One red VW

If I ever do write the memoir of my time in Durham, which I want to call 'Driving in England', the story of Anna's ascent of a neighbor's car will have to find its way in. She has always been a climber, and is pretty skilled, actually. If I hadn't seen her standing on top of our car a number of times already, I might have freaked out and not just told her to get down. Might have been better all around if I had. Because of course she didn't get down, as she could see I was in a conversation with a different neighbor. As I turned back to check, the owner of the car and his parents (?) emerged from the house shouting, first at Anna, and then at me.

 

I am pretty sure nobody has ever shouted quite so abusively at me before. The man yelled about his car, worried that Anna had damaged it (with her crocs?), while the other two people shouted rhetorical questions about the quality of my parenting. Shocked, I took Anna by the hand and walked away, utterly speechless. He demanded an apology and threatened to call the police. Nothing I said made any difference, though; he just kept getting angrier and eventually swore at me in front of the children. By the time I got Anna back to our house she was crying. The man and the two older people with him spent the next 45 minutes wandering around the car musing loudly over the damage Anna caused. So when I had to walk past a few minutes later to collect Iain from another neighbor's, they started in on me again. Thankfully the other neighbor offered to keep Iain a little while longer and walk him back, thus sparing him the ordeal. Eventually the owner of the car called me a moron, and demanded to speak to my husband, since I was useless.

 

Obviously Anna shouldn't have been there. But I was (and am) completely flabbergasted by the response. Really? This is the procedure for dealing with an 11-year-old girl climbing on your car? I apologised; I offered to pay for the damages. He didn't seem even to hear that. He followed me home and returned later to speak to Lewis.

 

Tonight as Anna was getting ready to go to bed, she clung to me in the way she does in a scary scene in a movie. I asked her what she was afraid of. 'Him', she said.

 

I didn't have to ask her who 'he' was.

 

 

 

 

'fashion paints'?

There are plenty of stories from our visit to the US this summer. Iain improved his swimming dramatically, Lucy discovered the joy of water wings, Thomas learned to handle a kayak, and Anna found that she likes crab. Consider this post the first installment of the 'holiday' series. Hopefully it will be cheering for all (not least of all, me) as the seasons change and our tans fade.

We vacationed on Tybee Island during the summers when we lived in Atlanta, so we were delighted to go back to somewhere fun and 'foreign', and yet familiar...and hot! Dressing for the day involved choosing which bathing suit to wear for the beach or pool. Wonderful.

One day, as Anna and I were walking back from the beach together, she insisted on 'fashion paints'. It wasn't the first time, either. The day before, when we were sitting at the table, she had said she wanted 'some of those paints'. Which paints? I asked. 'Those fashion paints', she replied. Fashion paints? I wondered. Some new nail polish maybe? No. That wasn't it. Clearly, it was something we had seen together before, but I couldn't figure out what. Eventually I said that she would have to point it out the next time we saw it. Patient girl!

Somewhere in the back of my mind, though, I must have been working on the puzzle. When she asked me on the way back from the beach, we rehearsed some of the same things. Then I remembered something we had seen and talked about: airbrush tattoos. Ah-ha! Which one do you want? CAT. She even knew that she wanted it on her leg:

Mystery solved!