Synopsis: Kids today may seem different, maybe worse; but what goes unnoticed is that parents have changed as well and mostly for the worse. Parenting the impressionable minds of children may just be a lost art form. In this story, a mother encourages the discovery of her kids’ environment by breaking away from the societal herd, giving importance to nature, creativity and all-encompassing love.

About the Author: KJ Hannah Greenberg is usually too busy parenting her teenage sons and daughters to contemplate her navel. If she had five extra minutes, she would bake quinoa pie and feed it to her imaginary hedgehogs. Meanwhile, she steals time by sleeping a little less and laughing a little more. On rare, alternate Tuesdays, Hannah and the hedgies fly the galaxy in search of gelatinous monsters and assistant bank managers. Sometimes, they even catch a few. Read more about her at http://www.kjhannahgreenberg.net/ .

In this inspiring story, we see Ginny Lou be herself to be the change she wants to see in others.

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Steamed Fish with Eyes
by KJ Hannah Greenberg

Chastised for her perspicacious nature, Ginny Lou insisted on contributing, to block party pot lucks, fish steamed complete with lips and eyes, and on planting, in her front yard, where passersby could see them, beds of wild flowers in lieu of a lawn. Though her astuteness allegedly ranked well with her academic colleagues, her neighbors no more knew what to make out of her clever interpretations of mundanities such as clothes lines and wind mills, both of which ornamented her backyard half acre, than they did out of her offerings of algae-dressed salads or of St. John’s wort salve.

In not so discreet huddles, they spoke of the woman whose kids picked and ate weeds, whose husband sat contently, playing recorder, on the boulder his spouse had intentionally set in their yard and who, herself, would rather go on slug walks than get a manicure. It was not so much that they were scandalized as it was that they were baffled.

Peer pressure remained useless in the face of an adult who taught her offspring how to make crowns and bracelets out of white clover instead of pushing them to spend their time earning the local principal’s top foreign language award. Bribes to local police failed to reduce the number of disposable diapers she set out in trash cans when those same officers had been befriended by the woman in her national newspaper column. Even sending their teenage sons to drop hedge clippings all over her driveway had proved ineffective; Ginny Lou, maneuvering her trusty, plastic, orange wheelbarrow between her two, garden glove-covered hands, merely bundled up and hauled those bits to her compost pile.

That rascal of a neighbor refused to hire seamstresses to construct intricate costumes, for her children, for the elementary school’s annual parade, preferring instead to ransack her husband’s closet for shirts suitable for fabric painting. What’s more, she deigned to entertain the community’s children, at local fairs and festivals, as a storyteller. Hers was a popular home.

One afternoon, Beatrice found what she believed was a foolproof means of revenge. Her plan involving maple syrup, crazy glue, and the viscera of a cat found in a municipal dumpster. She contacted Agrimony, her PTA co-chair and the woman who had built a spite fence between her yard and that of Ginny Lou’s. Once more, their little town would experience complete compliance with the understood, yet unspoken, ordinances.

Oblivious to the energies being invested on her behalf, Ginny Lou mentally composed a prose poem about lady bugs while she filled her twig basket with red runner beans. Those legumes and her Dutchman’s pipe vines had been her Mother’s Day gifts to herself.

A few yards away, her two youngest children and about twenty or so of other people’s kids were digging their way to Bancroft or possibly to Toledo. Ginny Lou’s oldest daughter was serving as guide among the rows of asparagus fern that filled the boarders of the family’s vegetable garden, offering handfuls of late radishes and of timely baby tomatoes to those tourists. Her oldest son was showing his friends just where, in their meditation garden, the family had buried their long since deceased, ancient cat, and was pointing out how plantain could be harvested, masticated and applied to bramble scratches if not otherwise spit at siblings.

On one of the benches under the towering oak tree, a friend, from the farm coop, nursed a toddler. Across from her, another mother, parent of energized twins, espoused the relative virtues of family beds and of carob chips. The latter’s children were happily plucking petals off of several types of day lilies.

Beatrice regarded the bucolic scene and shuddered. No electronic toys or designer shoes could be seen, even when she dialed the highest setting on Agrimony’s binoculars. While she handed that device to her friend, she noted, disdainfully, that her friend’s comforter and drapes were last year’s fashion. She accepted, nonetheless the can of beer Agrimony proffered in her kitchen and wondered, silently, if her own children might like to learn how to make animals out of stones and nail polish.

A six pack later, the chairwomen of Pemberton Elementary School’s Parent Teacher Association even openly discussed the possibility that they might, after hours, hire, for a private party, the same recycled quarry, where Ginny Lou was known to take her children to swim. They thought aloud, as well, about running in lanes of basil, at the community-based agriculture farm, where Ginny Lou was a loyal patron and even dared to giggle over the phrases “home birth” and “breast feeding,” which Ginny Lou was known to speak. Thereafter, they compared notes on season tickets for opera and for ballet.

While they enjoyed the serenity brought on by their hops mixed with fermented grain, a handyman, whom they had paid a little more than minimum wage, was making a delivery. Though ordered to deposit the malodorous concoction, personally stewed by Beatrice, to the front stoop of Ginny Lou, mid march, the man had redirected himself to Agrimony’s house and had left the foul mess there. Ginny Lou, who was fond of sushi, always gave his sister, a waitress at the local Asian restaurant, a twenty per cent tip. The frosted blonds who hired him, however, sent more food back to the kitchen than they actually ate and often “forgot” to leave any acknowledgement of his sibling’s service.

After ridding himself of that nasty business, the man did visit Ginny Lou; he meant to borrow her spigot to wash his hands. He lingered, though, gladly accepting a glass of sumac tea and allowing himself to be gently persuaded to regale the assembled ladies with stories of squirrels, of bats, and of the other creatures he encountered when cleaning gutters, caulking windows or making roof repairs.

In clumps, the children gathered round that visitor. One brought him a crown of pampas grass. Another fetched a piece of dwarf bamboo so that he might have a natural scepter. Two more children ran into Ginny Lou’s house and returned with a plate of kohlrabi salad and with a bowl of fresh-picked blueberries, both of which they presented to the man.

After an hour or so of stories about salamanders and of promises to the seated moms that he’d give them a bid on a rustic treehouse for Ginny Lou’s yard, the man left to scrape paint on a neighborhood barn. Some agency or another was converting an abandoned farmstead into condos. A friend who wanted no part of overtime work had invited the man to pick up a few hours’ wage.

The children returned to playing with the garden hose and to giving each other “gifts” construed of dried leaves, columbine heads, and assorted small bones dug from recently located owl pellets. They stopped their play, however, when the loud noise sounded.

Beatrice and Agrimony, too, stopped comparing notes on the flatness of their respective personal trainers’ abdomens and on the complexions of the stock boys at the local food emporium when they heard that sound. More curious than cautious, those moms immediately made for Agrimony’s threshold. Subsequently, the moms and tots in Ginny Lou’s yard were treated to another remarkable, well amplified vibration.

Although the children were busy climbing on the sudden mountain of mulch that had been deposited, by a dump truck, in Ginny Lou’s narrow driveway, the moms, having picked their way over the gardening material, ran to identify the source of the second noise. Quickly, they discovered Beatrice and Agrimony stuck to an important architectural feature of Agrimony’s home. A carpenter and both of the community’s teams of paramedics were needed to separate the women from that front porch.

Brief months later, Beatrice insisted that her family relocate to Short Hills and Agrimony, or so it was said, remained institutionalized at an upscale clinic in Maryland. Ginny Lou was invited to replace those women as the singular PTA chair.

Under her guidance, the school’s art curriculum began to include lessons on sketching area trees and of stones and the upper grades’ field trips began to feature places like the shorebird sanctuary and a nearby soup kitchen. Though Ginny Lou remained powerless to disband the annual parade, she managed to get rules legislated, which limited the expenditures on costumes. She also managed to bring in an herbalist, for a parents’ meeting, who lectured on the benefits of dandelions. A few of the community lawns were doused with less weed killer that year.

Although Ginny Lou continued to encourage her offspring and their friends to plant swathes of wild onions where bluegrass might have otherwise been coaxed and to photograph rather than to stone local chipmunks, she failed to conduct her annual apple harvest. So busied had she become with all manners of teacher recognition and with talent night quandaries that she had to send her loyal spouse to the yearly pick-your-own.

By the time that the snow season arrived, Ginny Lou had quit. She’d rather tease poetry out of students and teach her own children how to use cabbage to tie-dye socks than stand up for yet one more round of applause at school assemblies. Besides, no other mother had stepped in to supply the neighborhood’s children with information on numbats, on yellow scorpions, and on zooplankton. What’s more, she failed to grasp why no other mom stepped forward to fill the lauded position or to provide fish steamed complete with eyes.

**** THE END ****

Copyright KJ Hannah Greenberg 2010

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