AT SEVEN THIS MORNING I spoke to my oldest son on the telephone. It has been forty-seven years since they rolled me into an operating room and cut me open and lifted him from my body. Now he is in Copenhagen, Denmark, with his second wife and their three children and I almost never get to see him or hold him in my arms or touch his face and hair. Motherhood is a strange and powerful thing. I grew this man inside my womb and sent him out into the world. He has given me eight grandchildren, immortality for another hundred years. It seems a great gift. I know how to receive gifts. I am good at being grateful.
I am writing this on a legal pad with a pencil one of my granddaughters brought me from the championships at Wimbledon in the year 2002. She is five years old and is always giving me pencils because she knows I am a writer.
It is fall. This is the time of year when I play a constant and demanding game with the squirrels who live near my hickory trees. Squirrels are addicted to the smell and taste of hickory nuts. They will pass up shelled pecans to crack open the hard green shells of immature hickory nuts. They like to sharpen their teeth on the shells and as soon as the nuts get scarce they begin to chew on the trim of my house. My house is made of California redwood. They have done thousands of dollars worth of damage to the trim over the years. I have spent another thousand having them trapped and taken away by an old fish-and-game man who is an ace at trapping animals. He takes them off in his truck and turns them loose in the woods near a pecan grove.
Lately I am trying another, more exciting, less expensive track with my squirrel problem. I go out on my porch five or six times a day and pick up all the hickory nuts near the house and throw them out into the yard to a stand of cherry trees. I am trying to trick the squirrels into thinking that cherry trees are the nirvana of hickory smell and taste, not my house and porch. Sometimes I hire a twelve-year-old Little League pitcher who lives next door to do the throwing. He is able to pitch the nuts all the way to the vacant lot behind my house where there are maple and oak trees. I do not know if any of this is working but it’s a lot of fun to watch John Tucker McCormick throw the nuts so far. I remember when he was inside his mother’s stomach and I was helping choose a name for him.
Now he is so tall and strong he could probably throw those hickory nuts a mile if he really tried.
What a wonderful world. I love it here.
OCTOBER 2003