Ellen Herrick

Author of The Sparrow Sisters

Spring

by

James

I am in a state of longing.  Spring is such a near thing and yet, this morning, the little pot of ivy I left out is rimmed in frost.  Frost!  I rub salt into my homesick wound by checking the London weather on my computer dashboard: 75 all week.  I squeeze lemon into my emotional paper cut by watching the Kings Road web cam obsessively.  I can see the school children in their woolly jumpers and tidy lines serpentine along the footpath on their way between playing fields and classrooms.  For a moment I am sure I see my own in that line.  Perhaps it’s because my photographs of that time are so blurry?

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The End

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This begins the first of the lasts for us in London.  We will leave London next Tuesday, our 25th wedding anniversary–and what a festive way to spend it, cramming the last bits and bobs into our suitcases, struggling through security where all the metal bolts and pulleys in my back will necessitate yet a another officer-escorted visit to the “cubby of revelation,” another display of much scar-age and X-rays.  Why, I can’t think of a more fitting way to depart.  Yes, I can but apparently the Concorde has been retired and Prince Charles has not yet recovered from our last meeting so he’ll skip the send off.

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These Foolish Things

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When I first came to London there were things I believed the English did better than anyone else.  I still do, even the irritating customs.  Some of these habits are long-standing: driving on the left (that’s from reigns in the left hand, lance in the right), others are newer: the English proclivity for queuing left over from the war.  Most are almost holdovers from the days of Empire.  The English can make noblesse oblige look as natural as breathing.

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Through the Looking Glass

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Now that it is clear we’re moving back to America, I find myself reflecting on our sixteen years in London.  Really?  Yeah, well, you know.  So, in the next few posts I’ll probably wax lyrical (or not) about our years here: how my sons went from toddlers to men, how my daughter was born here (now that’s a typically English story–tea and biscuits in the delivery room), how I learned to drive–for the first time– here (I was only 37, you see), how I found out what a picnic should really look like (it does not involve tupperware), how to watch your sons play rugby without throwing up (modified face-palm posture).  The important stuff.  We have all become dual citizens in every way you can imagine.

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Weep No More, My Lady

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Here is something you should know about me.  I’m not a crier, not really.  I do not cry about sad/bad things happening in my life.  Ever.  I didn’t cry when my mother died.  I’m not a hard-hearted Hannah, I just don’t cry about the big things.  I do, however, weep copiously when small children sing at school concerts.  I cry when I see a little person lost in the supermarket.  I cry when I see a balloon floating away in the sky.  I have been known to cry at that 1970s ad for some do-good organization that features a kid in group home writing a letter to Santa asking for a puppy.  Does anyone remember that ad?  One kid says “Santa won’t bring you a puppy!”  And then, the do-gooder volunteer/ Secret Santa/postal worker guy reads the letter.  On Christmas morning, the kid finds a puppy waiting for him.  Of course he does.  The look on his face?  Priceless.  The look on the pooh-poohing kid’s face?  Oh, the humanity!!

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Who’s That Girl? No, Really, Who?

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Now, before you begin to wonder, “does this woman not have an un-posted thought? let me just say that we all have a junk drawer.  You know the one, bits, bobs, knobs and knockers.  Mine has about five old mobile phone batteries and a few lira, francs and pesetas.  And, oh no, here’s an envelope with one of Emma’s baby teeth!  Does that mean that I forgot to be the tooth fairy, or that I remembered and chucked the tooth in a drawer without thought?  I don’t know which scenario is worse.  It’s not like I can ask her.

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Cafe Society

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My husband is bald.  Elegantly, handsomely bald.  This has been a fact of his life, and mine, for more than ten years.  It snuck up on him when he was in mid-thirties and completely overtook him by the time he was forty.  That’s when I gave him a buzz clipper for his birthday.  His face fell so far he looked like a Dali.  I pictured a kind of ‘Out of Africa’ hair-washing scene with me in the Robert Redford role (damn it).  David saw a ‘Mommy Dearest’ Bon Ami moment (No more silly comb overs!).  After he’d buzzed it off with a number 3 blade–just a hint of spikiness, not a ‘do’ per se but not an invalid-ish hairless-ness–he never went back.

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Riding in Cars with Boys

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In the mornings, after everyone has gone to school, I make my way through the house.  I pick clothes up off the floor, stack notebooks, flush toilets and yes, make beds.  Now, while it’s true that my children make their own beds, I remake them.  I wonder if, when they are in their rooms at the end of the day, they look at their beds and marvel at how the duvets are smooth and unruffled, the pillows piled just so. Do they think, damn, I make a fine bed?  Do they silently thank me for my controlling ways?  Probably not.

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