9:30 a.m.

Tired, bit of the neck thing happening, might go away on its own if I eat something. Which would require getting away from this computer, where I have been sitting (with frequent ups and downs) since just before 8:00.

Barney is at the kitchen table, working on his Language Arts. He comes over to show me sentences he has written and is proud of. Yesterday he wrote a character sketch using me as a model, based on a “story” I have been writing and telling him about. Yesterday I read the first chapter to him, expecting him to be bored, but he wasn’t. He said it was interesting. I wonder if that’s because I have shared the imagining process with him.

His sketch, designed to use compound words:

“The character is a girl named Kathy. She is very beautiful and works in a café. She likes to make food for everybody. She is a moneymaking machine because so many people come to her café. She is very carefree. She likes kids and always gives them candy. She makes fudge and bread and other award-winning things. There is no dead end when it comes to baking, for her.”

The dishes were all done last night after supper so the kitchen is a room I don’t mind entering, won’t just pass through and avoid today until I am ready to face cleaning it up.

Farmbeau kissed me as I slept. I woke, he told me he and his dad were going to a town over an hour away for a combine part. They had 50 acres left to take off the field when the combine broke down. “I don’t really want to go,” he said, “but if the part is there, it will take two of us to get it off.” Must be going to a used-parts place.

The Sheikh showed up late yesterday afternoon. “I was just passing by and I think my brakes are going to quit and I can’t afford to fix them so I thought I’d stop and see you guys before I’m stuck at home with no vehicle.”

Don said “You’re staying for supper, right?”

The Sheikh looked at me, looked at Don. “I don’t know, we’ll see. I just meant to stop for a few minutes.”

“You can stay for supper, right?” Don repeated.

I laughed. “What makes you think there’s going to be supper? Barney, run in (we were sitting at the picnic table outside) and get some freezies. We’ll have freezies for supper.”

“Yay!” Barney squealed and bolted for the house.

“You’re just fooling, right Mom?” Don looked at me, worried.

“Yes, I’m kidding. Don’t worry, I’ll come up with something.”

We ate a dozen freezies anyway after walking to the garden, which the Sheikh had wanted to see because he gave us 20 of the over two dozen strawberry plants growing there. I picked a shopping bag full of green tomatoes to send home with him.

I made pancakes for supper, and a caramel sauce (creme a sucre, a French-Canadian treat) to go with them. The boys were thrilled. “Pancakes are breakfast food! Woo Hoo!” They think they have the best mom, sometimes. Dessert before a meal, breakfast for supper, man I’m good.

They really like it when I make popcorn for supper. It’s rare, but it has been known to happen.

The Sheikh's mom’s been dead since February. He Sheikh lived with her, and spent a lot of time at his grandmother’s house in the village — a hamlet, actually — several miles away. He and his mother didn’t get along, but at least he was not alone all the time like he is now. As he said last night when Farmbeau’s niece rode into the yard on her bike, saw us at the picnic table, and turned and went back out without greeting us, “People see me and go the other way.” People who don’t know him think he’s scary.

A couple weeks ago I paid the Sheikh for the kneading machine, and dropped off a carton of Players cigarettes he’d asked me to pick up at the store. The carton cost $80 and when he pulled out his wallet to pay me, I said “Never mind; I prefer to give you a bit extra for the machine and know I haven’t underpaid you.”

“If you want,” he said. “Okay. But you don’t have to. You’re a friend, so it wouldn’t matter if you got a bit of a deal on it.”

Farmbeau questioned me about the money over and above the price the Sheikh and I had agreed upon. I replied that if I am going to err, I have decided to always let it be on the side of generosity. He didn’t say anything. He wouldn’t be aware that I use that same reasoning sometimes when I buy a case of beer for him when I’m in town. I nearly talk myself out of it, thinking I shouldn’t be the one paying for all this frigging beer that he drinks like a man in a hot desert; then I think why not be generous? And I do. And it doesn’t empty my bank account, and I feel good about it, and Farmbeau feels gifted by his world. So why not?

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The photo is of me, the Sheikh, and Clementine on Halloween night in 1987. That was the best Halloween of my life. We belly-danced till six in the morning. We won best costume at the shindig in my hometown. I have never had so much fun again.

xoxoetc
~~~Kate