That’s my six-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Rose, in the leopard costume I sewed her for Halloween—ears, tail, mitts, spats, and all. That’s me in the zebra mask. I’m standing on one leg because Rose the leopard is eating my other leg. I also sewed that, the pretend zebra leg that’s hanging out of her mouth.
A friend of my daughter’s brought her own leopard costume over for a play date a couple weeks ago. The girls were adorable as they stalked a gazelle (actually the spring horse), and I really wanted to take their picture. Finally I located the camera on top of the piano, under a precarious stack of Rose’s artwork—hundreds of suns and rainbows and cheetahs. But we were out of film.
And that’s sort of how things have been going this fall.
For example, it’s December now, but the sewing machine is still out on the dining room table, along with scraps of leopard fabric, tissue-paper pattern pieces, and tangles of golden thread. Not to mention piles of school papers, drooping roses standing in furry water, and multiple bowls of yellow leaves, seed pods, and the crystals Rose culls from playground gravel. I still need to hem the costume; I taped it up on Halloween when I ran out of time.
And someone from the homeowners-association board knocked on the door a couple weeks ago, about the pumpkins still on the front porch. I politely agreed to take down the collapsed one right away, but not the huge one we grew, the one my daughter carved into a tiger. Our covenants grant us 30 days after a holiday to take down decorations, the neighbor told me, so I had a few days left. I marked November 30 on my calendar, but the pumpkin’s still there, snow between its sharp teeth.
With the cold, mice are moving in. We finally caught the one in our kitchen last week, but I haven’t cleaned the droppings off those two spots on the counters yet; I want to take the time to do it correctly so we don’t get hantavirus.
Speaking of getting sick, one reason I haven’t cleaned the mouse turds up yet is that I got a bad cold last week, including an ear infection. I was grateful to my physician friend for diagnosing me at her house, as well as serving me tea, because I haven’t found a new primary-care doctor since my previous one closed his practice two years ago.
Way last spring, I also meant to speak with the psychiatrist who diagnosed my ADD about the mild depression I get every fall, to get a jump on it this year. But my husband and I got into it about whether we had the money for that, and I got stuck and never called. November is usually my worst month anyway.
I would love to have had a Halloween party for Rose, by the way. She and I would have had a blast making up games about spiders and bats and bones. But it was just too much to clean up the house for it. That’s why we hardly ever have dinner guests, either.
I did manage to take down our pumpkin lights last weekend and store them in the garage, where my thirty boxes of old papers are starting to lean a little in their stacks. I sorted through a few of them once, and it was kind of fun, like an archeological dig: Hmm, college paper on herbicide use in forestry; she was interested in the issue of pesticides back then too. Ah, here’s a third clipping from her mother on organizing; perhaps she has an issue with this. And a valuable find—long-lost stock certificates.
But mostly, all the clutter and unfinished projects feel like a 200-pound leopard on my back.
I soaked kernels of red Indian corn to make a necklace for my sister’s Christmas stocking, but after a week or so, the corn got all moldy. I haven’t gotten my daughter to school quite on time for days. I just lost a check for $700. What makes me think I can actually write a whole book?
Well, I do plan to write a whole book—a memoir of my life as a girl and woman with ADD. Imagine holding the book in your hands, reading the piece above as the preface.
