"Can we listen to the trailer song?" Olive asks from her perch at the table that wobbles if you lean on it.
"Sure," I say, turning off NPR, and the doom of our current political crises, to play Old Crow Medicine Show, my children's favorite band.
Please don't tell them that this particular song choice of theirs-- especially beloved now that we live in a trailer--is really called "Bushy Mountain Conjugal Trailer" about much anticipated prison sex.
Some day, an older Olive, sitting alone in her room as a teenager, or driving her own car as a young adult on her way to a weekend camping trip with friends, will really listen to the words, and she'll put her foot on the brakes and say: "Holy shit, thats what this song is all about?!"
For now, its our "trailer song" and I find myself dancing before 7:00 a.m. on a Thursday morning as my kids eat sausage and hash browns.
"Its like you're doing a show," Olive says, and I spin around and shake my hips, arms raised above my head, unusually happy for this early in the morning, without my husband here to help the kids get ready for school.
Olive smiles up at me, not yet embarrassed by a Mom who loves to dance.
I still have some time before she rolls her eyes.
Time, that elusive shapeshifter, that stretches and shrinks, hides and reveals itself, always present, like breath, central, yet so elusive.
"What time is it?" Elias asks, multiple times a day, as if numbers can capture the rotation of the earth, the progression of night to day, always onward, like water tricking or surging downstream, forging a path towards the ocean, towards a greater depth.
It rained seven inches in less than twenty-four hours on Sunday night, and we know this because a green bucket sat empty up on our clearing on Saturday and Monday morning, after Sunday's deluge, Nick and I stuck a measuring tape into the collected rain water.
The empty bucket represented a stuck moment with Elias, one of those times when his mind wouldn't let go, like a barnacle, it sticks to an irrational thought and refuses to release-- despite a bay of reasoning, bargaining, ignoring, consoling, pleading-- forcing everyone around him to adjust.
It was Saturday evening, after our glorious helicopter-glacier-dogsled ride.
(A gift we have since talked about almost every half-hour, and unlike Elias's recycled elevator conversations, I haven't yet tired of Elias rehashing Saturday's flight.)
Still sunny and calm, Nick and I planned to burn part of one of our many slash piles of mostly Alder and Spruce.
We had attempted a fire the night before, adding dried grass and twigs, only to realize a little late that the wind gusts would make the smoke unruly. "Too windy," we told the kids. Olive pouted, disappointed she couldn't cook a hotdog on a stick.
"We don't want to catch the whole woods on fire," I might have said.
Elias sat on a bench Nick made with tree stumps, smoke obscuring his face from view. Nick dumped a bucket of water on the fire and we planned to try again on Saturday.
And here it was. Saturday. Not windy, sun sinking behind the mountains, shadows cooling the clearing, a perfect time to burn some old trees. I crumpled paper and tore up some cardboard, but Elias's lip started to quiver and he said, "We're not having a fire!"
It didn't matter what logic I delivered, he stuck to his refrain, even digging the paper and cardboard out of the pile and clutching it to his chest like a blanket.
Nick shrugged as I shook my head and bit my lower lip. "Ignore him," he offered, as my my words bounced off my boy, as if our magnetic poles weren't aligned.
"You know why I don't want a fire?" Elias said.
"Why?"
"Because it might rain," he answered, as we stood under a cloudless sky.
The thing is, I wanted a fire.
I longed for the physical work of tossing branches into the flames and the beauty of watching them burn. The knowledge that this was a step towards building a home, something solid and real that I could do.
I grabbed the empty green bucket and walked towards our big puddle, a hole dug out with the backhoe in search of a water source that now collects and holds the rain. I leaned in and filled it as close to the top as I could; I alternated arms carrying it back up the driveway, resting every few feet to trade hands.
Water: both light and heavy, like parenthood, like emotion, like time.
"I want you to walk back and dump the water back in the puddle!" Elias said, still worked up, not letting go of his newfound fear of flames, of the smoke circling the woods, of the woods burning down.
I looked around at all our giant piles of downed trees that we need to burn this fall and thought: How can we now have a boy anxious about smoke and flames? And yet here he was, fretting about my bucket of dirty water, clutching cardboard and paper to his chest, eyes wild.
Even the offer of watching YouTube elevator videos in the trailer didn't pull him out of his fretting spiral.
He walked to the shed and emptied his armload of crumpled school papers and ripped box wine. He walked back to the slash pile and pulled out the tissue from a shoe box I'd thrown in with the grass and branches.
"At least he's doing something on his own," I said to Nick.
After carrying his second handful of paper back to the shed, he walked up to the green bucket and rocked it back and forth and pushed till the five gallons of water, hauled by my own hands, seeped into the rocky soil.
I walked away from my child, and his determined rigidity, to a recent patch of Alders Nick chainsawed to make room for another storage shelter, and started dragging the twenty foot trees to our biggest slash pile, choosing to haul wood over my son's anxiety, his irrational but rational fear, planted, most likely, by my own words.
We don't want to catch the whole woods on fire.
We never did light that slash pile on Saturday night. But we did start a small fire, safely contained in our stone pit we built, so Olive could roast her hotdog and not have her desires squelched by her brother's behavior, an all too familiar scenario.
The wood crackled before us, not caring about Elias's antics an hour before. And after the physical work of dragging small trees, lifting and tossing them onto our growing pile, I cared a little less.
He had moved on, why shouldn't I?
Why not enjoy the small flames we sat around, the light on the mountains, the memory of standing on a glacier at noon, the generosity of my new community, the Dahlias and Snapdragons blooming in the background, the anticipation of corned beef cooking on David's stove...?
Why not let the invisible magic of time keep moving forward, without harboring frustration from a moment ago?
Why not wake up groggy on a Thursday morning, before the sun rises, light the flame beneath the kettle, cook hash browns and sausage, encourage my children to rise, to dress for school, to eat, and shake off my exhaustion with the sway of my hips, twirling before my children, as we all sing about prison sex in the thirty-foot trailer we call home.
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