epines, and Petit Martinique are some of the locations in Grenada. They also left a French-African-English patois language that the locals speak.

The British left behind other cultural tidbits: schools where the boys and girls wear uniforms (pleated skirts, starched skirts, ties); red phone booths; driving on the left-hand side of the road, and a love of games like cricket and rugby. At any time you might drive by a field and see young men all decked out in cricket whites, bowling for the wicket, or whatever it is cricketers do. (I know nothing about how cricket works). Grenada is still actually a Commonwealth of the British Empire, and the Queen is on their money. Being a moderate anglophile (we spent our honeymoon in England), I really got a kick out of these little bits of English formality, especially when juxtaposed with the generally free-and-easy feeling of island life.

Grenadians also hold to a much more formal, British-type standard than we Americans do of what constitutes proper dress. Grenadians who are just hanging out dress in Western-style clothes like jeans and T-shirts. But Grenadians dress to the nines when they are going to work.

Everyone, even the checkers at the grocery stores, wears full-on business suits. Women wear knee-length skirts or slacks, buttoned-up jackets and high heels, with hair perfectly coiffed and nails nicely done. Also, most older women that I saw seemed to wear long skirts most of the time, not just to work. They sometimes wear dressy women's hats, too. But it was the working women who earned the highest respect from me. They go all-out in their clothes for what we here in the States would consider to be an unimportant job, one to which we would probably wear jeans and a polo shirt with the store logo.

Let me tell you, when you're a tourist walking along the street (or riding the reggae bus) roasting in your tank top and shorts, and you see a lady walking to work in a polyester suit, high heels and nylons--well, you just have to admire their dedication to appropriate business attire.

I've already mentioned soca, which I actually liked pretty well. It's very upbeat, kind of dance-music-ish. One time on a reggae bus we heard a Soca-ized blend of old Sunday School songs. "This Little Light of Mine," "Oh When the Saints Go Marching In," "I'm Gonna Sing, Sing Sing..." and others, all set to this techno beat...I was really tempted to sing along, but I was sitting in a bus full of strangers and I think Eric would have crawled under the seat to get away from me if I had started singing, so I refrained.

The thing is if I weren't so obviously an American tourist, it would not have been out of the ordinary for me to burst into song at all. The locals sing along with the radio, sweetly and completely unselfconsciously, everywhere they go. T Here at home, only small children walk around in public singing out loud, and we all smile at them and think how cute they are. An adult who walked around in public singing out loud would be considered annoying or strange, at best, and possibly seriously mentally challenged. In Grenada, though, the locals sing at any time or any place. The waiter bringing your meal or the checker behind the counter might suddenly burst into song while completing your transaction.

And as far as what they sing, besides soca, the other favorite music of the islands seems to be 1990s easy listening hits. You hear Celine Dion everywhere. Eric Clapton, Billy Joel, Whitney Houston. The kind of thing that no one who considers themselves even slightly "hip" listens to anymore in America. It is BIG in Grenada. Meg swears that she once saw an entire group of men digging a ditch--big, sweaty, manly men--singing their hearts out as they worked to "My Heart Will Go On."

Getting places in Grenada is an interesting proposition. Traffic moves on the left-hand side of the road, a nod to the country's British colonial history, and drivers weave in and out of traffic with seemingly little regard for the road ahead of them--though I never saw anyone crash. Although theoretically we could have rented a car to get around down here, there is no way I would have had the guts to drive in Grenada. It takes nerves of steel, and I give Meg total props for driving us around in the Suzuki Escudo (the national car of Grenada, it seems, there are so many of them) that she borrowed from a friend for the week.

If you don't have a car in Grenada, that leaves you with two ways to get around: on foot, or the bus.

Buses in Grenada are everywhere. These are not the same type of municipal buses we see in American cities. They're more like a US full-size van, except not like any family van you've ever ridden in. Each driver has his own bus tricked out exactly how he wants it. Each is labeled with a name--everything from "Jesus Saves" to "Dynasty" to "No Fear." They call them reggae buses. When I asked Meg why they call them reggae buses, she shrugged. "Because rasta guys drive them? Because they listen to reggae music? I don't know."




The reggae buses cruise the streets of town constantly, with a two-man crew: a driver and a spotter. Whenever they see anyone walking down the street--any pedestrian at all--they shout out the window. "You need a bus? Hey! You need a bus?" If you don't need one, you just shake your head. If you do, the bus pulls over immediately, wherever it happens to be, and you run up and jump on board. (Unless, of course, a police officer happens to be around, in which case everyone on the bus starts yelling, "Po! Po! Po!" and the bus pulls over only at the designated bus stops.)

The buses are crowded with Grenadians of all ages, shapes and sizes, plus the occasional student or tourist. The spotter motions you to your seat as you get on, and you squeeze in wherever you can. You go about a block and then, the bus pulls over again to squeeze more passengers in. You go another two blocks, and one of the passengers will suddenly knock the wall of the bus. This means, "I want to get off now, please." The bus pulls over, everyone next to or in front of them files off so they can exit, and then they all pile back in again.

The reggae buses are stifling, crowded, sticky and loud (And the few that I rode in weren't actually playing reggae. They seem to favor soca, a Caribbean musical style that is sort of a blend of rap and techno with a little super-charged reggae thrown in).

They are also dirt cheap and easy to find. It costs $2.50 EC (EC stands for East Carribean dollar; the local currency) for a ride. That's like $1 US for a bus ride anywhere on the island.

Although I think I would get tired of relying on buses for transportation eventually, and it would be hard as heck to maneuver my passel of babies and toddlers in and out of those things, for tourists who want to get around the island for cheap and who don't mind mingling with the locals (as in being seated so close to them that your sweat is probably literally mingling with theirs) then reggae buses are the way to go.

You'd think that with as long as I've been writing for newspapers I would have learned about deadlines by now.

As in, that it's a good idea not to have a whole bunch of them right at the same time. Especially when you've got only a finite amount of time available for work and a lot of things demanding your attention. Like, three small people dependent upon you for all the daily necessities of life.

However, I am a fool and I am always overly-optimistic about my capabilities when I am scheduling things, and as a result I have a whole bunch of stories all due within a week of each other.

My desk is swimming in pieces of paper torn out of my notebook, each page covered in scribbles legible only to me. I have half-a-dozen Word documents open on my computer, filled with notes, story outlines, and to-do lists. There are toys and graham cracker crumbs all over the floor of the office, where I was attempting to get Evie to entertain herself while I was writing this morning. We won't even talk about the way the rest of my house looks. Actually, the bathrooms were getting so yucky that I just had to clean them today, deadlines or not.

Did I mention that Lucy and I are also working very, very hard on potty-training? Which means I'm spending a lot of time sitting on the floor of the bathroom (which is why I was so aware of how much it needed to be cleaned) reading from the nursery rhyme book over and over, while she sits on her little Dora potty seat and tries to figure out how to do her business.

Time. How is it that no matter what's going on, there just never seems to be enough of it?

Evie has learned to smile whenever someone points a camera at her. Can you tell?

I picked myself up off the ground, unhurt but with a lovely pattern of mud-blotches smeared all the way from my ankles to my rear. Knowing that it could have been a lot worse if I'd lost my footing and fallen downhill rather than uphill (it takes true talent to fall uphill), we continued on our merry way through the jungle, soon reaching the small farm we'd walked through once already.




Remembering the forbidding signs we'd read on our way through the farm the first time, I was a little nervous when we walked down the road to find ourselves face to face with a Grenadian man holding a large machete. Though machetes are fairly common on the island, it was a little disconcerting taken in conjunction with the "Back off! Head off!" signs posted nearby. We nodded politely at the man and continued past him, when he suddenly began shouting at us. We turned, and with his limited English and hand gestures, it was clear he'd noticed my muddy state.



We'd just crossed a little bridge over a small creek, and the man pointed toward a bucket on the edge of the bridge. Ah-hah!

We nodded and smiled and I leaned over, intending to splash some water from the bucket onto my legs. No! No! Machete still in one hand, the farmer strode up next to me and reached into the bucket, pulling out a dripping, brownish sponge.

Ah! A sponge. That would make things easier. I reached out my hand for the sponge.

No! Foot! He pointed, and I hesitantly placed my left foot onto the edge of the bridge. The man bent over and gently began washing my feet. At one point I thought he'd gotten most of it and began to move my foot, but he made it clear that he was not done. He thoroughly wiped every speck of mud from my foot and leg, then pointed again. Other one! He carefully cleaned my right foot as well, then pointed at Meg. She wasn't quite as dirty as I was, but the goopy trail had still left splatters on her skin.


Unlike every other Grenadian I met, this farmer did not seem to be fluent in English, but instead spoke the local French/African/island dialect, throwing in a few words we understood. He pointed out his crops to us: Nutmeg. Plantain. Callaloo.

He did not offer to wash Eric. When he was all done with Meg, he straightened up, dropped the sponge back into the bucket, and turned away.





Here in America, washing any part of another person's body for them is a startlingly personal gesture. I'm not sure about Grenada. Maybe this was simply normal for this guy--all in a day's work for a Grenadian farmer with a road to a popular waterfall running through your farm. Plant crops. Pick weeds. Slash at brush with your giant machete. Wash mud off white tourists. Maybe this man was particularly kind and friendly. Or maybe he'd just been alone in the hills for way too long and was glad for the chance to have contact with a couple of pretty young women.

Whatever it was, I was at least glad to get the mud off my legs. Although the rain might have taken care of that for me if we'd waited a few minutes. The steady rainfall turned into an absolute downpour as we neared the end the parking lot.

Narrow, twisty roads, jungle hikes, roaring waterfalls, strangers with machetes, and now being drenched to our skin in the 80-degree weather: just a few of the things that made our Grenada trip much more exciting than your standard seaside vacation.

I felt my foot start to slide through the goo once--just once--but I flung my arm out and managed to cling to a rock and stop my fall. Finally, the terrain flattened out. I felt triumphant--I'd made it all the way to the bottom without breaking my neck. We waded through a creek before arriving at the big rocks next to the waterfall where we spread out our picnic lunch.




Seven Sisters is a series of--you guessed it--seven waterfalls. We lunched at the pool in between the bottom two. If you want to pay extra, you can hire a guide to show you how to jump off the waterfalls, leaping from pool to pool. I was 100% convinced that jumping off not one but seven waterfalls would result in my untimely death. Eric was intrigued by the idea, but decided against it. With all the rain, the water was unusually high and rapid--not a serene mountain stream, but rushing and chocolate-colored from all the mud that had washed into the water.




Still, while we weren't brave enough to leap off the falls, we didn't let the murky water deter us from swimming in them.




The delightful thing about Grenada is that even when it's cloudy and rainy, it's still 84 degrees. And the mountain water was only slightly cooler than that. It was a little chilly and tingly to step into at first, but after that it was just pleasantly refreshing.



And fighting against the current added just a twinge of excitement to the swimming; you always knew that if you somehow got into the wrong spot, you just might get caught up in the current and swept right over the edge. Fun times!




We swam, we laughed, we took pictures. And then we packed up our lunch stuff, grabbed our walking sticks, and headed back to the trail...just in time for the rain to start. But the canopy of the rainforest overhead actually kept much of the rain from splashing down too hard, and, as I've said before, hiking in the rain is nothing new to Oregonians.




"It's a lot easier on the way back," I commented to Meg and Eric as we sloshed our way back up the goopy hillside trail we'd descended earlier. "Now that I'm going uphill I'm not nearly as worried about slipping in the mud and killing myself."

Of course, as soon as I said those words my feet slipped straight out from under me, and there was no recovering from it this time. I was on the ground and covered in mud.

To be continued....

We twisted and turned our way up the mountain, the engine on Meg's borrowed Suzuki Escudo screaming and steaming. Gray clouds swooped in over the mountains, but we did not let that deter us. Oregonians are not afraid of rain.



Grenada is a volcanic island, which means there is a scant area of flat land around the perimeter, and everything else in the whole country is built on nearly-perpindicular hillsides. Many houses are built with one-half of their foundation on the ground, the other half balanced on rickety-looking stilts. The road we were driving on headed up straight up the side of the volcano, ascending from sea level to nearly 2,000 feet within a few miles. Grenadians do not believe in guard rails, nor do they believe in making roads wide enough for two vehicles. It was an interesting drive. Meg screamed a lot.

At the top, we found ourselves walking through those clouds of mist. We stopped at Lake Etang and tried to feed the mona monkeys who lurk in the jungle, but it was rainy and they didn't grace us with their presence. This did not bother me, because I knew it was all a ploy on Meg's part to coax a monkey onto my shoulder, or perhaps my head. I wanted nothing to do with a monkey on my shoulder, where it could use its freakish little fingers to pull my hair or perhaps gouge my eyes out, so I did not mind the lack of monkeys. But I digress.

We parked the faithful little Escudo, paid our money to the man behind the counter of the little house at the trail-head , grabbed walking sticks from the stash outside the door, and started the hike.


To get to the trail, first we followed a dirt road through a little valley which seemed to be one of Grenada's many abandoned plantations-turned subsistence farms. There were several one-room shacks dotted alongside the road, with signs bearing slogans like: "Back off! Bad news! Head off!" I considered taking a picture of the signs, but I was afraid a machete-wielding Grenadian farmer would come charging out and take my head off, so I stayed on the road and kept my camera at my side.




As we entered the jungle portion of the trek, we found that rain had turned the trail to muck. Thick, orange-ish, slippery soup. The very muddiest mud you could imagine. This would not be such a big deal, were it not that the trail was nearly vertical and studded with large rocks.



Meg and Eric were both wearing hiking sandals. I had decided against Meg's advice to purchase Teva-type sandals for the trip, because I didn't think I'd ever wear them once I was back in Oregon, and I'm cheap. I was wearing Keds with zero tread on the soles. And I am not known for my physical agility and grace.

Needless to say, I picked my way down the trail gingerly, sure at every moment that one wrong step would send me sliding straight on down.



To be continued....

...to give you the answers to that movie quiz.

Even though it was from last month.

Just in case anybody cares.

Here are the ones nobody guessed:

5. "Come no further, for death awaits you all...with big nasty pointy teeth." This is from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," people. You know, when the old guy is warning them not to cross that bridge? And the horrible monster turns out to be a bunny? Funny. This is funny, funny stuff. I realize I'm making it sound lame, but if you've seen the movie, then you know. Funny.

7. "We have so much in common, we both love soup and snow peas, we love the outdoors, and talking and not talking. We could not talk or talk forever and still find things to not talk about." "Best in Show." Christopher Guest mockumentaries = hilarious.

8. "The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever." OK, with all the English-majory types of people who read my blog, I really thought someone would get this. My husband the engineer read it and said: "Sounds like Oscar Wilde." And he is right! "The Importance of Being Earnest." The version of this with Reese Witherspoon and Rupert Everett is one of the few movie adaptations of a beloved book (or in this case, a play) that I thought did a marvelous, marvelous job. Love it.


11. "Maybe I could be a truck driver. You got the number of that truck-driving school? We might need that." Was I the only person who loved "Top Gun" as a kid? This is when Goose is despairing because Maverick (Tom Cruise back when he was more cute and less weird) is up to his usual antics, and Goose is afraid they are going to get kicked out of Top Gun. Poor Goose.

16. "All stories have an ending, you know." The Many Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh. From the last "chapter" of the movie. Love the A.A. Milne book, and also the Disney movie. Classic.

And that's it! The rest of my selections you easily guessed. Give yourself a gold star if you got them right.

Eleven years ago, the powers that be at Linfield College randomly paired me with a girl from Wyoming as my roommate. I was very nervous about this.

I, the introvert, who had never shared a room in her life, would suddenly be sleeping, studying, changing, breathing, all in the company of a stranger? Within in the confines of a very small dorm room?

I was really afraid that this unknown Megan person would turn out to be a weirdo and I wouldn't like her at all.

Or, worse--that she would think I was a weirdo and that she wouldn't like me at all.

Turns out, the random matcher-uppers at Linfield did a stellar job. We're the only freshman roommate pair I know of who not only made it through that first year, but actually became friends. We even chose to live together for another two consecutive years and have remained friends ever since.

So when she up and decided to go to veterinary school in Grenada--and said that her apartment was open to visitors--Eric and I started saving our pennies.

It was well worth it. Meg showed Eric and I the time of our lives in Grenada. Seriously, if the whole becoming-a-veterinarian thing doesn't work out, she could have a future in vacation planning. She gave us tips on where to go, what to buy and where to eat. She opened up her home to us. She cooked for us. She braved the horrors of driving in Grenada traffic to take us around the island, and she sweet-talked a boat owner into giving us a spot on a champagne-and-lobster cruise that we weren't really supposed to be going on.

The trip was, in a way, a total blast from the past. We ate together, we hung out together. Meg studied. I didn't. And at the end of the day we all curled up on the couch and watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer together. It was just like old times.

To those of you who read this blog and are also friends with Meg in real life, and haven't gone to visit her yet, I say: DO IT. Meg rocks. And Grenada rocks. You will not regret it.





Back in 2000, Meg and I traveled to England together. Now, in 2009, we've experienced Grenada together too. Maybe this is some kind of an every-nine-years travel pattern. Who knows where 2018 will find us?

You're thinking:

So, Jen woke up one morning in Grenada, and saw a sheep, and then she dropped off the face of the earth completely, never to blog again.

This, my friends, is not the case, but I forgive you for thinking so, as posting has been quite sparse. I was busy having tropical adventures, including, but not limited to:

• riding the reggae bus,
• buying fish cakes from street vendors with large flesh wounds,
• hiking through the jungle,
• falling down in the jungle,
• swimming in a waterfall,
• attempting to bodysurf,
• attempting to snorkel,
• sailing on a sailboat,
• discovering that I really love rum punch,
• encountering cows on a cliff, crabs on the beach and lizards everywhere,
• and having my feet washed by a machete-wielding Grenadian farmer who did not speak English.

And then I got home and was reunited with my children. This weekend I've been getting caught up on my laundry and and my running, both of which were sadly neglected while on vacation.

So, to sum up: stories are coming. Many stories. And photos. But I'll leave you with just one photo, to show you how Eric and Meg and I feel about Grenada: