Susan Senator

“Hey Mom, if one end of the Asteroid Belt is at Mars and Jupiter, where do you think the other end is?”
–Benji, this morning, before I’d finished my second cup of coffee.

Asteroid Belt? Is that a new fashion, to be worn low and sparkly on the hips?
Why doesn’t he ask Ned? I think it’s so cute and wonderful that he figures he can ask me this stuff; I am so non-science, non-math, but to Ben, I’m still Mom-in-the-know. Or maybe he just thinks I will make the effort to think about it and come up with an answer. Here is a typical conversation with Ben:
“Hey Mom,” is the start of most of my conversations with Ben. “Hey Mom, want to know something about Planet X,025?”
“Hmm?”
“It has three moons and a ring. And the ring on that planet actually protects its moons. I wished I lived there.”
Ahh, this is something I can now relate to. “Why?”
“So I can see how it felt to live with one eye. And you could feel what it is like to just say one word and a laser shoots out of it.”
“Out of what?”
“The eye! And the people of Planet X,025 only live on the three moons. They haven’t ever explored the planet!”
“Oh, then they have something to look forward to.”
“Yeah.” Satisfied, he gets out his pad (There is a stack at the end of the dining room table and assorted pens; a very large stack behind him on the sideboard, of maybe 30 pads, another similarly large stack next to the computer, another of brand new pads on the floor next to the computer, and two totally packed shelves of completed pad stories. Today I am going to try to dust, and I feel very depressed about the prospect! But every time he calls me into his room because there is a spider among the webs of dust on all his Legos, I take the opportunity to say, “That’s why we need to dust in here more often!”)

But I know I am not going to dust today. I won’t get to it. We still have no pumpkins, and it is only two days until Halloween! So the priority today is to go to a nearby farm and get a few pumpkins and carve those mothers. The other thing we must do today is clear our front yard of acorns. The oak tree let loose so many that our front yard is studded with them. You no longer feel grass underfoot; you crunch roundly with your feet.

I will spend a part of today picking up dust balls and picking up acorns and picking up pumpkin seeds and mopping up pumpkin guts and answering hard scientific questions and checking my email and trying not to eat those cookies Nat and I baked and looking for some fun in those things. That is my life on a late October Sunday.