As ever on time-change days, I swapped the windows. I found a glass cleaner that, attached to the hose, makes this chore much less annoying. Cold hose water on the skin in sunny but 60-degree weather and Windex in the eye is no joy but is preferable to scads of paper towel and leaves fewer streaks. Hooray.
I pruned whatever kind of bush it is in the corner that in a high wind always makes me think the house is haunted by how rogue branches scrape either screen or glass. RDC emptied the swamp cooler for the winter. I would have continued in my filthy state to put the vegetable gardens to bed--it was only 1:30 and beautiful--but the Hallowe'en party was at 3:00. Three o'clock! for all the shorties.
Costumes were meant for kids (actually for the adults, most of the kids being too young to appreciate the holiday or to object to adorable get-ups), but I wore one anyway, inconspicuously: my regular gray french terry skirt and RDC's gray t-shirt and a home-made "Hello, My Name Is" label on the breast--my name was Earl. Earl Grey (tee).
The last time I saw Gethen was at JPM's first birthday party, when she thought I was a poorly haberdashed loon. This time we had a great time together. She is at one of those perfect ages, 3.5, and we compared belly-buttons and I tossed some sofa cushions on top of her and leaned back and her father asked where did Gethen go? and I asked JJM why the cushions had feet on them. She spoke of the advantages of cushions with feet instead of just the whole couch, and then of the advantages of giggling cushions. Gethen might not know quite the order of the letters in her name, but she does know which letters belong to it, so we spelled it out with alphabet blocks and sounded out my name too.
Her younger brother is adorably owly in spectacles. Little kid eyes are big anyway, but magnified because of hyperopia are bigger still. And Ditty, Jack and Diane's kid, is fun for seven months (I am gradually learning that people under 18 months old can be fun, though I maintain that it's rare). She was a pumpkin, interested in pulling hair (fine as long as she grabbed a fistful, but individual strands hurt) and peeling my label. There were a ladybug and a pig (when the ladybug lost her costume I had to ask which kid that was), a lion and a bumblebee and a monkey. Pynchon was the fleecey monkey, and Dexy and I dragged his crawly self back toward us, fleece offering no resistance against hardwood floor. We were demonstrating to Pynchon the futility of effort while he showed his determination in the face of adversity (which Dexy attributed to his mother). Then there was discussion of the age by which children can understand existentialism.
Later in the day I sat in one room petting Charley the cat, an excellent excuse to eavesdrop on a conversation in the next room I did not want to be explicitly involved with (it was political and heated; politics might not make me itch but heat does), though everyone knew I was there. Gethen came in asking if I would read her a story. We selected Parts, Olivia, and How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? and I read with her in my lap, until she said her eye hurt for the second time. The first time, I looked in it for irritants; the second time, I called her father, who identified the irritant as Charley. Poor broken child. So we finished our reading in the uncatted living room.
Gethen should not live so far away. I can't recommend Parts, but I can Olivia (I gave that to the bumblebee upon his birth), and How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? was new to me. It is great, with lots of detail, and anatomically if not chromatically correct dinosaurs. And that's what I learned Saturday.