A few months ago, we lost our remote control to the TV. Like all households, it is usually the first thing to be disappear.

We lived without it for more than a week. My husband, meanwhile, had moved from moderate annoyance to all out grumpiness. He didn’t want to relive his elementary years when he was forced to heave his body off of the couch to turn the DIAL on the television to switch the channels (that was when there were only 13 of them plus PBS).

We Californians pride ourselves on riding out earthquakes as if they were a ride at Disneyland.

Especially if we are native. Once in awhile we talk about it, usually in the presence of tourists or people from Georgia, and we laugh and say how they are really no big deal. We get earthquakes all the time. I grew up on them, like I grew up on skim milk and beef tacos.

We just hold on and wait for the shaking/rolling/jolting/rattling to stop.

Caltech says we get earthquakes all the time, but usually they are so small or far enough away that we never feel them. We might be driving or walking down stairs or jogging outside when they happen, and the would-be jolting fades into the symphony of life unheard.

In my lifetime I’ve “ridden out” lots of California earthquakes. I was in junior high during a big one. When Hope was a baby I remember a shake so significant I bolted out of bed and ran to her crib in the next room. She never woke up. I ended up in the door jam, but she never knew what happened.

Tuesday at about 11:40 in the morning, we got about an 8 second shake, rattle and then roll. Luckily, the three of us were sitting at the kitchen table eating an early lunch. Jolt first, then a little shaking and then rolling. Rolling…sometimes that’s the part that doesn’t seem to end.

If you’ve never been in an earthquake, you might think that 8 seconds is not very long. But when I stop, and my heart seizes (my opinion is that you never really get used to them) and I grab the girls’ arms with an unyielding grip, 8 seconds is a lifetime. I was ready either to throw them under the table or move them away from the sliding glass door.

It rolled and swayed a little. And then stopped.

Hope looks at me and absolutely grins. As if she had been on a Disney ride. I guess it is some sort of a rite of passage for kids who grow up here.

Meanwhile, my heart is pounding. Naomi is oblivious. And my mom calls. Are you okay?

It is the biggest any of us has felt in a long time. At least 15 years. I guess we’ll hit Home Depot this weekend and buy some more furniture straps to bolt our bookcases to the walls.

Nothing is broken, nothing has fallen, at least here at my house. The only thing that needs mended, perhaps, is my sense of pride in thinking that I am comfortable in just riding the quakes out. I’ll always bolt out of bed and down the hall. I’ll always grab their arms ready to duck under the table. But I’ll always be happy they aren’t tornadoes.

A watermelon sits on my counter. Green. Firm. Perfect.

Because I live on a small patch of ground on an unfertile hill where even a tomato would struggle to grow, I’ll take what I can get. I have to trust my market for ripe fruit. I try hard not to take California’s abundant produce for granted. I really try. But when the displays literally overflow with melons, berries and squash all times of the year, it is difficult.

So my ripe watermelon, from Trader Joe’s, summer’s best, is waiting to be cut.

I know it’s ripe because it sounds hollow and I ‘ve already consumed its sister. Red and icy inside, cut, the juice pools in the dish. Only fit to be eaten in the yard or over the sink, the watermelon won’t last another 48 hours. Not with my two little melon-munchers craving it. It is full, heavy and beautiful. It is asking me to cut into it.

And oh, this life seems to be begging me to cut into it too.

It is full and heavy and good to eat. It is asking me to get up early in the morning and run, to make my body strong. Life is begging me to laugh and cry or be quiet and not be ashamed. It is asking me to kiss my husband longer, to hug my daughters tighter and raise my face to worship.

Life
is
ripe.

And perfect and abundant. Love spills and pools when I let it. Kindness collects and runs down my chin when I forget myself. Sometimes life is so messy and big it has to happen out of doors where the mess doesn’t matter.

Devour, don’t taste.
Dive, don’t dip.
Drink deeply and let love spill.

Life is ripe and is begging me to eat. Begging you to eat.

These are my best days.

I sing my toddler to sleep at night. I’m inches from her blonde hair and smell her baby bath bubbles. She says Mama, sing sing…and I sing, even if I’m tired. Because I know it won’t last. She’s not always going to want me to stay.

Someday, she’ll want me to go.

I help my daughter with her sentences. She’s printing so much better now, getting ready for first grade soon. She says Mama, how do I spell…and I stop what I’m doing, even if I’m busy. Because someday she’ll take off across the paper with her own pencil. And she won’t always need me close.

Soon, she’ll write her own story.

These really are some good days. Even with the shouting from the backyard and the arguments over toys, there are still watercolor paintings and moon sand sculptures. There are still nighttime cuddles and a toddler patting her way down the hall at midnight to take up residence between her parents’ pillows.

And I know when I am old and all my girlfriends are old, and my husband needs me even more than he does now, we’ll talk about the jobs our grandchildren have and who they are marrying. I’ll miss the Kindergarten-lined paper and the lullabies. But I’ll have had the first row seat to the lives my daughters have lived.

Those will be my best days too.

I grew up in Long Beach, California. You know…where Sublime and Snoop Dogg are from. In the LBC.

And not in the super-nice, country club part. No way.

I grew up in the very normal part. We heard gunshots at night. Sometimes near but more often far away. Sometimes if we stretched up on our toes, we could see the Queen Mary fireworks in the summer from our kitchen window. Our house was old and cozy and clean. No air conditioning and no swimming pool. We rode bikes in the afternoon and took swimming lessons at the community park pool. My sister and I went to a Christian school because the public one nearby was old and rundown.

I loved growing up where I did.

Since I was small, Long Beach has had a little bit of a renaissance. The main streets are being cleaned up and the downtown area is alive with restaurants and shops. There is a beautiful aquarium now by the water and the neighborhood school was completely redone about 10 years ago.

And Long Beach is not like Newport Beach. There is no bluff or a back bay. There aren’t beautiful trails along the ocean or open air malls cool with a sea breeze. It is in Los Angeles County and it’s normal, it’s grounded. Long Beach has a lot of cafes and coffee houses and “hole-in-the-wall” restarants. It has a “beach” but it isn’t wide and deep like Huntington, or with cliffs and tidepools like Laguna. It’s near a harbor and a shipyard. But somehow, Long Beach is perfect even so. Its just different.

And a lot of my friends are still there. In fact, I drive there every other week to be a part of a mother’s group. I do that because I connect with those mothers more than I do with some of the mom’s groups near me.

I could have been a Hoosier (my mother’s from Indiana). Or from the Sunflower State (my father’s from Kansas). And I would have been proud of it. But was born in California and I ended up in Orange County on accident by way of Long Beach.

Its not all beaches, plastic surgery and gas-thirsty Hummers in Orange County. We also have a county fair.

I haven’t laughed so hard since Annie came to visit.

I hadn’t realized how much I NEEDED to laugh until after it was all over. And my house was dark and quiet and I washed dishes alone in my kitchen.

We sat around a table last night with other adults while 8 kids combined pounded up and down my stairs, climbed on the top of the kids’ playhouse, and tore through our back yard pulling each other in a wagon. One family lives near us, but we don’t see them often and the other family, we’ve just met and they’ve come all the way from Canada.

All day at the beach, to our seperate corners to clean up and shower and then back to my house for tacos and ice cream sundaes. And I haven’t laughed so hard.

Eight kids generally keep each other happy and don’t need a lot of direct supervision, as long as they have things to do. Sometimes more kids means less work because they play with each other. Unless they are destroying things, which they didn’t.

Share the Wii, please.
Be careful not to dump the toddler out of the wagon on the patio.
Girls, please don’t be mean to the little boys.

…was about the extent of the discipline needed last night. They played inside and outside until well after dark and they were all so good. Which allowed the adults and the oldest boys to sit around and play a game and laugh.

I needed adult laughter at the merits of Canadian sunscreen (Is anyone going to tell them it doesn’t work? They are all sunburned!!), turkey basters, farmer’s markets, and ancient temples being more majestic than the wilderness (thank you, Mr. No-Green Card).

I needed to get to know another mother who lives 1600 miles away and think about how much we’d be friends if we lived remotely close to each other.

I needed my girls to be enveloped in a larger group of kids, in a mini-community, and learn how to make the best use of short time spent with new friends.

I needed my home to burst at the seams with people and kids and friends and a whole lot of laughter. A busy, messy kitchen is much better than a quiet one.

When I was a little girl, I hated this ride. And I hated Ferris Wheels.

I think it has something to do with the freedom of swaying, the not-being-stuck-to-the-groundness of it. They aren’t coasters, on a track with a five point harness to smash me against the seat.

On these giant swings, suspended high above Southern California (incidentally, inside of a GIANT orange) my feet hang free. Kids kick off their flip-flops before they ride. I notice a LIFE-PRESERVER near the entrance, no doubt there because of some municipal code. I look around for the water hazard and remember that the Big Orange is in the middle of the man-made lagoon in Disney’s California Adventure. Okay, life-preserver noted, I figure that we will be swinging at such an angle that a potential broken chain might fling a person through the openings in the orange peel and out into the lake.

But my daughter, she has no fear. As I’ve written before, she accepts all the thrills of life with a squeal of joy and welcomes new adventures without hesitation.

We jump on, and I purposely sit behind Chad and Hope so I can video.

As we lift up, the ground seems to sink down and I can feel the weight of my body in my hips without anything for my feet to rest on. Hope immediately begins to laugh and scream (the constant high pitch in the video is her) and I’m not scared. Even the feeling of the loss of control, the knowledge that it’s only a few thin chains that keep me from being hurled into the murky water, it doesn’t scare me. I am watching Hope and she makes me laugh. She spreads her arms wide like a bird and giggles.

For the brief 90 seconds in the Big Orange, I feel like a kid – sitting on a chair or a sofa when your legs are too short to reach the floor; swinging at the playground so high that the chains give a little slack at the top.

I realize I no longer hate this ride. Its taken me awhile to let go enough so that the joys of being six infect me again.

The Big Orange from Sarah Markley on Vimeo.

A couple people in my life have the mistaken idea that I am ultra-organized.

I really don’t know where they get that notion. I guess I am usually on time to things. I normally have what I need with me (I don’t run out of diapers or snacks). I pretty much always have a cold drink with us in the car and I pack our lunches if we are out for the day. I guess in those ways, I am organized. I am somewhere between prepared and slightly-cluttered.

But you should see the floor of my car. And the books piled lopsided beside my bed. And then take a look at my closet.

And please, please don’t go near the toy room.

It
is
bad.

Apparently the two individuals who keep telling me I am sooo organized (maybe I am just less cluttered than them) haven’t peaked inside the girls’ playroom lately.

The girls don’t even like to go in there. I know, that is really bad. That is what a playroom should be: a repository for all of their toys and a place they can play and build things. It should be organized. Unfortunately, it is usually ankle deep in stuff. Junk really. Plastic stuff.

Okay, so they are two and six and they CAN keep it clean if I keep them accountable to pick up several times throughout the day. But it is usually on me to discipline them to be organized. Kinda silly when I am a bit cluttered myself. And then when one dumps a box and another box is dumped, everything gets shuffled together like a deck of cards and then its all over.

However, about once every six months I overhaul the room. I throw away so many things without homes or boxes: pieces of old games, weird plastic toys from Happy Meals, naked dolls without heads. Then I take everything that is left and put it back into the boxes/bins/shelves where they belong and label it all.

Today was the day. Three hours and I still have a couple remnant boxes of plastic junk left to sift through.

And here is the amazing thing: As I was cleaning and I was beginning to match dolls with clothes and toys with all of their accouterments, they began to play well together. No screaming. No arguing. Of course they feel more at ease with their surroundings and with each other when things are clean. I feel more at ease in my home when it is clean. The whole afternoon they didn’t ask for the television once. They were busy with their “new” toys.

I wish my house could be featured in Cookie magazine with organic hemp wooden toys and perfectly painted murals on my playroom walls. I wish my children would check out toys like a library with their little scrawly signatures on a card. I wish they would sit quietly in the middle of my vacuumed living room with one simple box of like objects. I wish I couldn’t go to bed at night until each and every toy was neatly placed on it’s labeled shelf.

That just isn’t me. I do my best to keep my home clean and comfortable and sometimes things get left undone. Like the playroom. Usually.

But tonight it’s different. The kids are bathed and quiet and are playing in the middle of a (unvacuumed) floor with boxes of organized toys. And I can live up to my friends’ unreal view of an organized Sarah. At least in one room. And probably only for tonight.

We’ll see which one dumps first tomorrow. I think summer begs it.