Let's Talk About Stucco
I am in the midst of too much of a good thing. My little family– with my two-year-old grandson in the starring role–are all here staying with us in our small house in a heat wave. I waited and waited for this, and now I'm in the thick of it, and I'm stupidly surprised at how disruptive and exhausting it is, but I also know that once they leave (and that day draws near) I will be bereft.
In the meantime, I am learning a great deal. Felix has a voracious appetite for machinery and tools, and a curiosity about aspects of the world about which I know nothing, and I must broaden my horizons in order to be a worthy Nonna.
I have rediscovered a thick heavy book from my daughter’s childhood called the Macmillan Visual Dictionary…with 3500 color illustrations!…and we’ve spent lots of time sitting together looking at things, reciting their names, pondering their uses. Felix’s curiosity and delight are inexhaustible. We say the names out loud, and it’s an incantation, a glorious spell of objects.
The combine harvester is a favorite…it’s a bright red shiny one pictured on a two-page spread. Felix opens the book right to it, gleefully announces: “Combine harvester!”––and a litany ensues:
What’s this?A rotating augur.
What’s this?
The cutter bar.
What’s this?
The grain pan.
What’s this?
The propeller. The cab. The grain tank. The unloading tube.
You get the picture.
Did you know that this machine combines the three major harvesting operations – reaping, threshing, and winnowing––into a single process?
Neither did I.
Felix has already discussed farm machinery with our farmer friend Adam. He was disappointed to learn that Adam’s family has a combine harvester in Indiana for grain crops, but he doesn’t use one here in California. Fear not: Felix found consolation riding on Adam’s quad and an antique tractor. He also made friends, in a parallel play kind of way, with Adam’s son Theo, whose mommy, Olive, has been his mommy’s best friend since childhood. When last seen, the two little boys were wandering around naked eating watermelon.
I hasten to add, however, that Felix’s interests are not limited to farm equipment. He has also displayed a fascination with domestic appliances, snacks, cookware, parking structures, trains, airplanes, carpentry, and building materials. On the subject of building materials, as we sat outside on the deck yesterday, Felix pointed to the wall and asked, “What’s this?”
“Stucco,” said Nonna, hoping that would suffice.
“Let’s talk about stucco,” he said.
Meanwhile, the heat has been relentless and ominous. The other night, Felix and I went outside together in the evening to sit on the deck and try to cool down. As the sky turned pale pink, the moon brightened until it shone like a lantern above the hills. We watched a hummingbird sipping nectar from the honeysuckle flowers and heard the metallic trill of its vibrating wings. In the far distance, we saw the lights of an airplane traveling vaguely north. (“I wonder where it’s going,” said Felix.)
But sometimes we just listened as nighttime made its entrance. We didn’t hear a train whistle or the muffled crash of surf, but there were rustlings in the orchard, and an audio-carpet of cricket song, and around it all, a kind of hum, like the sound of earth breathing. I was enjoying the weight of my grandson on my lap, and I tried to make the moment last, knowing I would miss this very soon. Alas, there was a murmur of voices in the living room, and Felix wanted to go back inside and join that party. He expresses his wants abruptly and unequivocally.
Once, we made a pillow house, where no one can be sad. You can’t get overly frisky in a pillow house, and you can’t be loud, but you can snuggle and hug and make up songs and burrow into the softness.
Sometimes we water the thirsty trees together, and sometimes we eat ice cream, real and pretend. We hold hands when gravity makes our feet go too fast down the driveway.
Now Felix and his parents have gone on an overnight expedition. Bye, bye, Nonna, he said nonchalantly when told I would not be accompanying them. (How I dread the real goodbye that’s coming!)
And Monte and I have returned to a house that seems weirdly empty––toys strewn on the floor and a jumble of books, but minus our Felix.
It’s been another witheringly hot day. And since I’ve been thinking about building materials, I contemplate how effectively the exterior stucco walls of our house have absorbed the heat of the sun, and I am newly aware of the insulation buffer this provides, somehow blocking heat in summer and deflecting cold in winter. I read somewhere that stucco was applied to temple walls as early as 1400 BC, and it seems to me there is something ancient and reassuring about it.
Stucco. It’s a simple plaster, I suppose, a gravelly mix of sand, cement, and water, but now I touch its rough surface with a new respect, and admire how its light ochre tone echoes the rock behind the house, and I appreciate the modest sense of shelter and protection that it offers. I remember the workers thirty years ago patting it on with hand-trowels, and I notice a meandering crack resembling a river and wonder how long it’s been forming. Even the stucco has a landscape and a history, and when I place my palm upon it, I feel life in the warmth it retains.
I understand what William Stafford meant when he wrote these lines:
Please think about this as you go on. Breathe on the world.
Hold out your hands to it. When mornings and evenings
roll along, watch how they open and close, how they
invite you to the long party that your life is.
Felix has helped me to recognize that invitation and say yes.
Sometimes I forget that I am surrounded by miracles, and they aren’t necessarily the things I usually stop for. Felix has reminded me to wonder, and to ask questions when I don’t understand. He has turned me on to the poetry of names, the astonishing cleverness of things that work, the sustenance in silliness.
“What means possibilities?” he asked. (I’m serious. He really did.)
“It’s all the things that might happen,” I replied.
Let’s talk about sweetcorn. Let’s talk about bin lorries. Let’s talk about stucco.